I’m frequently frustrated by the silly imprecise concerns people have about ‘privacy’, particularly in relation to technology. Not only do most people who express concern about this issue have any clear theory about why a loss of privacy would be a bad thing they don’t even bother to distinguish the concept of privacy from other related concepts like obscurity. Ironically while many people who claim to be worried about privacy would, if pressed, cite some Orwellian concern about the government or corporations using information about to control what we can say few people seem to be upset at the governments continuing attempts to do just that. While I know that in a country where a sizeable fraction of the populace is convinced we need laws to protect us from certain combinations of sounds rational consideration is unlikely to ever make a difference it’s still a fun game to play so I’ll take a look at the recently proposed ‘Do Not Track’ list.

Now I agree with Mr. Harper over at The Technology Liberation Front (TLF) when he observes that a ‘Do Not Track’ list isn’t really analogous to the ‘Do Not Call’ list. Targeted advertising is a practice which increases the efficiency of the voluntary exchange of your time/eyeballs for web content while telemarketing is a practice with a significant externality (your time/annoyance) that isn’t paid for by the advertiser. In short targeted advertising makes us better off while telemarketing makes us worse off.

I’m slightly sympathetic to the concern that some people have about advertising companies like doubleclick/google tracking their visits to third party websites. However, despite the ridiculous claim that because mozilla developers get advertising revenue (from google for the default search box) they would never do anything about this problem their are a fuckton of privacy and anonymity extensions for people to use. If people don’t even care enough to go install a browser extension or to convince the firefox people to include such a feature by default (like the popup blocker) then the intrinsic cost of the legislation outweighs these minor benefits. Worse, ignorant of the benefits they get from the practice many people are likely to sign up as the result of scary sound bites about “being watched.”

While I think some of the more extreme worries presented over at the TLF are unrealistic I do think the concept of a ‘Do Not Track’ list raises free speech concerns. While I think it’s surely within the scope of congressional power to require corporations to have privacy policies and abide by them or to impose liability for data breaches requiring someone to delete or avoid recording freely given information is more troublesome. Surely the government could not pass a law preventing any unauthorized individual from retaining financial data on members of congress, that would bar any journalistic inquiry into fraud charges against congressmen but you might think a rule that applied only to normal buisness records avoided these problems. However, I think the recent revelations about who is editing wikipedia, e.g., congressional staffers editting their patron’s page, are a clear example of how user tracking data can be necessary to speak on matters of public concern.

More generally the first ammendment, if it is to have any force, must be read to protect the creation of notes and collection of data. Hell, the creation of a note is itself an act of speech. Simply because you might have lots and lots of data now as a result of the information revolution can’t change that. If I as a blogger have first ammendment protection for announcing that so-and-so visited my blog or that someone with cookie blah-blah-blah did so it’s hard to see how I couldn’t also have first ammendment protection for conveying that information in bulk to someone like google.

Now I admit that the supreme court’s analysis of this issue might be significantly different. I do tend to be a bit of a free speech absolutist. However, regardless of legality I think it’s damn important for us to retain the right to record what happens to us or to objects we control and analyze or pass on that information. If that means people have to go to a bit of trouble to remain anonymous that’s a small price to pay for information freedom. Ultimately technology will erase the obscurity we’ve enjoyed for the last 100 years or so since we moved into cities the only question is do we get democratic access to the analyzed data and the right to use the same tools to monitor the government they use against use or do we adopt a hierarchical model where the government knows everything and the rest of us are barred from accumulating information in databases.

Some idiot from CNET being interview on the radio just claimed that google’s search algorithm is broken because it returns tens or hundreds of thousand results for many queries. According to them someone will eventually come along and offer an algorithm so elegant that it only gives eight results and “I will love every one of them.” I haven’t heard much today so this qualifies for the dumb remark of the day.

Go into a library and ask a librarian for a book on the Spanish civil war and she’ll probably recommend one or two. Go back and tell her those weren’t what you were looking for and she’ll recommend a few more. Unless the librarian’s patience wears out you can keep doing this for a long time and the better the librarian the longer she will be able to keep suggesting more books. It’s not a feature of the librarian that we have to walk all the way back over to the reference desk to ask for more recommendations. It would be strictly better if we could hit the next page button and get the next set of results.

Of course a real librarian would incorporate feedback from our reactions to the previous recommendations (yah this is closer but not quite what I was looking for) and this is an obvious direction for search engines to explore but it’s not clear it would be good for the majority of searches (the overhead of feedback might overwhelm the cost of scanning output or changing your search in most cases). However, it’s just idiotic to think that merely offering the user the change to look at more pages means google’s algorithm is broken.

I recently ran across an article on slashdot discussing the payments that hotmail accepts from businesses to have their email whitelisted and (indirectly) links to editorials praising and denouncing the 2006 deal AOL and Yahoo struck with goodmail that allows businesses to pay a 1/4 cent fee per email to guarantee their email makes it past spam and volume filters. Now I’ve been vaguely aware of calls to combat spam with micropayments for some time but this prompted me to actually take a look at some of the more carefully designed proposals for email micropayments. These schemes actually manage to answer many of the common worries about email micropayments (if really implemented). However, while I’m generally a big fan of clever economic/incentive based solutions to social problems, it seems to me that micropayments for email are a fundamentally flawed non-solution to the problem of email spam. In fact it’s far from clear if they would reduce the total amount of junk mail at all and even if they did the trouble they cause and risks they pose outweigh any benefits.

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So the big financial story of the day is the revelation that John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods posted anonymously on the Yahoo finance site. Unsurprisingly he tended to say good things about his company (and his haircut) while dissing his competition (Wild Oats which Whole Foods is now trying to purchase). In short he behaved like every other fanboi on the internet, he just liked his own company rather than the one that made his computer CPU. But because he is the company CEO everyone is getting really worked up about this. Frankly I don’t see what the big deal is.

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So I’m listening to the Gonzales hearing and some senator has sidetracked the discussion onto the subject of internet gambling. He, with Gonzales’s agreement, asserted that it is vital to outlaw internet gambling because they functioning as unregulated banks and are thus perfect vehicles for money laundering, terrorist financing and tax evasion.

Now perhaps he just meant that given we outlaw internet banking it is important to shut down easy financial transactions with the companies. This seems to be a reasonable position. However, it’s an insoluble problem of our own creation. There are simply too many otherwise law-abiding US citizens who are and will continue to engage in internet gambling and their will always be offshore bank accounts and other means for them to do so. This flow of relatively innocuous money will disguise any genuinely criminal money being laundered or tax being evaded.

Of course we could easily eliminate the problem entirely by simply legalizing internet gambling for properly licensed companies. This would bring all those cash flows into a regulated system as well as allowing us to institute protections against problem gamblers, e.g., laws that require internet gambling entities to stop people from playing after they’ve lost too much money in a given time period or receive some sort of notification that this person is a problem gambler. Also it would bring us in line with the WTO guidelines.

But no, that would be far too rational for the US to ever do.

I’m usually a big fan of Google. I normally think being a fan of a company is dumb I’ve made an exception in this case. For a variety of reasons (noble and selfish) they have worked hard to support open standards and free uncensored exchange of information (choosing not to comply in China would only have left the Chinese searching on even more censor friendly sites). This has allowed them to gain the trust of users like me who allow Google to store massive amounts of my personal data, a key component in their business strategy. However, reading the editorial guidelines for custom buttons on the new Google toolbar has shaken my trust.

As you may already know google’s new toolbar (still in beta for FireFox) allows users to create custom search buttons, e.g., I could create a button that people could place on their toolbar to search the posts on this blog. Thankfully Google does not exercise any control over what buttons I can create or distribute to either but they (understandably if unfortunately) have an editorial policy about which buttons they will display in their online gallery. As this is the only place most people will look for buttons it in effect controls what sort of search buttons the general public is exposed to.

Much to my disappointment when I was thinking of creating a custom button to search asstr (text only sex stories) I discovered that the editorial guidelines seem to exclude any such search button from google’s gallery. Though I am disgusted by policies that treat sexuality as some kind of unclean shameful thing I can appreciate the justification for it in horribly puritanical country like ours. It is the editorial policy on other subjects like, drugs, prostitution, copyright law and smoking that really bothers me. Despite my deep uncomfortability with content based favoritism in this sort of situation I would even accept an editorial policy which just declared certain topics off limits for buttons. For instance if the editorial policy simply said no buttons about drugs or prostitution I wouldn’t be happy with the policy but I could live with it. However, I find it totally unacceptable for Google to have editorial policies that ban only one side of the argument on controversial issues.

For instance consider this sampling of their editorial guidelines.

Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote drugs or drug paraphernalia. This includes drug accessories, illegal drugs, and herbal drugs such as salvia and magic mushrooms. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote beer or hard alcohol. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote hacking or cracking. For example, sites must not provide instructions or equipment to illegally access or tamper with software, servers, websites, cell phones, or other communications or content delivery systems or devices. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote certain weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote tobacco or tobacco-related products. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote prostitution. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote illegal content.

The plain language of these guidelines would seem to allow the brady campaign to add a custom search button for their site to google’s button gallery but not the nra. Similarly the DEA would apparently be allowed to post a button facilitating access to anti-drug (pro drug war) propaganda while a NORML button making pro legalization information convenient, a erowid button providing drug information (important to avoid overdoses) or even a UDV button giving information on their (totally legal) religious use of Ayahuasca would be denied from google’s button gallery. Arguably even a site that merely advocated legalizing prostitution to reduce violence against women would run afoul of these guidelines while the opposite position would not. Heck, technically a site arguing for breaking copyright laws as a form of civil disobedience would run afoul of these guidelines.

I still am inclined to give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume that guidelines like the one against cracking/hacking will not be used to stop buttons helping people figure out how to liberate their own phones from corporate locks or play their music on a different portable player. While most of the other conditions disturbingly make no distinction between legal and illegal situations (e.g. prostitution in Nevada) this condition might be read to only apply to illegal hacking/cracking. However, in light of the other language in these guidelines I am worried.

Certainly Google has the right to put up whatever restrictions it wants on content that it will display on it’s pages and it would be wrong to call whatever guidelines they choose censorship. Nothing prevents Google from deciding that only pro-life and not pro-choice search buttons would be allowed. Absent the FEC they could only allow buttons made to search pro-republican sites and not democratic ones. People whose buttons aren’t accepted in the gallery can go distribute them on other websites. But just like a policy that accepted only pro-republican buttons into the gallery by handicapping one side of the debate, especially the less popular side, the full public debate is stunted. Even worse appearing to favor one side over another on controversial issues imperils people’s trust in Google as an unbiased provider of search results. Sure conditions like this may be common on many forums and sites around the web but unlike your generic website Google, like the news media before them, has a responsibility to not only present the information in an unbiased fashion but also avoid even the appearance of stacking the deck in one side’s favor.

I suspect and hope that this policy was just an oversight on google’s part (or a horribly bad misunderstanding on mine) and when they read the similar message I posted in the button developers group it will be rewritten in a more neutral fashion. While I might prefer that membership in the button gallery might be determined solely by usefulness/estimated popularity I’m not demanding the impossible. I understand that I will probably always have to look to third party sites for buttons to search sexual content but at the very least Google can make the playing field fair and put both sides of these controversial issues on a similar footing (let them both have buttons or neither).

Obviously Wikipedia does not have the same sort of authority that a traditional encyclopedia does (nor is it as limited and dated either) and anyone using wikipedia as a definitive source in a research paper deserves to be severely penalized (because of the changing content if nothing else). However, I just don’t understand all the anti-wikipedia hate. The Register is intent on portraying Wales (founder of wikipedia) as guilty of some moral outrage for creating this public menace. Some librarians (though certainly not all) make a point of showing off wikipedia as an untrustworthy site and generally taking their criticism beyond concerns about citations and reasonable caution. There are a host of anti-wikipedia websites. Amazingly there is even one devoted to a class action lawsuit against wikipedia. Now there is even an article on the relatively restrained FindLaw’s Writ advocating partially revoking their protection from libel lawsuits.

What the fuck? It’s just a website people what is all the fuss. If you don’t like it don’t use it, even try and convince other people that it isn’t that reliable (though some experiments have been done in this regard and disappointed the critics) but there is no reason to be outraged some people got together and wrote down a bunch of facts on their web page. I’ve always thought those suggestions that people had some vested interest in reserving information to the elite (the type of people who go look it up in musty libraries) but maybe I should reconsider that opinion.

Ridiculous as I find these protests I guess I should say a few words about why they are in error. Basically all the complaints focus around the accuracy of wikipedia (fanned by recent events). Importantly these anti-wikipedia zealots aren’t complaining just because wikipedia occasionally has errors or makes mistakes. If this was their position the entire web would be the subject of their ire. Rather the protest is that wikipedia doesn’t take enough responsibility for their content and that somehow their place as a widely consulted web reference is somehow “unearned” or unfair.

While I do think that wikipedia could improve its moderation model and it is too idealistic about openness the critics I mention are not offering constructive suggestions to make a valuable project even better they are actually critical that an openly editable encyclopedia exists at all. Their defense for complaining about a free resource is that by calling itself an encyclopedia this website somehow becomes responsible for meeting the same standard encyclopedia does. This is also the argument made against wikipedia’s BBS like libel protection.

The idea that a mere title could carry with it that level of expectation or those moral responsibilities is just absurd. I mean would the onion suddenly be in the wrong if they had been titled West Valley News. Besides the site is not encyclopedia.com it is wikipedia.com and just as one should have a lot different expectations from a place called fakepedia.com so too should one have different expectations for a wiki encyclopedia. The essential feature differentiating wikipedia from a normal encyclopedia is in the name. What more could you want?

The difference between wikipedia and a normal encyclopedia is readily apparent with a quick visit to any page, perhaps a few deeply confused people don’t realize this but some people think theonion is a real paper too. The real reason so many people trust what wikipedia says is because it is so frequently right. If wikipedia had the same layout and name but most of its information was false it would never have gotten popular (they don’t even advertise). What works up these critics is that the general accuracy of wikipedia makes many people (perhaps wrongly) put great trust in the site but the idea that a webpage suddenly becomes morally (or legally) suspect because it usually gets things right is pretty absurd.

Wikipedia is a free resource which goes to every reasonable effort to inform people how it works. Unlike a commercial product they have no responsibility to be whatever their ‘customers’ want them to be so long as they don’t misrepresent what they are. Essentially the critics are mad about the way people use and trust wikipedia but can’t get away with telling people they can’t read or believe something so instead they attack the website. Their position might be obscured by the arguments but basically it amounts to the absurd position that it is wrong for people to get together and create a freely editable website which aims to have the same content as an encyclopedia.