On this episode of Spark: Bringing Sexy App. Click below to listen or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
Play audio:
- Nora mentions that this year, Oscar winners can give two speeches
- Andy Baio tracks pirated Oscar-nominated films
- danah boyd researches teens, privacy, and social media
- Jessica Leshnoff reports on the trend of boomers sexting
- Ali Rizvi Badshah explains the impact of the internet on the shelf life of jokes
- Dan Gillmor on Apple’s removal of sexy iPhone apps from its App Store
- Peter Nowak writes about the origins of everyday innovations in his book, Sex, Bombs and Burgers: How War, Porn and Fast Food Shaped Technology as We Know It
Music and sound effects used in this episode:
- “Long Road Ahead” by Kevin MacLeod
- Countdown by Corsica_S
- “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama
- “Crazy Love – 3-TPBO” by The Paloseco Brazz Orchestra
- “You Oughta Be In Pictures” by Rudy Vallee And His Connecticut Yankees
- “Just A Message” by Hank Penny’s Radio Cowboys
- Music from “Music For The 20 Song Game” by Podington Bear
- “Feral Chase” by Kevin MacLeod
- “Tickle” by fLako
- Clips from Perversion for Profit (Part I)
- Clips from Preparation of Foods: Stone Age to Space Age
- “Victory Stride” by James P Johnson’s Jazz Men
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[Original image byAndYaDontStop]
Hearing about young people online was interesting timing. Yesterday I was at http://www.techlaw.uottawa.ca/launch and the final session was on "Doing Girl Online: How social networking is transforming gender, equality and privacy". Some pretty amazing speakers which you may want to look into for future shows (Valerie Steves, Shayla Thiel-Stern,…)
I think it is critically important how adults look at young people as it will reflect back. The more surveillance adults impose, the less valuable young people will think their privacy is worth.
I liked how your conversation indicated that adults are generally not as away as youth about the exposure they have in more public online spaces. I'm not comfortable with sexting partly because I know how easy it is for an intermediary to access those messages (email, IM, SMS, etc). In effect, I don't send anything electronically that I would be too uncomfortable being published publicly online.
As to Apple, they already impose much more than their subjective morality. I've heard more than one set of stories that if you favourably mention a competitor (Such as Google's Android) in the description of your application it may not get approved. It's a gated community where I already don't trust the gatekeeper, so barely want to visit (use someone elses iControl device) and would never consider living there.
While I agree that some people may want to have filtering, I don't think this should be imposed by device manufacturers or other communications intermediaries. This is the net neutrality debate all over again with a different technological intermediary. This is a bundling of unrelated services that is very dangerous: economically as well as protection of citizens rights. My choice of what filtering I want (or don't want) should be independent of devices manufacturers, which should also be independent of communications providers.
Hearing about young people online was interesting timing. Yesterday I was at http://www.techlaw.uottawa.ca/launch and the final session was on "Doing Girl Online: How social networking is transforming gender, equality and privacy". Some pretty amazing speakers which you may want to look into for future shows (Valerie Steves, Shayla Thiel-Stern,…)
I think it is critically important how adults look at young people as it will reflect back. The more surveillance adults impose, the less valuable young people will think their privacy is worth.
I liked how your conversation indicated that adults are generally not as away as youth about the exposure they have in more public online spaces. I'm not comfortable with sexting partly because I know how easy it is for an intermediary to access those messages (email, IM, SMS, etc). In effect, I don't send anything electronically that I would be too uncomfortable being published publicly online.
As to Apple, they already impose much more than their subjective morality. I've heard more than one set of stories that if you favourably mention a competitor (Such as Google's Android) in the description of your application it may not get approved. It's a gated community where I already don't trust the gatekeeper, so barely want to visit (use someone elses iControl device) and would never consider living there.
While I agree that some people may want to have filtering, I don't think this should be imposed by device manufacturers or other communications intermediaries. This is the net neutrality debate all over again with a different technological intermediary. This is a bundling of unrelated services that is very dangerous: economically as well as protection of citizens rights. My choice of what filtering I want (or don't want) should be independent of devices manufacturers, which should also be independent of communications providers.
It is a big problem, those with intermediary access to other peoples online messages, and sometimes it is hard to understand, why are they accessing someones private information? When I think of two people having a private conversation, I can accept there is little need of having a third party to record the conversation; so when I imagine how many people are viewing online information, I begin to question the legitimacy of their concerns; do they want to listen for the sake of their communities, or their companies; are they attempting to profit from private information, or are they using the information for a good purpose. The internet is a relatively knew technology, and it appears to becoming increasing in popularity. It is my hope, as more people participate in online activities they will collectively develop a reasonable set of social norms; thus, treating the internet users as a young developing culture.
All great thoughts. If you look at government policy you can see the inconsistencies. Our Federal Privacy Commissioner tends to say "If you can't protect it, don't record it". Contradicting this you have the whole concept of "lawful access" (Conservatives promised more of this in throne speech) where corporations are mandated to not only record excessive amounts of details about our conversations, but that these private companies store this information for possible future access by law enforcement. The reality is that if the police can access this information, so can someone else who we would all agree should not be granted access.
It is interesting how these concepts of privacy and law enforcement often get confused and intermixed. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is widely quoted as saying, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.". While alleged by opponents that this was admitting that Google was invading peoples privacy, he was actually talking about concepts of "lawful access" where Google must obey the laws of the countries it operates in. Obeying the law includes when those laws mandating that they spy on their customers who are citizens of those countries. Contrary to popular western opinion, it isn't only the Chinese government that makes inappropriate demands for monitoring and filtering.
Before we can reasonably expect service providers to protect our privacy, we need governments to stop requiring in the law that they invade our privacy.
I wonder why privacy wasn't an issue for the Internet in the 90's or before Web 2.0 reared its ugly face? When I first started using the net in 2001, it was usually peaceful by today's standards. Sure, it had the occasional troll, spammer, or flamewar, but talk about privacy was unheard of. There was an inert understanding about how to correctly publish and utilize information. People didn't use their names or petty remembrances of their real lives – they used pseudonyms and personas to represent the best of themselves based their skills and talents. They didn't connect to familiar friends and people they already knew – they sought out new friends in other parts of the world that shared their own interests instead of conforming to what they're sold to. The only time I ever had a breach of privacy in this system was when I offhandedly referred to my online activities for a little bit of small talk. That person, brilliant bugger he was, then used that information to run amuck in my online affairs. To me, publishing information *off* of the Internet is the greater danger.
Those of us still operating using the pre-2.0 mindset feel much more secure in our online doings. When I was little, I was made a pariah for my interest in computers. Now my accosted peers have patted me on the back since they've embraced both computers and the Internet – but in doing so, I didn't have the heart to tell them they were doing it terribly, terribly wrong.
I think you answered your own questions: those who aren't themselves, and not talking to people who they actually know, won't be discussing anything real which — if disclosed — would invade their privacy.
As various communications media is intermixed more and more with the rest of our lives, and we are ourselves talking to other people we know, the more personal and private those communications become. While I've been online since the 1980's in one form or another, I nearly always participate as myself. My contributions here are with my legal name, but knowing it is public I'm not divulging anything not intended to be public.
For a growing percentage of the world, there isn't a distinction between publishing information on or off the "Internet". It is all just communication, some understood to be intermediated and some not, some intended to be public and some intended to be (but not always kept) private.
Interesting. You and I must be at two entirely polar, yet still perfectly functional, extremes. Respect.
You're very right. The web's core use is to act as an extension of reality; therefore, the developments we're talking about today must be the effects or affects which could further be developed upon, to be further damaged or bandaged up. But – and this is a pretty important but – the Internet can also be used as a platform to start over from a more damaged life. When that distinction between publishing information comes around, it would be awful if it biased one use of the Internet to another.
May I be curious about how you use the telephone? Is it as an extension of your meat-space life, or as part of your "second life" (or third, or…)? Is there something "special" about the Internet? Is this a text vs audio vs audio/video vs physical presence difference?
When I've pretended to be someone else it was mostly for fictional reasons. As an example, I pretended to be both sides of a feuding couple on my own BBS back in the 80's — to draw in more users (Back in the days of 300 bps modems and AppleII clones).
I'm curious to hear more about how being someone else online would make me (the real person) feel better about my actual life? If it does help, does the feeling last any longer than the escapism of getting emerged in a good book or movie?
You aren't the first person to express this alternate-life idea, and I've been really curious to ask about this for years.
There is no single reason for doing so. A dissent living in a country with an iron-fisted government would need to vent his or her frustrated thoughts, yet he would do so anonymously to not endanger themselves. An artist or author would use an art name or pen name to publish and sell poems/novels while still being able to live the life that inspires them to create art. A small child or teenager who has been the target of bullies in school would adopt a distaff identity online in order to avoid being the target of cyberbullying until they graduate from school or the weather clears (the tormentors have it easy these days; the intended target could be a Google search away). Various situations like these can prompt an alternate-life scenario, each of them satisfactory to different ends yet still the same in method.
Usually this is just a temporary measure. I've known some who change online handles once every three years. I don't think anyone intends it to be a long-term thing, but it can certainly evolve into one. Sometimes there is a sort of Robertson Davies' Fifth Business-esque plot development, but I can't attest to how often they are. It isn't a matter of escapism – underneath, one is still the same person living the same existence, just wearing a different set of clothes every now-and-then.
I hope this clarifies things.
I've been following Danah Boyd for some time now. She has an interesting perspective on privacy. It is good to hear an interview with her. One of the ideas she speaks of, which I agree with, is the problem of persistence. She suggests that no one really considers the issue of persistence and that it is difficult to gauge how serious a problem it is. I would agree with her in this regard. We need to really think about what we are posting online before we post it.
Nora,
Love the show. You made a small idiomatic error that I thought you might want to be aware of: The expression is to "flesh something out" not "flush something out" as mentioned at 23:22 in Spark 105.
To “flesh out” an idea is to give it substance, as a sculptor adds clay flesh to a skeletal armature. To “flush out” a criminal is to drive him or her out into the open. The latter term is derived from bird-hunting, in which one flushes out a covey of quail. If you are trying to develop something further, use “flesh”; but if you are trying to reveal something hitherto concealed, use “flush.” http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/flesh.html
Thanks, Harold and Joel! I must admit, when I first read your comments, I thought 'no way did I say flush something out', but sure enough, when I listened back, I did!