June 8 YEDG?
Casey Lartigue, Jr.
김은영
Please, have a look at the map
http://m.map.naver.com/siteview.nhn?code=20570114&ret_url=http%3A%2F%2Fm.search.naver.com%2Fsearch.naver%3Fwhere%3Dm%26query%3D%25EC%258B%25A0%25EC%25B4%258C%25EC%2597%25AD%2B%25EC%25BB%25A4%25ED%2594%25BC%25EB%258B%2588%26sm%3Dmsv_nex%23mobile_local
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Casey Lartigue, Jr.
RYAN SHIN
Oops!! I didn't change the title
sorry for bringing you confusion T_T
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hello, YEDG group members
there are three articles which we will discuss on this sunday
hope to see you all !!:)
#1.
Football
Beautiful game, dirty business
Football is a great sport, but it could be so much better if it were run honestly
Jun 7th 2014 | From the print edition
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THE mesmerising wizardry of Lionel Messi and the muscular grace of Cristiano Ronaldo are joys to behold. But for deep-dyed internationalists like this newspaper, the game’s true beauty lies in its long reach, from east to west and north to south. Football, more than any other sport, has thrived on globalisation. Nearly half of humanity will watch at least part of the World Cup, which kicks off in Brazil on June 12th.
So it is sad that the tournament begins under a cloud as big as the Maracanã stadium. Documents obtained by Britain’s Sunday Times have allegedly revealed secret payments that helped Qatar win the hosting rights to the World Cup in 2022 (see article). If that competition was fixed, it has company. A report by FIFA, football’s governing body, is said to have found that several exhibition matches were rigged ahead of the World Cup in 2010. And as usual, no one has been punished.
In this section
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This only prompts other questions. Why on earth did anyone think holding the World Cup in the middle of the Arabian summer was a good idea? Why is football so far behind other sports like rugby, cricket and tennis in using technology to doublecheck refereeing decisions? And why is the world’s greatest game led by such a group of mediocrities, notably Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s boss since 1998? In any other organisation, the endless financial scandals would have led to his ouster years ago. But more than that, he seems hopelessly out of date; from sexist remarks about women to interrupting a minute’s silence for Nelson Mandela after only 11 seconds, the 78-year-old is the sort of dinosaur that left corporate boardrooms in the 1970s. Nor is it exactly heartening that the attempts to stop Mr Blatter enjoying a fifth term are being led by Michel Platini, Europe’s leading soccercrat, who was once a wonderful midfielder but played a woeful role in supporting the Qatar bid.
Our cheating rotten scoundrels are better than yours
Many football fans are indifferent to all this. What matters to them is the beautiful game, not the tired old suits who run it. And FIFA’s moral turpitude is hardly unique. The International Olympic Committee, after all, faced a Qatar-like scandal over the awarding of the winter games in 2002 (though it has made a much bigger attempt to clean itself up). The boss of Formula One, Bernie Ecclestone, stands accused of bribery in Germany, while American basketball has just had to sack an owner for racist remarks. Cricket, the second-most-global sport, has had its own match-fixing scandals. American football could be overwhelmed by compensation claims for injuries.
But football fans are wrong to think there is no cost to all this. First, corruption and complacency at the top makes it harder to fight skulduggery on the pitch. Ever larger amounts of money are now being bet on each game—it may be $1 billion a match at the World Cup. Under external pressure to reform, FIFA has recently brought in some good people, including a respected ethics tsar, Mark Pieth. But who will listen to lectures about reform from an outfit whose public face is Mr Blatter?
Second, big-time corruption isn’t victimless; nor does it end when a host country is chosen. For shady regimes—the type that bribe football officials—a major sporting event is also a chance to defraud state coffers, for example by awarding fat contracts to cronies. Tournaments that ought to be national celebrations risk becoming festivals of graft.
Finally, there is a great opportunity cost. Football is not as global as it might be (see article). The game has failed to conquer the world’s three biggest countries: China, India and America. In the United States soccer, as they call it, is played but not watched. In China and India the opposite is true. The latter two will not be playing in Brazil (indeed, they have played in the World Cup finals just once between them).
In FIFA’s defence, the big three’s reticence owes much to their respective histories and cultures and the strength of existing sports, notably cricket in India. And football is slowly gaining ground: in the United States the first cohort of American parents to grow up with the game are now passing it on to their children. But that only underlines the madness of FIFA giving the cup to Qatar, not America. And the foul air from FIFA’s headquarters in Switzerland will hardly reassure young fans in China who are heartily sick of the corruption and match-fixing in their domestic soccer leagues.
A Seppless world
It would be good to get rid of Mr Blatter, but that would not solve FIFA’s structural problem. Though legally incorporated as a Swiss non-profit organisation, FIFA has no master. Those who might hold it to account, such as national or regional football organisations, depend on its cash. High barriers to entry make it unlikely that a rival will emerge, so FIFA has a natural monopoly over international football. An entity like this should be regulated, but FIFA answers to no government.
All the same, more could be done. The Swiss should demand a clean-up or withdraw FIFA’s favourable tax status. Sponsors should also weigh in on graft and on the need to push forward with new technology: an immediate video review of every penalty and goal awarded would be a start.
The hardest bit of the puzzle is the host-selection process. One option would be to stick the World Cup in one country and leave it there; but that nation’s home team would have a big advantage, and tournaments benefit from moving between different time zones. An economically rational option would be to give this year’s winner, and each successive champion, the option of either hosting the tournament in eight years’ time or auctioning off that right to the highest bidder. That would favour football’s powerhouses. But as most of them already have the stadiums, there would be less waste—and it would provide even more of an incentive to win.
Sadly, soccer fans are romantic nationalists, not logical economists—so our proposal stands less chance of winning than England does. One small step towards sanity would be formally to rotate the tournament, so it went, say, from Europe to Africa to Asia to the Americas, which would at least stop intercontinental corruption. But very little of this will happen without change at the top in Zurich.
#2.
Football
A game of two halves
The world’s largest nations will play almost no part in the World Cup. But there are signs that, eventually, football will become a truly global game
Jun 7th 2014 | From the print edition
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DEEP in the jungles of Myanmar there is a camp stocked with guns, maps and medical supplies. Medics and former rebels regularly practise dodging bullets on its flat exercise ground. Then they dust themselves off and kick a ball at makeshift bamboo goals. The communication difficulties attendant on the aftermath of civil conflict mean they may not have seen Real Madrid win the European Champions League last month. But they know how its famed Portuguese winger, Cristiano Ronaldo, stands over a free kick.
An interest in getting a ball to some sort of goal, by one means or another, over the opposition of another team has been shown by all sorts of cultures throughout history. But the particular version codified in Britain in the 19th century, which ruled out moving the ball with hands or anything held in them, quickly won the hearts and feet of industrialising Europe and many of its colonies, current and former. Simple rules (offside provisions notwithstanding) and no need for equipment, apart from whatever might pass for a ball, have allowed the game to flourish in the favelas of Brazil, the shanty towns of South Africa and the jungles of Myanmar. The notorious corruption of the sport’s governing body, FIFA (see article) has not stopped it enrolling more members (209) than the United Nations (193). In 2006 FIFA estimated that the game’s players, both serious and casual, totalled 300m.
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The world does not just play football—it watches it, bets on it, argues about it and spends money on it. The English Premier League (EPL) is broadcast in 212 territories, reaching 643m homes. Brand Finance, a consultancy, values Bayern Munich’s brand at $900m. The world’s 20 richest clubs made €5.4 billion ($7.4 billion) during the 2012-13 season, according to Deloitte, another consultancy. People do not just write books about the game, they write books about how it illuminates all manner of other things, such as “How Soccer Explains the World” by Franklin Foer, or “Futebol Nation”, a study of Brazil by David Goldblatt (see review). Such broad thinking might seem ambitious. But then half of mankind is expected to watch at least some of the World Cup, which begins in São Paulo on June 12th.
The balls less kicked
The sport’s global dominance is unprecedented—and all the more remarkable given that, of the four countries in the world larger than Brazil, only one, America, qualified to be among the 32 countries to send a team there. For various reasons, football is a much lesser preoccupation in the world’s giant countries than elsewhere.
Though its presence in Brazil shows that America fields a decent national team, there are a number of other sports its citizens pay greater heed to; in India there is another sport so deep in the national psyche that football seems hardly to get a look in. In China and Indonesia football teams from other countries have devoted followings, but the national teams are pretty poor. Neither Indonesia nor India has travelled to the World Cup’s finals in the competition’s 84-year history; China did once, in 2002, but failed to win any games, or indeed score any goals. How can football be the world’s game if nearly half the world hardly plays it?
Exceptions on this scale stand as something of a rebuke to football fans’ declarations of their sport’s planet-encompassing importance. They also show that football has the potential to get even bigger. These countries are “just starting to switch on” to the game, says Simon Kuper, the co-author of “Soccernomics”, a statistical analysis of football. European clubs—the richest and most popular in the world—see lots of potential for growth in the big markets of Asia and have increased their missionary work there. American, Chinese and Indian domestic leagues have seen an influx of cash and have improved as a result.
These various indicators have many in the footballing establishment hoping that the hold-out nations will soon join the football-mad small fry. Sceptics are entitled to a sense of déjà vu. Football has been poised to take off in these places before, only for the rocket to stall on the pad or fall back to Earth in flames. But a mixture of market opportunities, new approaches and demography means that football looks more likely than ever before to conquer the places it has passed by.
In America, the beachhead is well established. On the day of a football match, being in Seattle is like being in another country, says Clint Dempsey, a forward with the Seattle Sounders who is also the captain of America’s national men’s team. The Sounders’ fans meet in the heart of the city an hour and a half before kick off and march to the stadium with their scarves held high and flares alight. A 53-member marching band leads the way. Mr Goldblatt compares Sounders fans to the ultras, Italy’s fanatical football supporters—but though they have borrowed some traditions from European football culture, they also created their own. If ever there was a sign that football is taking off in America, this is it, says Mr Goldblatt.
Americans have heard this before. The first purported turning-point for football in America came in 1975, when the New York Cosmos signed Pelé. Though the Brazilian legend raised the profile of the game, the North American Soccer League in which the Cosmos played folded ten years later. When America hosted the World Cup in 1994, it was again thought that football was on the up. But Major League Soccer (MLS), the country’s professional league, failed to build on the momentum; a few years later it nearly went bust. Other dramatic developments—America reaching the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 2002, David Beckham signing with the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007, Landon Donovan’s miraculous last-minute goal against Algeria in 2010—were heralded as game-changers. The games Americans showed most interest in, though, did not seem to change.
Songs in the street
Football’s critics took all this as evidence that America would never embrace such a low-scoring game with few statistics to fuel fantasy leagues. Youngsters of both sexes might play football in large numbers, and the women’s game (at which America excels) would occasionally capture the nation’s attention, but there was no way football could challenge America’s four major team sports—baseball, basketball, ice hockey and American football. And yet, without making any single dramatic breakthrough, football has surreptitiously entered the mainstream.
Teams that once played in near-empty American-football stadiums now boast arenas designed for football and frequently full. Average attendance, though down last year, has risen to 18,600 per match, which puts MLS ahead of both the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (which play more games). According to Forbes magazine, the average MLS franchise is now worth $103m, up more than 175% over the past five years. The league had 13 clubs in 2007; next year it will have 21, including a new club in New York. The improved MLS has lured America’s best players, like Mr Dempsey and Michael Bradley, back from the European leagues. There are ten players from MLS teams in this year’s American squad; there were just four in 2010.
Last month MLS signed a new eight-year deal, estimated to be worth $90m per season, that will see more of its games broadcast on more television channels. In 2012 NBCUniversal, a television and film company, paid $250m for the rights to broadcast the games of the EPL for three years. The previous three-year contract had gone for under $70m. Over 30m Americans tuned in to EPL matches this season, more than double the number that watched the previous one. Kevin Alavy of Futures Sport + Entertainment, a consultancy, expects America to come third, behind Brazil and Germany, in terms of World Cup viewers this year (being in the right set of time zones is a big help).
Digital technologies allow America’s fans to keep up with foreign leagues even when television takes no interest. Stephen Nuttall, senior director for sport at YouTube, says 300 of the world’s top football clubs run official channels on the site. That may not matter much to the older, more sofa-bound sports fan; but football’s American fans are much more likely to be young. Rich Luker, a pollster, says football is second only to American football in its popularity with Americans between the ages of 12 and 24 (and concerns about head injuries have an increasing number of parents holding their children out of that sport). Mr Luker notes that two international footballers—Mr Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, an Argentine who plays for Barcelona—rank among the ten most popular athletes for Americans under the age of 34.
Olé, olé, olé, olé
America’s demography is working in football’s favour, too. Hispanics in the United States, as elsewhere in the Americas, love the game. Though they make up only 16.9% of the population, the number of Hispanics grew by 43% between 2000 and 2010. Over that same period the number of non-Hispanic whites, who tend to follow America’s long-established team sports, grew by just 1.2%. Based on current trends, Mr Luker believes international football will soon be four or five times bigger in America than it is today, and MLS’s fan base will triple or quadruple.
After a recent stretch of mediocrity, America has headed off to the World Cup ranked 14th in the world, though its draw means it is unlikely to get through the group stage into the final 16. It is a measure of how far the game has come that Jürgen Klinsmann, the German who coaches the team, not only felt that he had a strong enough squad to leave the ageing Mr Donovan at home—he was also called on to explain his decision on live television.
Robert Baan, the Dutchman who is technical director for India’s national team, must dream of such interest. In cricket-mad India, football is an afterthought—just ask Bollywood. In “Lagaan”, a hugely popular film from 2001, Indian villagers beat British colonial officers at a game of cricket, and win relief from oppressive taxes. But the real-life version of this tale, or the closest thing to it, actually involves football. In 1911 Mohun Bagan, from Kolkata, beat the East Yorkshire Regiment for the Indian Football Association Shield, becoming the first Asian squad to defeat a foreign team—a much celebrated event in the febrile atmosphere of the time.
The All India Football Federation (AIFF) was established in 1937, and an Indian team was invited to the World Cup when it was last hosted by Brazil in 1950 (it did not attend, due to the expense and the requirement that its footballers, who played barefoot, wear boots). Up until the death of Syed Abdul Rahim, a revered national coach, in 1963, India’s football was in reasonable fettle. The national team won the Asian games in 1951 and 1962 and came fourth at the 1956 Olympics, the best ever finish for an Asian country at the time.
Not a sporty nation?
Never, though, did football enjoy anything like the hold on the nation that cricket exerts. As many as 400m people will watch the national cricket team on television when the stakes are high; the immensely popular Indian Premier League (IPL), a professional cricket tournament set up in 2008, draws tens of thousands of fans to each match, and its brand is valued at $3 billion. In contrast, around 6m Indians watched the final of the World Cup in 2010, held in South Africa. The average crowd for India’s top professional football league, the I-League, is around 4,000 and most of its teams face financial hardship.
Indian football is not just eclipsed by cricket; for a long time it has been in absolute decline. The national team has sunk to 147th in FIFA’s world rankings—behind Afghanistan and North Korea. As the nation’s fortunes fell, investment drained out of the game and the country’s football infrastructure deteriorated. Professional teams play in rickety stadiums. Sunando Dhar, the head of the I-League, touched a nerve last year when he claimed that “India lacks sporting passion and is not really a sporting country.” But he may have a point. Apart from cricket, India does not excel at sports: at the last summer Olympics, it won six medals, none of them gold.
But even Mr Dhar is optimistic about football’s future in India. As in America, there are signs of a generational shift. India’s World Cup television viewers in 2010 may have been few in number, but they were also disproportionately young. Foreign leagues are already popular—IMG, a global sports-management firm, estimates that 131m Indians watch football on television each year, mostly tuning in to matches from the EPL or Spain’s La Liga. Other studies show this audience growing. European clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool and Barcelona have opened youth academies in the country, mindful of what discovering an Indian superstar would do for their fan base. A document promoting the creation of the new Indian Super League sums up the mood: “Cricket was the game of the fathers. Football is the game of the sons.”
Cricket’s promoters have been aware of the generational issue for a while; they set up the IPL, which features a shorter version of the game, to appeal to a younger audience. Now football is cheekily using the IPL as a prototype for the Super League, which will kick off in September. Set up by Reliance Industries, a big Indian conglomerate, and IMG, the league is expected to feature eight squads of Indian players alongside recycled foreign stars like Freddie Ljungberg, a Swede, and Robert Pirès, a Frenchman. It has even co-opted some of cricket’s star power, with Sachin Tendulkar, the sport’s greatest batsman, taking a stake in one of the teams. A number of Bollywood actors are also involved. The league is gimmicky, to be sure. So was MLS, early on.
When Mao wore the yellow jersey
Some fear the Super League will disrupt the poorly run I-League; others think one will subsume the other. Either way, the creation of the new league reflects an optimism surrounding the sport. It will never come close to unseating cricket, but it could benefit from the increased appetite for less-staid sport that the IPL has tapped into and encouraged. If India becomes a somewhat sportier nation, the world’s default sport will be well placed to benefit.
For that to happen, though, the country needs to improve its football infrastructure. As a spur to such improvements, FIFA has chosen India to host the World Cup for players under the age of 17 in 2017 on the understanding that it will spruce up its stadiums. By virtue of being host, India’s junior team will get into the 2017 tournament regardless of its quality.
By then, if all goes to plan, Indian football should show other signs of improvement. The Super League clubs have promised to invest in grass-roots efforts to teach the game, while the AIFF has opened up four academies to develop talent. But even Mr Baan, the first technical director the AIFF has had, thinks the country is a decade or so away from fielding squads that might qualify for the World Cup. Others would see that as impressively optimistic.
India can, to some extent, blame cricket for a lack of footballing success. China can blame communism. Under Mao Zedong, who played as a goalkeeper in school, the country was isolated from football’s growing popularity. Even after China started to open up under Deng Xiaoping, another football fan, the game was difficult to play, as meetings of ten or more people needed official sanction. The Chinese will tell you that they invented football, and they have a point; there was a formalised way of kicking balls around fields in China two thousand years ago. But they do not play it in large numbers today, nor do they play it terribly well. The men’s national team ranks 96th in the world—which is, as it happens, one spot behind Qatar.
The government is well aware of what some commentators call the country’s “football crisis”. And it takes policy for sporting prowess seriously in a way that India’s government does not and America’s does not need to. But interest shown off the pitch—the Chinese are keen to watch football played elsewhere, and to bet on it—is not proving easy to translate into participation and success on it. The top-down approach that works well for sports that depend on individual athletes is less suited to producing winning teams. Rather than investing in the coaching and infrastructure that might lead to long-term success, party leaders have sought quick fixes, such as shipping promising young players abroad to hone their skills. They often fail to flourish.
Chinese football also faces a cultural challenge. Most parents insist that their children cram for exams rather than kick a ball. Most kids do not aspire to success on the football pitch. Chinese football has no Yao Ming, the phenomenal Chinese star of the Houston Rockets basketball team, to inspire them. The result is that in 2011 the Chinese Football Association (CFA) reported just 7,000 registered players under the age of 18. That helps explain the national team’s ineptitude.
Yet the Chinese love watching foreign teams. Games from Italy’s top division, Serie A, have been aired on national television for decades. The EPL is often broadcast on regional channels, which have a wide reach. Many watch games online as well. In 2010 over 300m Chinese tuned in to the World Cup, with 17 stations airing nearly 3,000 hours of the games. (The 11-hour time difference is expected to put a big dent in this year’s numbers.) Big foreign clubs, like Barcelona and Manchester United, often make pre-season trips to the country.
Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport business at Coventry University, says support for such teams needs to be seen not so much as participation in the vicarious joys and sorrows that fans are heir to as a form of conspicuous consumption: “Manchester United is just another Western consumer brand.” Foreign clubs seem content with this superficial, if lucrative, engagement; they fly in and play but do not invest much in the country’s footballing scene. This contrasts sharply with the attitude in basketball. America’s NBA has worked hard at encouraging basketball in China by building new facilities and opening up training schools. As a result it is one of the country’s most popular sports.
Professional football in China has largely been known for foreign stars, like Nicolas Anelka, a Frenchman, and Didier Drogba, an Ivorian, who arrive to fanfares but leave soon after. It has also been known for corruption. In 2010, match-fixing saw the Guangzhou team relegated to the second division. That team’s fortunes, though, have changed. Shortly after its demotion, Evergrande Real Estate Group bought it and began pumping money into it, hiring Marcello Lippi, a World Cup winning Italian coach, in the process. Guangzhou Evergrande, as it is now known, has won the Super League, China’s top division, three years running. Last year it beat FC Seoul to become the first Chinese team to win the Asian Champions League. On June 5th Alibaba, an internet company, announced that it had agreed to buy 50% of the club.
It is a reflection of China’s building boom that most of the other teams in the league are owned by property developers, too, and they are also spending freely on foreign talent. The Super League’s top scorers are from Brazil, Sweden and Morocco. Last year Guangzhou R&F hired Sven-Goran Eriksson, a Swede who managed England, as its coach. The average attendance at games is a respectable 18,600, on a par with the MLS’s.
Well it beats quidditch
Rowan Simons, the author of “Bamboo Goalposts”, believes Chinese football would benefit more if the money shelled out for foreign coaches and players was spent on helping young Chinese players get really good. Evergrande has already made a big investment in this area. The club has built an enormous football academy in the southern province of Guangdong that students compare to Hogwarts, the school in the Harry Potter novels. With 2,300 students and 50 football pitches, it is China’s largest such institution, and perhaps the biggest in the world.
When the school opened in 2012 Xu Jiayin, the billionaire head of Evergrande, said, “Our long-term strategy is to use teenagers to turn Evergrande into a team of only domestic players in eight to ten years, making them stars in China, Asia and the world.” At least one other club has followed Evergrande’s lead, opening up a smaller school. Others are likely to do so if the academies are a success. The CFA has also hired Mr Beckham to promote the game to children and sell Chinese football to the rest of the world. Until the sport finds its version of Mr Yao, he’ll have to do.
Football’s situation, and prospects, in each of the sidelined countries differs. But there are common themes. In all of them, football is to some extent a deviation from the cultural mainstream, and following it expresses an interest in the world beyond the country’s borders. In some ways, indeed, football in these countries is more global than it is elsewhere, where the fiercest devotions are normally reserved for local teams. In its glamour, its appeal to the young, its international investments, its consumerist sheen and its easy integration with new media, football can be seen as a poster child for globalisation, and to many in the countries which have yet to excel at the game that increases its appeal.
This is not to say it does not have its dark side. China is still getting over its latest match-fixing scandal, which saw dozens of officials sent to jail. Indian officials say their I-League has been targeted by a Malaysian betting syndicate. A recent report from the Sorbonne and the International Centre for Sport Security states that football is under siege by criminals. And the global game is overseen by a FIFA elite some of whose concerns about corruption seem to be limited to ensuring that they get their fair share.
The awfulness of FIFA is not new, is not completely out of line with the situation in other sports and has done little to dampen the world’s enthusiasm for football. But at the margins it can do real harm. Take the choice of venue for the 2022 World Cup. The front-runners were a large, liberal country with an increasingly football-friendly population and a small, sweltering autocracy made up mostly of migrant workers. FIFA chose the latter, apparently because of the largesse its supporters spread around. And so a second American World Cup, which might have truly set the seal on football’s ascendance in that nation, was passed over for a Qatari one.
That decision might be overturned, which would be all to the good. Yet no matter how rotten FIFA appears or how poor its decisions, there seems to be little that can hold back football, and that too is for the good. The world needs friendly competition around which to gather; at the same time football’s diversity of styles is a welcome demonstration that globalisation need not mean homogenisation. And it still has half of the world to conquer.
#3.
Privacy
Hiding from big data
IT security: With the increasing commercial use of personal data and multiple security breaches, will people pay for privacy?
Jun 7th 2014 | From the print edition
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AS THE chorus of Twisted Sister’s 1984 anti-authority hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” faded, Aral Balkan got ready to launch his latest project from the main stage at Handheld, a small technology-design conference held in Cardiff, Wales, last November. The entrepreneur’s big idea? A phone that flies in the face of a consumer-technology industry transfixed by big data and how to make money from it.
Users of Mr Balkan’s phone will have extensive control over any data it collects. However, those data will not be “monetised”. So far, what Mr Balkan calls his Indie Phone is just an idea and one that is largely dependent on a crowdfunding campaign aiming to raise the several millions of pounds needed to put the device into production.
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But with online security frequently breached and personal data plundered, Mr Balkan is not alone in thinking there will be a big market for privacy products. Other new ventures are meant to appeal to an audience believed to have grown indignant at the gathering of personal data for commercial purposes by industry giants like Google and Facebook.
Omlet is one example. It is a new social-messaging service launched by Monica Lam of Stanford University. Using Omlet, users may send messages to their contacts and share media, all of which is stored in the cloud with a third-party provider of their choice rather than being kept and used for purposes such as targeted advertising. Although the service is free, with no centralised ownership of data on the network, Dr Lam hopes to make money by collaborating with cloud services like Dropbox or Box.com, which might then be enabled as the default storage providers.
Companies could find privacy a useful marketing tool, reckons Stephen Wicker, a specialist in digital communications at Cornell University. Dr Wicker is one of many experts urging firms to offer consumers options which do not leave them vulnerable to the hacking or misuse of databases. A service which promises to keep users’ data for a day instead of a year or more is, he believes, something that people would be willing to pay extra for.
Big Brother is worried
Pressure from governments could encourage many more privacy products. There is an increasing awareness of just how much can be learned or predicted about an individual from myriad data floating around the web. The White House, for one, is co-hosting a series of big-data workshops in response to a call by President Obama in January for a privacy review following Edward Snowden’s revelations about snooping by intelligence agencies.
At the first of these workshops, in March, there was much discussion about two very different concepts that might be adopted by industry to make computer systems more secure: homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. Both terms have become buzzwords, but many experts find they have big limitations.
Homomorphic encryption allows computations to be carried out on data while they are in an encrypted state. Currently data must be decrypted on computer servers for them to be analysed and information extracted, which leaves them vulnerable to attack or accidental leaks.
But homomorphic encryption slows processing speeds drastically. Vinod Vaikuntanathan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues initially found that extracting information from encrypted data could take a quintillion (1018) times longer than open data. In his latest experiments this has dropped to ten thousand or so times longer, which is still far too slow to make it a serious alternative to existing data-protection systems.
Yet homomorphic encryption could have some uses, as in one-off situations where privacy is crucial. This might be for vote tallying during an election.
Differential privacy tackles another means of obtaining private information. Even anonymised databases can be vulnerable to “linkage attacks”. These allow people’s identity to be inferred by comparing anonymous information with data from an open source. Finding out whether someone is listed as having leukaemia in an anonymised medical-research database, for example, might be possible by matching the data with details about the person gleaned from their open social-media profile, which might well include their day, month and place of birth, home town and occupation.
Instead of directly outputting data when an anonymised resource is queried, differential privacy uses algorithms to add variable levels of “noise” to the data so that information about a specific individual is obscured. Frank McSherry, a differential-privacy researcher at Microsoft, says it is a bit like trying to listen to a million guitarists at once. If they are all playing with distortion (the added noise) it is hard to pick out an individual playing a different tune.
The problem with differential privacy is that there is no universally accepted way of doing it. Still, as Dr McSherry notes, at least researchers have begun thinking about how it might best be deployed. That is encouraging for researchers wanting to protect large, highly sensitive databases. But businesses accustomed to exploiting the richness of data, legally or otherwise, may be flatly uninterested.
Does privacy sell?
There is scant evidence that concern about privacy is causing a fundamental change in the way data are used and stored. Carsten Casper of Gartner, a technology consultancy, says that there is no big privacy-revolution happening in IT infrastructure. Companies are asking more questions about privacy, but Mr Casper says nine out of ten of those questions are to do with the location of data centres. Companies are keen to know if they will incur legislative restrictions on the use of data by moving to a particular jurisdiction, for example. Some firms also ask if public concern over the security of the cloud is significant enough to make the consolidation of data-centres a bad idea. In all cases, Mr Casper advises his clients to take a broad view, as privacy is far from the only factor they need to consider.
Yet interest in privacy-enhancing features is growing. These include such things as better control over which individuals within a company have access to certain data, or systems which can help to enforce stricter privacy policies. But neither big changes to business models nor hefty expenditure on special technologies are on the cards—unless they improve trust and customer loyalty. “Those things turn into money,” says Mr Casper.
Nevertheless, some researchers still think that privacy could be enhanced by new technology. Robert Watson, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, has spent years researching “compartmentalisation”. This is a way of segregating the components of programs within any service, such as an e-mail interface, so that only the communications that are absolutely necessary between those components are allowed. This could prevent malicious code in an e-mail attachment, say, infecting other programs. From a security point of view, that is a good thing. But what has it got to do with privacy? “We can use compartmentalisation to restrict the effects of a successful compromise,” says Dr Watson. It would therefore enforce security policies, which would deny an attacker or malicious insider access to information.
One of Dr Watson’s colleagues, Ben Laurie, a software-security engineer at Google and a director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns to preserve the openness of a digital society, agrees that compartmentalisation could help limit the impact of security flaws. He should know, because he is also a core member of the OpenSSL project, which provides a popular library of open-source encryption software. In April OpenSSL was found to have a vulnerability known as Heartbleed.
Heartbleed could be exploited by attackers to gain access to the memory on computer servers, which might reveal data such as users’ passwords and other sensitive information. Strong compartmentalisation, reckons Dr Watson, would have prevented that.
Compartmentalising programs does mean additional costs, but Dr Watson believes firms would find the investment worthwhile because it would make data more secure. Moreover, the costs of compartmentalisation would fall as more computers use it, as happened in another area of computer science. Virtualisation allows multiple (virtual) machines, each with its own operating system and applications, to run independently on the same processor. For it to be commercially viable, processors had to be redesigned. The changes were expensive, but rising energy costs made running independent physical machines exorbitant, so their implementation was accelerated. If demand for improved security grew fast enough, then redesigns for compartmentalisation could be speeded up too.
For those who know where to look there are ways to hide onlineSome in the industry believe governments need to intervene to protect privacy. There is some movement in this direction. In Britain, for instance, the Information Commissioner’s Office is working to develop new privacy standards to publicly certify an organisation’s compliance with data-protection laws. But critics think such proposals fall short of the mark—especially since the revelations that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) ran a surveillance programme known as PRISM, which collected information directly from the servers of big technology companies, such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
For those who know where to look there are ways to hide online, including the Tor network, which allows anonymous web browsing by routing users’ online activity through a network of randomly selected computers provided by volunteers. Tor has proved to be remarkably robust. An NSA presentation entitled “Tor Stinks”, which was leaked to newspapers by Mr Snowden last October, said: “We will never be able to de-anonymise all Tor users all the time.” New software should make the use of Tor less geeky, but the network is slow compared with the regular web.
There are other ways being investigated to protect security and privacy. One, known as “anonymous credentials”, provides authentication without identification. Instead of providing proof of identity to log into, say, an online service, a user’s device could be asked to complete a secret cryptographic puzzle which only authorised parties know how to solve. Another idea is “private information retrieval”, which allows excerpts from a database to be made available in confidence.
But all these processes come at some cost. Commercial use of big data, for things like market research and targeting advertising to individuals, helps to subsidise many products and services. Companies and consumers may be reluctant to pay more for greater privacy, choosing instead to take more care online. Just how big and successful the market for privacy becomes will depend on the demand for new products, like Mr Balkan’s Indie Phone—provided they can get to market.
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Ally
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Casey Lartigue, Jr.
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