In Privacy Is Dead – Long Live Surveillance Symmetry, Jakob Eriksson describes an interesting view on our current landscape of increasingly changing privacy expectations. His main point: We would not be as concerned about losing our privacy, if those spying on us lost it equally.

If we weren’t so careful about hiding our differences from each other, we’d come to realize that not fitting the standard stereotype is the real norm. If you’re not an alcoholic, a neat freak, in debt to your ears, battling hair loss, having an affair with the neighbor’s wife, or something equally shocking, then something is probably wrong with you, not with the rest of us. I believe technology will force this societal change to happen, but even if it didn’t, it really is time we all grew up and came out of our respective closets.

In a recent tragedy, a college student committed suicide after a revealing video was posted online. My hypothesis is that the problem wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong in the video or even anything particularly unusual or shameful. Fundamentally, this was a problem of information asymmetry. While the rest of the world could all see him in his most private moment, this insecure young fellow couldn’t see them in theirs, and it was too much to bear.

It is an interesting thought. I also do not think that this could be a complete answer.

Would travelers at airports be more accepting of being examined with backscatter x-ray machines, if they could also view images of security personnel that were produced by those machines, when that staff was examined?

Would we be understanding, if our neighbors positioned motion-activated cameras to capture the activities in our home, if we did the same to them?

Many, many more examples can be imagined. Like so often, I think the answer here is: It depends. What is acceptable for one person in one context will not be for a different person or in a different context.

Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old. That doesn’t imply that the 10-year-old technologies we might draw from are mature or that we understand their implications; rather, just the basic concept is known, or knowable to those who care to look.
Here’s the message to be heeded: Innovation is not about alchemy. In fact, innovation is not about invention. An idea may well start with an invention, but the bulk of the work and creativity is in that idea’s augmentation and refinement. The newer the idea, the coarser the granularity of most analysis, and the more likely people are to say, “oh, that’s just like X” or “that’s been done before,” without any appreciation for how much work and innovation is involved in taking an idea from concept to wide practice.

Those things do not just happen. It is work and success is a process. An enjoyable book on the subject is Scott Berkun‘s Myths of Innovation. Here is a video lecture of him discussing innovation, creative thinking and ideas presented in the book:

We all like stories. Innovation stories that focus on moments of epiphany can give the impression that it is that moment that is important – rather than the perhaps long time of preparation that led to the moment.

The aforementioned essay presents an interesting perspective. Two sections particularly stood out for me.

Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. “Our culture is afflicted with knowingness,” he says. “We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that’s great on many levels. But we’re forgetting the pleasures of not knowing. I’m no Luddite, but we’ve started replacing actual experience with someone else’s already digested knowledge.”

Having more information available is generally preferable to having less. We are in trouble though, if a large amount of information creates, what perhaps amounts to an illusion of knowledge, particularly if that cuts short our own quest for discovery.

Modern search engines as well as large amount of meta information in form of reviews, opinions, etc. provide extremely convenient sources of data and real shortcuts in knowledge acquisition. It is good to learn from other people’s experiences. That however, does not need to be the end. Sometimes, quick answers are more than sufficient, but other times there are real opportunities for deeper inquiry, to “figure it out for oneself.”

There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Diminish that aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective. Do I really think Blue Bottle coffee is that great? Or Blazing Saddles that funny? Do I really not like that pizza place because it isn’t authentic New York-style? Sure, it’s entirely possible to arrive at one’s own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it’s also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own.

Knowledge can both empower and constrain. Both is important, but in this discussion that second aspect may be the more interesting one. Every bit of information that we consume about a topic will inform and build our perspective and opinion of it. We will become biased, perhaps in subtle ways, but often quickly. It is important to consider the artificial, mental boundaries that we will build, based on the information available to us.

Like many good quotes, the following is commonly attributed to Mark Twain.

They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!

This can be interpreted more broadly and I think it comes down to the following. Introspection to determine our own biases in a given situation can be an instructive exercise. Sometimes it is a very good thing to ignore or place a lower emphasis on certain pieces of knowledge. Sometimes, one has to dive in deep and experience discovery not because but in spite of any other information that others provided.

Netflix’s streaming selection is large, but there are lots of titles that they only provide as DVD rentals. Earlier this year, I purchased an Apple TV. Among other things it offers the convenience to rent or purchase a movie and then just start watching it, streamed over the Internet. Even though this accrues a (relatively) small extra expense, getting the movie virtually immediately over Apple TV is much more convenient than waiting for a DVD in the mail.

That part is obvious, here is what is perhaps more interesting.

In How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More, Dan Ariely discusses Netflix, among other companies. He explores the question of why Netflix users ended up renting fewer DVDs. The short answer: We are bad a predicting our own, future preferences.

There’s a beautiful paper by Daniel Read and two coauthors showing the gap between what people want to do in principle and what they want to do right now. They asked subjects to choose several films from a list containing a mix of highbrow titles (e.g., Schindler’s List) and lowbrow titles (e.g., My Cousin Vinny). When asked which film they wanted to watch a few days later, most picked a highbrow one. But when asked which they wanted to watch right now, most went lowbrow. In principle, we want to be the kind of people who watch serious movies, maybe even French ones—just not tonight! And so our queue becomes aspirational, filled with titles that are more ambitious than the ones we really want to watch.

The aforementioned paper goes by the title Mixing Virtue and Vice: Combining the Immediacy Effect and the Diversification Heuristic [PDF] and describes the study and the authors’ findings in more detail. It is absolutely worth reading.

I’m guessing there is more to it than just the pleasure/aspiration tradeoff. However, thinking about this a bit more I realize the following. Both my DVD queue and my Instant Queue contain well over 50 items. Whenever I do decide to watch a video these days, that movie is almost never in either queue though. I simply go with whatever I find most appealing at the time. I would like to think that low-brow entertainment is not generally winning over the high-brow variety, but I also have no evidence to prove that.

At times, it does seem as though my adding a movie to a queue can almost make it less likely for me to actually watch it.

Technology Review highlights the movement in The Measured Life, including a feature article of the same title in the magazine’s August print edition. Quantified Self looks like a good blog to follow to keep up with developments in the area. There are also numerous Meetup groups as well as a conference.

Gary Wolf, who wrote about self tracking in Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365 and The Data-Driven Life also gave the following Ted talk:

From the video:

I would like to tell you that it’s also for self-knowledge. The self isn’t the only thing, it’s not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.

I think, people generally like data. The ability to collect and subsequently analyze and view the data, can lead to powerful feedback loops that can help us make better, more informed decisions about how we live.

We will be hearing a lot more about this.

All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

All three perspectives make an important contribution to the thinking around this and none of them should be ignored. I think this is particularly true, because there really is no turning around anymore: Having introduced new knowledge and technology, once a massive progress has been put into motion, it is not going to be simply undone.

I am counting myself in the Never-Betters camp, for the most part. The above article is an excellent contribution to the discourse though. I am looking forward to learning more, particularly about the Ever-Wasers perspective that emphasizes that similar debates (and struggles) occurred at other times in history in comparable manner, when significant changes were introduced.

In addition to the ease of using and developing visualization on the Web, visualizations on the Web can also be easily modified, updated, customized, and recreated by other users thanks to the use of Uniform Resource Identifiers. This “linking” of data is a key feature of the new vision that Fox and Hendler outline. It is of particular importance when dealing with what they refer to as “big science” on topics such as climate change that involves data that ranges from distinct fields like biology to geology.

The actual article is titled Changing the Equation on Scientific Data Visualization and its full text is available with free registration here.

I think a significant issue here is that the typical form of presenting a piece of research online is in the form of a document, most likely in PDF, PostScript or LaTeX format. A file like that has several strong advantages: It can be easily printed, emailed or viewed in a document viewer. It is also inherently static though: A PDF file does not integrate well with the dynamic experience of the web.

Compelling visualizations, perhaps allowing readers to experiment with different views, subsets of the data or modifications of it could go some way in bringing life into the presentation. Currently, consumers of those documents are just that: consumers, readers. There is no widespread way for them to interact with the presentation – and other readers.

It would be excellent to see those presentations move from static documents to dynamic experiences. Perhaps a semantic wiki for research papers might take this in the right direction?

It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore security warnings, and are oblivious to certificates errors. We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort.
[...]
Thus we find that most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit tradeoff to users and is rejected. Security advice is a daily burden, applied to the whole population, while an upper bound on the benefit is the harm suffered by the fraction that become victims an- nually. When that fraction is small, designing security advice that is beneficial is very hard. For example, it makes little sense to burden all users with a daily task to spare 0.01% of them a modest annual pain.

In other areas of life we have long ago come up with a way to deal with similar costs. We invented insurance for health, car, property, etc. for what-if scenarios and our policies are typically priced in a way appropriate to our risk profile. I am sure we will see lots of progress in terms of security user education, computer security research – as well as sophistication of attacks.

Could personal insurance policies against cyber attacks also become a realistic, mainstream option?

According to the author, the generative nature of computers and the Internet helped them triumph over early, proprietary networks:

What made the Internet and the programmable personal computer a successful pair was a characteristic none of the alternatives offered: they are generative (J. Zittran, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Yale Univ. Press, 2008).

Generativity refers here to our ability to freely program and modify our computers and produce our own content. Any programmer can appreciate this and the Internet is full of examples where this has led to outlets of creativity to pass spare time (such as lolcats) as well as innovative solutions that would not have been possible before the Internet (such as Wikipedia or Facebook).

We are increasingly seeing devices that are less open in nature. The iPhone is an incredibly successful platform, but its app store and the associated app review process are much more restrictive and have drawn criticism because of it. Other examples of closed computing platforms are known, sometimes their software are modified remotely, sometimes apparently without the product owner’s approval.

The author appears to believe that this might lead to an overall negative change on the Web:

Things could evolve differently, though, due to the possible diffusion of Web 2.0. Its application programs are beginning to migrate from individuals’ computers to centralized webservers. This approach offers great and widely publicized convenience, but there are also great—and not so publicized—risks.
With centralized applications, the user loses control over the software’s evolution, even post facto—that is, even after using it to create data. While we can simply decide not to install the new version of a program if it lacks some useful feature, such a possibility doesn’t exist in the Web 2.0 environment.

It is curious that web 2.0 is being highlighted here. It seems like lots of early, successful websites (such as Amazon.com or eBay in the mid-to-late 90s) had some of those same symptoms without yet having any of the characteristics we have come to associate with web 2.0 in recent years.

The author concludes:

If Web 2.0 and its information guardians have their way, the future may be nothing more than a flashy version of Compuserve or Minitel, despite the allure of all their modern technological bells and whistles. The corporate model that the creative anarchy of the Internet defeated once might then return with permanent vengeance.

Going back to the title, I am confused how exactly the phone would be to be blamed for this. The web is still a very open environment. It has in fact in many ways become easier and cheaper to get server space and computing capacity, develop applications and make them available to the world. Many applications that now have strong user interfaces and also take advantage of features that aren’t easily conceivable without online access are also complex. Depending on the degree of complexity the likelihood of someone else simply building their own is of course decreased.

I think there will always be walled gardens, as well as open playgrounds. There will probably also always be a hacker culture (particularly following Paul Graham‘s definition) and so people will always strive to find smart new uses of systems (open or closed).

And some of those people will continue to look for interesting solutions, because they are intrinsically motivated by the joy of solving an interesting problem. As the author asserted, this kind of spirit drove a lot of the innovation on the net. I don’t think that is going to stop.

I do a significant portion of my shopping on the Internet and I have come to appreciate customer reviews, recommender systems and many other features that have become common at a lot of online stores. I often take information provided by those systems into account when making buying decisions. I have gotten used to those features and – as I realized on that day at the mall – I miss them in their absence.

Usually, I am content to satisfice, but when I am in the store without access to those familiar features, I feel a bit deprived, as if one of my senses were shut off. I like that imagery, too: The idea of an additional sense, based on Internet data is an intriguing one.

The following video shows how MIT’s Sixth Sense may have the potential to act as an additional sense to equip you with the features that you may have gotten used to on the Internet.

I wonder when we will routinely wear devices that integrate cameras, microphones, displays/projectors, etc. and that continuously scan our surroundings and have the ability to feed us data about it back in real time. It could be a version of Sixth Sense using discreet packaging.

Quick access to product reviews, as we look at a book or CD in a store sounds like a useful feature. Maybe sunglasses (and their integrated display) could provide directions as we are walking. It could also display quick stats regarding our surroundings, incl. a warning of nearby danger. The potential for applications seems endless.

In the meantime, I am of course still stuck with unfinished shopping.