My main concern for efforts like this is that they not start from the position that the Internet is by nature or design normalized to the commercial and government interests that happen (or appear) to be in charge of it at a given point in time.
All the concerns you list are important ones. But we should pose them against the Internet's inherently unprejudiced end-to-end nature, and its disregard for the parochial interests of large commercial entities, including giant search engines, social networks and the carriers of bits.
We would not have the Internet if it had been left up to the phone companies and government policy-makers of the world. Or to the ITU, whose interests are almost entirely those of governments and carriers (and which, as I said in another post, avoid using the term "Internet" at all).
First principles matter. The Internet was not created by or for anybody's self-interest. It was created for making best-effort movement of bits between end points anywhere, without regard for who or what owns the paths between those points. Like the Earth and the Sun, it has no business model, and for that reason supports an infinitude of living beings and activities. It is good for business and government because it doesn't have either. It is a whole new world, and has a nature that is not reducible -- not even to ICANN and other well-meaning .orgs that are doing their best to govern parts of it, and which exist because we can't yet think of a better way to do what needs doing.
Paying mind to transcendent properties is not easy, but it is necessary. The Net is not the Web, and the Web is not just the client-server model. Likewise it is also not Google or Facebook, any more than personal computing was Windows back when Windows was the overwhelmingly popular way to do it.
Saying all this, by the way, risks labeling me a utopian. But here's the thing: With the Internet, we invented a Utopia. All we can do is screw it up. Your job with this project, as I see it, is to help keep that from happening, as much as that can be done.
BTW, the policy argument over net neutrality has largely been lost. But neutrality remains a characteristic of the Net's base protocols, still. And that's what matters most. Because the fight against those goes on.
Doc
On Oct 13, 2011, at 3:02 AM,
wrote:
Hi Iain,
What we are trying to do in this project is to try and create an open community asset that everybody can go to, to identify and understand 'the digital detriment' as it evolves. The goal is to help identify the biggest detriments before they really take off, to be proactive rather than reactive. It probably won't even be hosted on the Consumer Focus website. They are simply doing the initial work to get it up and running.
Some interesting candidates so far include:
- search-dependency. Google claims to organise the world's information. It does not and cannot. It can only organise the information that people want made public (i.e. searchable). Google is therefore helping to create a two tier information environment: an easily searchable environment which gives the appearance of openness and comprehensiveness, but one which helps to hide a much bigger 'dark' layer of information that has been kept deliberately unsearchable. (This is no different to keeping files secret in an office - but the influence on actual behaviours is different because we as individuals have become so search dependent. For example, how many journalists now equate 'research' with 'googling'? This can be the opposite of real investigation.).
- ubiquitous face recognition as per Facebook's new initiatives- what are the implications?
- what are the potential downsides of online reputation systems e.g. gaming the system, 'rehabilitation of offenders' (e.g. how do you clear a name once a person has improved their behaviour?), gossip and bullying etc.
- in an age of crowd-sourcing are experts redundant now? Or is 'democratic' anti-expert sentiment just naive folly? Would you like your heart surgery to be crowd-sourced? Where is the line to be drawn between the two types of knowledge?
- de-averaging. Many business models are based on cross- subsidisation. For example, people who pay off their credit card bills promptly, every month, get a very expensive service free - paid for at the expense of people with high outstanding balances and late payments. The more businesses use data to understand the profitability of each individual customer, the more they can discriminate - to the point of 'sacking' unprofitable customers. Is this fair? What about the case of insurers refusing to insure individuals with a certain DNA profile? You could argue that this is an outrage. But why should one customer subsidise another?
- the whole issue of personal identity management, including the distinctions between genuinely anonymous, anonymised, pseudonymous, and so on. There are multiple pitfalls in the details of these systems - for example, inference attacks on pseudonymised data (using patterns in non-personally identifiable information to identify the person). What are the biggest pitfalls here? How can they be avoided?
- geolocation data. What are the hidden pitfalls and unintended consequences of the capture, analysis and sharing of geo-location. Remember the website 'Please rob me?' How best to address these issues?
- who controls the internet. If you read Tim Wu's book The Master Switch, you can see how easily the Internet could become a new monopoly/cartel like AT&T or NBC. For example, if we lost the argument about net neutrality, new controls over who has access to information, when, could be introduced via a pricing mechanism, via the back door.
This seems like a good idea to me.
So, any thoughts?
Alan
-----Original Message-----
From: Iain Henderson
< >
To: asmitchell
< >
CC: jernst < >; projectvrm < >
Sent: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:46
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] The digitial detriment
Alan, I think the key issues here will be:
- who can write to/ edit the wiki; i.e. is it a Consumer Focus silo (like the product recall and marketing opt out ones), or more of a community asset.
- to what extent can it's content be re-used in web applications.
Iain
On 11 Oct 2011, at 08:40,
wrote:
No it hasn't been set up yet. The UK body Consumer Focus wants to host it. I'm trawling for an initial set of issues to 'seed' it.
A
-----Original Message-----
From: Johannes Ernst
< >
To: asmitchell < >; projectvrm < >
Sent: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 0:53
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] The digitial detriment
A wiki on this subject is an interesting idea. I can imagine that a number of people on this list and others would contribute ... has it been set up yet?
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 7:57 AM,
< >
wrote:
This is a request for some crowd-sourcing help from the VRM community (with blessings from Doc and the Project VRM Steering ctte)
I’m working on a project for a UK Government consumer protection agency Consumer Focus to conduct a 'horizon scanning' exercise looking at all the possible ways that the emerging digital landscape could work against consumers rather than for them.
The idea is to initiate a constantly-updated wiki that serves as a resource identifying key threats, assessing their importance/ likelihood and what's being done or could be done to prevent or fend them off.
Examples of digital detriments could include personal data landgrabs by the likes of Google or Facebook, unintended consequences from the capture of geolocation or other forms of data, us all living in our own 'filter bubbles' etc.
Have you got any suggestions as to what should go into this list?
Thanks!
Alan Mitchell
PS You can see more details of the project here.
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