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Anonymity in a connected world

Published on May 14, 2009. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

I was reading this article Your Morning Commute is Unique: On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs, by Arvind Narayanan, and it got me thinking. (Thanks to @jamespage for pointing to this article.)

He starts out by citing this study by two PARC researchers and concluding that “for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations — to a block level — identifies them uniquely.” Isn’t it amazing how fast anonymity breaks down?

Cover art for new Penguin edition of Orwell's 1984 (Shepard Fairey)

Now just having those two data points alone would leave your anonymity intact, but the potential danger comes in if this information is able to be shared by or among mobile connectivity providers, credit card companies, government agencies, advertisers and social networking services.

It could be that my paranoia level was increased after having seen this article in New York Times describing the amount of data mining and interpretation currently being used by the credit card industry.

The exploration into cardholders’ minds hit a breakthrough in 2002, when J. P. Martin, a math-loving executive at Canadian Tire, decided to analyze almost every piece of information his company had collected from credit-card transactions the previous year… Martin’s measurements were so precise that he could tell you the “riskiest” drinking establishment in Canada — Sharx Pool Bar in Montreal, where 47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months. He could also tell you the “safest” products — premium birdseed and a device called a “snow roof rake” that homeowners use to remove high-up snowdrifts so they don’t fall on pedestrians.

By the time he publicized his findings, a small industry of math fanatics — many of them former credit-card executives — had started consulting for the major banks that issued cards, and they began using Martin’s findings and other research to build psychological profiles.

So when people start to use their cell phones to pay for merchandise, location information will be added to the database, too. Conspiracy theorists, novelists and filmmakers, rejoice! There are some great storylines to be made from this stuff. But, seriously, should we be worried about these developments?

Late breaking: With respect to U.S. constitutional law, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that tracking a suspect via the global positioning system without a warrant violated his right to privacy. A stalker could be uniquely linked to the victim by GPS tracking, for instance. Hat tip to @stoweboyd for the lead. [Added 15 May 12:30 CET]

Published on May 14, 2009. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

Familiar strangers

Published on May 12, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .
I came across this slide deck today and thought I’d post it here and make a few comments. David Reed is the Reed of Reed’s Law, a person with genuine visionary status.
He sketches how the technologically-mediated public social fabric might look in the future. In slide 2 he postulates that in order to be well-connected we will need to feel safe, establish trust with “familiar strangers” and to share and collaborate with people in the same location. I am particularly interested in the term “familar strangers,” a seeming oxymoron.
I was first reminded of a quote by Diane Arbus, “Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.” But then I learned that it’s a term is commonly used in studying social networks and is generally defined as “an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact.”
In the future, however, I think the definition can be extended. The recognition can take place via machine-readable data. It all comes down to context, what elements we pour into the concept of context and how we weigh these elements in relation to each other. But it will never be really useful or trustworthy until our digital lives are tagged with open metadata and semantic protocols.
Since the people we don’t know will always be more numerous than those we do, we can gain much more from social search and discovery tools that tap into the knowledge of familiar strangers, applying rules learned from examining our declared identity and our relationships with people we do know and applying them to people that we don’t know.
Yet.
Published on May 12, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Always on!

Published on May 11, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Many of you will remember the early days of the web when The Next Big Thing was “always on” — fast, cheap bandwidth that would liberate us from the curse of dialup and would naturally enable new business models to emerge. We normally thought about this in terms of Internet connectivity, separate from mobile telephony. Since those days we have seen the blurring of the lines between voice and data due to the emergence of VoIP, 3G mobile, smartphones and (still too expensive) flat rate data pricing.

I just came across this article in the NYT, A Pocket-Size Leveler in an Outsize Land, by Anand Giridharadas. And it really hammered home the reality of where we are heading as a planet as far as digital connectivity is concerned.

But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. And while the average bill, of less than $5 per month, represents 7 percent of the average Indian’s income, enough Indians apparently consider the sacrifice worth it: if present trends continue, in five years every Indian will have a cellphone… There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening.

A huge percentage of the world’s population is coming online not through PC-based Internet, but through their cell phones. There are 3 billion active mobile device users in the world, 92% of them outside of the US market. (Stats are from Tomi Ahonen.)

What does the social web look like, how does it feel, when your first and only window into that world is a handheld mobile device? Like the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, your perception is determined by where you touch the animal.

A mobile device is by its very nature always on. Since there is little doubt that even the cheapest cell phones will be able to send and receive pictures and videos, listen to and share music and navigate the so-called mobile web in the not too distant future (as many already do), it is fascinating to think about what kind of new social networking businesses will be built to scale to, um, billions of members.

Published on May 11, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

‘Pataphysics, say what?

Published on May 10, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: .

Some of you may be puzzled by the title of this blog, so here’s a brief explanation for the curious.

‘Pataphysics (‘Pataphysique in the original), is a term coined by Alfred Jarry in 1893. It is to metaphysics, as metaphysics is to physics, AKA the science of exceptions.

Ubu done in Pongo

Ubu done in Pongo

I became enamored of Alfred Jarry in college after having been recruited to play a bit role in Ubu Roi. I had never heard of him before and was awestruck by its rawness, its power, its vehemence and the modernity of the piece. It premiered in 1896. I could go on at length about Jarry’s take no prisoners artistic position, but suffice it to say he remains a seminal figure for me.

I recently discovered that the word ‘Pataphyics was written into Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by Paul McCartney – “Joan was quizzical, studied ‘pataphysical science in the home…” and immediately loved the image and decided to adopt it here. First, because my train of thought runs on a ‘pataphysical track (Eadem mutata resurgo: “Although changed, I shall arise the same”) and second I am always attracted to the esoteric and ambiguous. The song itself is no great shakes, but I couldn’t resist the Jarry reference.

It will certainly take me a few weeks (months??) to get back into blogging and to dress the blog up with appropriate widgets, decent blog roll and all the other doodads. This is my experience with a self-hosted WordPress blog. So far, so good and this K2 template is the cat’s meow.

Over and out.

Published on May 10, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: .