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Links Writing

2013.7.10

jakke said: Actually I don’t agree at all. That’s directly analogous to leveraging (some is a positive externality to credit, too much is a negative externality to risk, the threshold differs depending on whom you’re talking about) and we can regulate that.

The literature that has looked at the economic of privacy over the past decade or two has been absolutely dismal, insofar as efforts to operationalize the ‘value’ of privacy are pervaded with assumptions of rationality, comprehension, ability to enact privacy choices, and so forth. The literature on privacy more generally is still struggling – after 40+ years – to really move beyond squabbling about what ‘privacy’ even means. The consequence is that ascertaining the externalities linked to privacy infringements/violations/concerns/(term of the month) necessarily requires adopting one definition or another.

Unlike more ‘defined’ harms (e.g. X percentage of Y particulate in the water is linked to Z) those linked with privacy have a tendency to be more normative, and harder to measure as a result. Ascertaining what the chilling effect of corporate surveillance, or the consequences of non-transparency in how communications infrastructures subtly modulate discourse and association, is an exercise in theory as much as anything else. Consumers, for lots of good reasons, are poor rational actors in lots of areas, and privacy is argued to be one of those areas.

So the quotation was emergent from a (longer) argument concerning the efficacy of economic analyses of privacy and place such analyses have within the broader dimensions of the contested individual, communal, and intersubjective natures of privacy. It’s on these bases that economic analyses fall short: while they *might* improve the situation, marginally, what is improved will be regarded as perpetuating the harm by some, and being the wrong measure of alleviating harms by other.

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Quotations

2013.7.10

Antitrust law is ill prepared to handle a “market” where some percentage of consumers consider a loss of privacy a gain and others consider it a loss. Economic reasoning in general falters in the face of externalities, but usually we can all agree that, say, pollution is a harm (or negative externality) and flowers are a boon (or positive externality). Privacy preferences are much more idiosyncratic.

Frank Pasquale. (2010). “Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries.“ Northwestern University Law Review 104(1).
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Quotations

2013.7.10

… the cultural, political, and privacy concerns raised by the new business alliances of search engines, social networks, and carriers cannot be translated into traditional economic analysis. They raise questions about the type of society we want to live in–a holistic inquiry that cannot be reduced to the methodological individualism of economics.

Frank Pasquale. (2010). “Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries.” Northwestern University Law Review 104(1).
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Quotations

2013.7.9

Canadian carriers detect over 125 million attacks per hour on Canadians, comprising 80,000 new zero-day exploits identified every day. The vast majority of attacks are undetectable by traditional security software/hardware.

From “The Canadian Cyber Security Situation in 2011”
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Quotations

2013.7.9

We can draw a distinction here between Big Data—the stuff of numbers that thrives on correlations—and Big Narrative—a story-driven, anthropological approach that seeks to explain why things are the way they are. Big Data is cheap where Big Narrative is expensive. Big Data is clean where Big Narrative is messy. Big Data is actionable where Big Narrative is paralyzing.

The promise of Big Data is that it allows us to avoid the pitfalls of Big Narrative. But this is also its greatest cost. With an extremely emotional issue such as terrorism, it’s easy to believe that Big Data can do wonders. But once we move to more pedestrian issues, it becomes obvious that the supertool it’s made out to be is a rather feeble instrument that tackles problems quite unimaginatively and unambitiously. Worse, it prevents us from having many important public debates.

As Band-Aids go, Big Data is excellent. But Band-Aids are useless when the patient needs surgery. In that case, trying to use a Band-Aid may result in amputation. This, at least, is the hunch I drew from Big Data.

Evgeny Morozov, “Connecting the Dots, Missing the Story”
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Quotations

2013.7.8

…PETs are a technological fix to a sociological problem … [they] introduce another dimension of social hierarchy into cyberspace, not one that aggravates the divide between the information rich and poor, but between those with technological savvy to assert their personal preferences and those who do not possess such expertise…An over-emphasis on PETs leaves the surveillance imperatives being designed into information infrastructures unscathed, while fostering particularistic struggles over the uses of technologies.

Dwayne Winseck, “Netscapes of power: convergence, network designed, walled gardens, and other strategies of control in the information age”
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Quotations

2013.7.8

This week, court documents filed by the RCMP pertaining to their investigation of Mr. Duffy were disclosed. They show that the Conservative Party of Canada was initially prepared to use taxpayer-subsidized party funds to repay the debt that Mr. Duffy owed because of improperly claimed Senate expenses. It balked, however, when it learned that the amount was $90,000, not $32,000.

The Conservative government of Canada: tough on crime over $32,000; anything above $32,000, you’re on your own – or not, since the documents confirm that Stephen Harper’s then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, did, as reported, step in and give Mr. Duffy a personal cheque for $90,000.

Tabitha Southey, “Duffy the empire slayer: How the PMO created a big, big problem”
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Quotations

2013.7.8

Like a giant python that has consumed a rat, Facebook captures, swallows, and slowly digests its users.

Ron Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
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Quotations

2013.7.7

In this light, the selfie isn’t about empowerment. But it also isn’t not about empowerment. Empowerment, or lack thereof, is not part of the picture. Neither is narcissism, as either a personal or a cultural moral failure. And the selfie isn’t about the male gaze. The selfie, in the end is about the gendered labour of young girls under capitalism. Do we honestly think that by ceasing to take and post selfies, the bodies of young women would cease to be spectacles? Teenage girls are Young-Girls, are spectacles, are narcissists, are consumers because those are the very criterion which must be met to be a young woman and also a part of society. That their bodies are commodities enters them into economies of attention, and that is where the disgust with selfies comes from. In an economy of attention, it is a disaster for men that girls take up physical space and document it, and that this documentation takes up page hits and retweets that could go to ‘more important’ things. And so the Young-Girl must be punished, with a disgust reserved for the purely trivial. To paraphrase that beloved of Young-Girl films, Ever After — itself paraphrasing Thomas More’s Utopia — what are we to make of the selfie but that we first create teenage girls and then punish them?

Sarah Gram, “The Young-Girl and the Selfie”
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Aside

Nature: it can happen to you, too