PRIVACY THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Chris Marsden, Oxford 21 May 2014

QUINN NORTON: EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

“Facebook and Google seem very powerful, but they live about a

week from total ruin all the time. They know the cost of leaving social

networks individually is high, but en masse, becomes next to nothing.

Windows could be replaced with something better written. The US

government would fall to a general revolt in a matter of days.

It wouldn’t take a total defection or a general revolt to change

everything, because corporations and governments would rather bend

to demands than die. These entities do everything they can get away

with — but we’ve forgotten that we’re the ones that are letting them

get away with things.”• https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1

REGULATING PRIVACY

Much of what I am going to say is taken from

my book with Oxford’s Ian Brown: (2013)

Regulating Code, MIT Press

See Ian Brown (2012) Privacy attitudes,

incentives and behaviours • https://www.slideshare.net/blogzilla/privacy-

attitudes-incentives-and-behaviours"

IS PRIVACY A RICH MAN’S FOLLY?

Did privacy not exist in primitive villages?

Is privacy a feature of shame?

Is the walled garden the physical

manifestation of privacy?

Is privacy an Oriental construct based on

patriarchy?

PRIVACY IN PRE-DIGITAL TIMES

BUT PRIVAC Y HAS W ESTERN ENLIGHTENMENT HIST ORY

Not least through its inverse:

the Panopticon

Bentham claimed privacy

was surrendered by illegality

ENTICK V. CARRINGTON KBD 1765

Every American law student learns this in the first

week:

Lord Camden: ‘We can safely say there is no law in

this country to justify the [police] in what they have

done;

if there was, it would destroy all the comforts of

society,

for papers are often the dearest property any man

can have.’

Still referred to in US privacy cases

PRIVACY V. FREEDOM 1773

“Benjamin Franklin colonial Postmaster GeneralLeaked letters by Massachusetts Lt. Governor Thomas Hutchinson to Thomas Whatley, Prime Minister’s assistantFor colonists to enjoy the same rights as English subjects “an abridgement of what are called English liberties” might be temporarily necessary.Franklin dismissed & censured by Solicitor General

WE HAVE MODERN EQUIVALENTS

W E A R E A L L N O W F O O T B A L L H O O L I G A N S, M E M B E R S O F D E V I A N T T R I B E S

VICTORIAN INTERNET AND

EDWARDIAN SNOWDEN?

TELEGRAPH AS VICTORIAN INTERNET

“The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!” - Noam Chomsky “The American father is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher” – Oscar Wilde

THERE BE PIRATES!

‘Golden (sic) Age[s] of Piracy’ • Francis Drake to Daniel Defoe –

1580s/1720sNastiest age was post-Napoleonic Wars

• Industrial piracy in Atlantic/MediterraneanSupressed by British Naval power

• Serving Abolition of Slavery Act 1807Secured trade routes

• India, West Indies, Cape Colony, Australia, Hong Kong

SOCIAL NETWORKING & PIRATES

We used to call our

undergrads the ‘Napster

generation’

36,000,000 broadband in

2000

Precursor to

YouTube/Facebook/

MySpace/Torrent label

ZEMBLANITY AND EMPIRE

Global digital communications: the telegraph

ZEMBLANITY?• Opposite of paradisiacal Serendib - a barren, icebound,

northern land: Nova Zembla, nuclear testing archipelago

• Latinisation of the Russian novaya zemlya, which means

‘new land’.

SERENDIPITY’S ANTONYM: ZEMBLANITY BOYD (1998)

ARMADILLO

Making unhappy, unlucky and expected

discoveries by designIncompatible but essential indispensable part of serendipity?

• “So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla.”

• discussed in Hertnon From Afterwit to Zemblanity: 100 Endangered Words

PRISM? NOTHING TO SEE HERE?

NSA/GCHQ WAR ON ENCRYPTION

#EdgeHill #Bullrun (Generals with memories of

US Civil War) & #Cheesy Name (no memory at all)

NSA $250 million per year buys:

1. Tampering with national standards (NIST) 1. to promote weak, or otherwise vulnerable

cryptography.

2. Influencing standards committees to weaken

protocols.

3. Working with hardware and software vendors 1. weaken encryption and random number generators.

5 MORE TECHNIQUES

1. Attacking encryption used by 4G phones'

2. Obtaining cleartext access to 'a major internet peer-to-

peer voice and text communications system' (Skype)

3. Identifying and cracking vulnerable keys (CheesyName).

4. Human Intelligence division to infiltrate the global

telecommunications industry – essentially bribing

employees

5. Decrypting HTTPS/SSL connections 1. Yahoo, Google, Hotmail/Outlook

OR….

SURVEILLANCE EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO SOCIAL

NETWORKS?

Not so much…ironically required by https

encryption default

Who do they target? Those using encryption esp.

TOR

‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to

fear’

‘Metadata isn’t real data’

Be quiet, peasants!

BOUNDLESS SURVEILLANCE

SO WE ARE SILK WORMS

COCOONS BOILED & EMPTIED

Personal data is NOT metaphorical oil in digital economy

• unless bodies have seeped into the sediment. Personal data accumulate with our treks into cyberspace

Better metaphor is silk, • woven into tapestry of online personality.

Potential to move beyond a caterpillar-like role as a producer of raw silk Ability to regenerate into a butterfly or moth?

SILKWORMS THAT TURNED

Weaving of a web by billions of prosumer-created sites. Silk created tapestries Wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace Arguably loss of ownership led MySpace decline. Prosumer boycott led by those preferring control of own data

• cocooned in their own personal form: chrysalis or pupae

Such boycotts rapidly create a landscape of zombie users: • ancient Hotmail and MySpace accounts that are undead,

unchecked, unmourned, useless to advertisers, and • antithetical to positive network effects that feed a successful

business.

CONCLUSION: MORE PRIVACY REGULATION

Widespread move towards regulation of social networking

• Including in US – Federal Trade CommissionEuropean Court cases – both data retention and deletionEuropean Parliament pressure on PRISM post-SnowdenNational regulator decisions on cloud, Streetview and othersEuropean Data Protection Supervisor pressure on merger cases – competition law – conference 2 JuneNew European Data Protection Regulation – first since 1995

• See http://internetsussex.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/towards-web-30-impact-of-google-spain.html

THE $100BILLION RESEARCH QUESTION

Why do social networks decline? MySpace/Bebo/Orkut/Friends

Reunited

Is the visceral nature of offline social networking responsible for

success online • dating sites approximate strong human contact better: Grindr, Tindr

– Twitter?

or bad coding, European data protection and a more aspirational

demographic • Facebook v. MySpace/Bebo

But ASmallWorld was Eurotrash Facebook and failed?• Weinstein’s brush with social networking and its failure:

http://gawker.com/5381040/harvey-weinstein-finally-sells-myspace-for-millionaires

MORE INFORMATION

@ChrisTMarsden

www.regulatingcode.blogspot.com

http://internetsussex.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.internet-science.eu/