Uncertain Scrutiny in Google WiFi Spying Investigations

In the wake of the release of an FCC report concluding a seventeen month investigation of alleged spying conducted by Google on unsecured wireless networks nationwide, the company may face additional scrutiny from Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which originally investigated and came to an agreement with Google in 2010.

Between 2007 and 2010 Google used its street view car to collect 600 Gigabytes of payload data along with the street-level images that the car is intended to generate.  This data included e-mail correspondence, text messages, passwords, and web histories.  Despite this, the ICO concluded that the data was free of any “meaningful personal details,” and took no official action, though Google did agree to allow the ICO to audit its privacy practices in the future.

One such audit was published last August and will be reviewed sometime this year to make sure their recommendations are being followed.  The results may affect the ICO’s decision on whether to take further action, which is an open question considering that around the time of that audit, the Information Commissioner decided that contrary to the absence of actual charges, Google had in fact broken the law.  The ICO’s inaction and handling of the investigation have also faced some criticism in British Parliament, so there may be some pressure to act more aggressively now that the FCC report has the ICO reconsidering the case.

The FCC has not, however, stated that Google is to face prosecution or even that it broke the law.  Google has maintained that while the wireless information gathering did indeed occur, it was attributable to one engineer who wrote the relevant code and installed it in street view cars, but did so without the knowledge or consent of the street view team or the company at large.  The FCC report casts doubt on this claim, finding that other engineers reviewed and modified the code, and several more installed it in cars and extracted the data it collected.  One senior manager of the street view project was purportedly informed of the intention to collect payload data.

Yet no litigation is forthcoming in the United States, presumably because the FCC report also points out that even if Google was aware of the data collection, and even if they had ordered it, harvesting masses of data from unsecured networks may not be illegal at all, as per the Wiretap Act, which grants that anyone may access any communication that’s configured so as to be publicly accessible.  Consequently, the only definite trouble faced by Google with the FCC has been a very modest fine of 25,000 dollars for impeding the investigation by failing to respond to repeated requests for information.

That in itself casts some measure of suspicion on Google, even if it doesn’t present any further legal problems.  Their claim that they never intended to use the payload data is automatically suspect in light of the fact that Google seems eager to collect all manner of personal data in other contexts, and to use it to target advertisements and content more effectively and more manipulatively.

I stopped using Google as a search engine and news aggregator when I discovered the extent to which content was modified from one user to the next, even in web searches for quite basic terms.  Google evidently uses fifty-seven different factors, including your location, operating system, and browser, to personally tailor search results to the individual user.  This is particularly objectionable when one is searching for current news, which ought to be presented objectively, and with a universal sense of importance, not personally structured to align with each individual’s likeliest consumption patterns.

The accompanying invasions of privacy, and particularly the ways in which they are used, are socially poisonous trends, even if they are not illegal.  But being as they are not illegal, governments cannot be relied on to do much of anything to counter that trend.  Little has been done in the United States, the case in Britain is shaky, and Australia has decided against investigating the same issue.

But in each of those places, the citizenry still can take it upon itself to use against Google that very thing that they are so fixated on: consumption patterns.  I fear that the reason why privacy invasions of this kind have become so endemic is not that entities like Google have been so prone to engage in them but that we as a society have been so prone to accept them.  When we can demonstrate that the new convenience we enjoy is not worth what we trade away for it, then perhaps the rampant misuse of information will be avoided more often, even if it isn’t technically criminal.

The Tragedy of the Modern Library

I try to listen to A Prairie Home Companion each Saturday evening, in large part because, despite being politically and socially liberal, I am personally quite conservative and prone to nostalgia and wistfulness for a purer experience of things that it seems I was denied by the unrelenting progress of history. This week’s broadcast featured an episode in the adventures of Ruth Harrison, reference librarian, a character who is rather similar in that regard. She is educated, non-combative, socially permissive, but often silently critical of people’s tastes and a widespread loss of noble ideals.

In this latest episode she editorialized for a moment in conversation with her twenty-eight year-old intern, Trent (not the other one, Brent, who is thirty-seven) after he had helped a patron find a thriller that showcased truly heinous crimes. Miss Harrison, voiced by the highly talented Sue Scott, commented: “In library school we were taught that the role of the library is to educate, to uplift, not to cater to every whim.” I didn’t even go to library school, but I have always had the same image of libraries.

On hearing that line of dialogue, I thought of the last couple of trips I have taken to the Central Library in the City of Buffalo. It has come a long way from the libraries that were so domestically familiar to me throughout elementary and high school. These days, when you walk around a library, you find that the stacks are deserted but that a sea of people stretches throughout the computer banks. On an occasion when I lost my internet connection, I had to carry my laptop to the library in order to borrow its wireless connection for a day. Doing so made me feel sort of cheap and disloyal, and it also gave me an opportunity to occasionally observe the behavior of the other patrons, which in turn made me feel worse.

I noticed a middle aged couple sharing a long game of solitaire on one computer. Elsewhere, a man about my age was watching Youtube. My eyes have passed over various computer screens each time I’ve been back there, and I find that these are extremely commonplace activities. Many different kinds of games are played in the Buffalo library – first-person shooters, adventure games, bejeweled and similar puzzles. A significant portion of the library patronage these days, perhaps the majority, is evidently poor people who have no access to such entertainment at home and utilize the library for the idle passage of time instead.

Oh, to be poor but also have such free time or the means of transportation to frequent the region’s most expansive library! I understand not reading because you simply don’t have the time amidst your exhausting and low-paying work, and I understand having little access to either books or technology, particularly in a town where everything is so spread-out. But here the people I’ve seen at the library have the opportunity to beautifully enrich their lives with the information and artistry that surrounds them in a variety of media, and they choose to play dull games. It is a tragedy that libraries are used this way, that they are little more than the low-rent internet cafes and LAN parties of the twenty-first century.

Even if people ventured away from the computers, I find that the most prominently featured books aren’t all that much better. I want to believe that there are a few librarians who work in that building and react to the public much as does Ruth Harrison, diligently pointing them towards the popular fiction with easily digestible plots and few themes, then lamenting that she could have recommended Hemmingway or Faulkner. I’ve found that those sorts of lamentations often meet with comments along the lines of, “Hey, anything that gets kids reading.” That’s not the least bit persuasive to me. The mere act of allowing one’s brain to process typewritten words doesn’t in and of itself make for a richer intellectual experience than other alternatives. Is a child really better off reading Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown than watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on DVD or listening closely to a Brahms symphony?

The sentiment of “as long as they’re reading” speaks to what I think is the underlying misconception that drives the degradation of libraries and of collective appreciation of art and literature. It also speaks to the difficulty that we face in reversing the trend. I resent what libraries have become, but I see no way of changing them back into grand temples of information and culture. In order to draw in the public and avoid closure, they have to provide the type of access that people want. And as a matter of principle, anything that qualifies as information or culture should have a place there, regardless of its intrinsic quality. So it’s not as if there is any cause for libraries to restrict people from being able to use them in such frivolous ways. But so long as easy escapism can be found there, the public will surely continue to gravitate toward it.

We need a collective breaking point to overturn the misconception, which drives both trends, that a greater quantity of information is effectively the same as a greater quality. I’m inclined to think that libraries think they are providing an adequate public service and that the public thinks it is adequately utilizing that service simply because, between the books and the high-speed internet, there’s a lot of information that’s directly accessible to the entire public. It doesn’t seem to matter how it’s utilized. But the danger to libraries is the danger to all of society – that as everything comes to be more and more at our fingertips, we will grow increasingly complacent about it and let the petty distractions dominate our attention. Since everything else is still there, such allowances seem to come at the expense of nothing, but in fact they come at the expense of our very minds.

Twitter Breaks News First, Often Makes It Up

Mediabistro led its newsfeed today with praise for a Twitter user who broke the story of Whitney Houston’s death an hour before the Associated Press did. The story began:

Twitter has long-established itself as the ‘go to’ place for breaking news, and this has never been so clearly demonstrated following the sad passing of music superstar Whitney Houston on Saturday.

Other celebrities whose sad passing I recall Twitter been the first to mention include Cher and Zach Braff, both of whom are still very much alive. If Twitter is anyone’s go-to place for news about anything, they are courting rampant misinformation. A network on which any user can post any claim they want is not a news service, it’s a rumor mill.

That is exactly the way Twitter functioned in the case of Whitney Houston’s death. The tweet that “broke the story” was from user @BarBeeBritt, and said only, “Is Whitney Houston really dead?” News reports, by their very nature, do not take the form of questions. There isn’t supposed to be any uncertainty about the essential facts of the story; it’s only news if you’ve confirmed the story with a reliable source and you’re certain that you’re not playing an inadvertent hoax on the public.

If CNN functioned as Twitter does, an anchor would come back from commercial break, look squarely into the camera and say, “We think Katy Perry might have been crushed by an anvil this morning. If anyone knows anything about this, please send us an e-mail.” If that ever happened, or the New York Times ever ran a story along the lines of “Australian Possibly Engulfed by Giant Fireball: Will Confirm/Deny for Tomorrow’s Edition,” I hope that a mob of angry, truth loving citizens would grab torches and clubs and destroy the infrastructure of the organization. Then, when all the media goes that way, we can just rely on a nationwide game of telephone to disseminate every fact-like piece of possibly-information.

Yeah, Twitter was the first to mention the story of Whitney Houston’s death, but speed cannot possibly be the only criterion we have for what constitutes the go-to source for breaking news. There’s got to be a place for reliability. Thirteen minutes after @ BarBeeBritt’s tweet, user @AjaDiorNavy tweeted, exactly thus: “omgg , my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in tub . such ashame & sad :-( “

That actually counts as information, but the trouble is that there’s no way of knowing that at the moment that it’s tweeted. On Twitter, anyone could have said that about any celebrity just to get attention or cause a stir, and many have. I expect that when someone sees mention of a significant event on Twitter, his first impulse is to turn on the television or check a professional news website. And if a person doesn’t do that, but just takes whatever has been tweeted at face value, he is disturbingly naïve and gullible.

The old saying applies about a stopped clock being right twice a day. But also, a stopped clock will tell you it’s eleven o’clock long before it actually is. It’s easy to be the first on a story; it’s not so easy to get it right. I’d rather wait a little while for news that is relevant, accurate, and thorough, and I’m much more likely to focus my attention on the media outlet that misinforms me least often, rather than on the one that informs or misinforms me most quickly.

It was forty-two minutes after the tweet by @AjaDiorNavy that the Associated Press used Twitter to break the story by indicating that the news of Houston’s death came from her publicist Kristen Foster. Forty-two minutes past hearsay and fifty-five minutes past the intimation of rumor. I know that the world moves fast these days, but is one hour really too long to wait for information that’s been vetted by an organization whose very purpose is to provide the public with news? Is there no lower limit breaking point at which the rapid speed of the news cycle is no longer worth its resulting unreliability? Personally, I think we should have hit that point long before anybody had the gall to describe Twitter as the go-to source for anything other than rumor and idle chatter.

Blackout

It’s good to know that even the chief executive of Twitter uses Twitter to say stupid things.

Fortunately, the mass of public support for the internet blackout in opposition to SOPA built until Wikipedia’s awareness of it hit a breaking point and Jimmy Wales saw fit to make the internet’s massive user-generated encyclopedia the largest participant in the protest. Unfortunately, in response to efforts to goad Twitter into joining as well, Dick Costolo said via tweet: “That’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

Well maybe, Dick, but not in this case since closing a global business demonstrates exactly what the outcome would be of letting that single-issue go uncontested. It’s not like this is just some eccentric webmaster’s pet cause. The SOPA legislation, if it were allowed to pass, would threaten the very existence of innumerably many sites on the internet. Its overbroad language makes Wikipedia potentially culpable if people ever fail to attribute quoted sources in articles, and threatens to punish Twitter for facilitating piracy if anyone tweets a link to a bit torrent, or the Pirate Bay, or an embedded video of copyrighted material.

The punishment for either site on the SOPA model could be that an entertainment company files a complaint prompting the domain owner to pull the entire site off the web practically immediately. That would look an awful lot like a blackout, except one that wouldn’t end without a great deal of legal wrangling, much less after twenty-four hours. That’s a consequence that people ought to be confronted with directly. The blackout that begins tonight is not just an impotent protest designed to outrage and inconvenience internet addicts. It addresses a single issue, but the single issue is not SOPA, but rather the witch-hunt mentality that threatens to dominate anti-piracy activism and legislation.

As long as that mentality persists, the very existence of such global businesses as Twitter and Wikipedia is in danger. To not clearly and unequivocally address that particular single-issue is foolish, and so is Dick Costolo himself for dismissing out of hand that bit of national politics that is most important to his company and to the landscape of the internet in which his business operates.

Life, Googled

I saw a television advertisement for Google yesterday. Not for any particular service offered by Google, just for the Google brand as a whole. I find it kind of strange that a powerful company with virtually no competition for its major services would run advertisements in the popular media simply promoting its own name. But I suppose it’s aimed not at encouraging people to use Google, but at encouraging them to use Google for everything. I’m taking the fact that they’ve seen fit to run the ad as a good sign that Google does still have competition and people are not yet flocking to it for all their worldly desires.

Yet the style and content of the ad does give the impression that that’s precisely what they are promoting. It consists of a lengthy montage of web searches, e-mail messages, videos, status updates, and so forth, and clearly the main idea is that every facet of life can be served by a Google application. It’s a familiar style of advertising – one that tries to saturate the viewer with beautiful or inspiring imagery to make them desire a more intimate connection with the world being depicted on the screen. And the consumer is meant to come away from it thinking that the given brand will help them to obtain that closeness.

I have two pieces of commentary to bring to bear on Google’s application of this advertising style. One observation is general to the commercial, and one is specific to a brief part of it that I find objectionable.

My general criticism is that the advertisement as a whole falls flat in its effort to inspire me with a barrage of imagery, drawn from disparate corners of human experience. It’s a type of content that I’ve considered effective elsewhere, for instance in the 2008-9 Discovery Channel “I Love the World” campaign. There’s a straightforward reason why I consider the Google ad to fail where that one succeeded. Google’s montage presents every scene as being two steps removed, rather than just one.

The images included in its montage are fairly familiar, on the whole. They are simply of people talking, or of significant but commonplace daily events like a child’s first bike ride. These things are perfectly accessible without a technological medium, and yet when I see them on the television screen, it is perfectly clear that they are being channeled through something external to both me and the person being depicted. Where the visual is of a Google+ chat session or the like, I find myself looking at a screen upon a screen, and that leaves me quite far from the reality of another person’s life. And where the scene is not affixed to a separate little box, it is a poor quality image, shaking as someone films the event on a handheld video camera.

The Discovery Channel ad was similar in basic intent to the Google ad, in that it was offering a mode of access to other events, experiences, and parts of the world through an intermediary, whether television media or computers. But two things differentiated the Discovery Channel visuals: They were professionally produced and they depicted experiences that were clearly remote and uncommon. Thus, I enjoyed crisp, almost lifelike views of African tribal ceremonies, and skydiving, and undersea exploration, and I got the impression that the Discovery Channel was capable of bringing me closer to things that I could not easily or quickly access on my own.

By contrast, the Google ad reminds me that the use of some of their services might actually put additional barriers between me and the people or circumstances I wish to access. And if what I’m trying to access is just people roughly like me and experiences similar to those that I’ve had, I can step out my front door and gain access to something of the same kind without Google’s help. And personally, I think I would be better off doing so in many cases. As so often happens, I worry that I’m practically alone in that thinking. I worry that most Americans have eschewed any breaking point on this subject, and that they think it’s actually preferable to use a technological middle man for everything they used to do for themselves.

That brings me to my particular gripe with the scenes depicted in the Google ad. At one point it shows someone Googling the phrase, “How to be a better dad.” Have we really come to a point where we think that even that is the sort of question that Google can resolve for us. I know some people think that widespread access to the internet means it’s no longer necessary to memorize any factual information whatsoever. Are we now at the point that retaining ethereal information, standards of personal behavior, and methods of character development are also considered obsolete?

There are some things that you don’t Google. I don’t care how sophisticated their algorithm becomes; no information that can be posted to the web takes the place of experience, practice, and acquired wisdom. Anyone who would Google the phrase “How to be a better dad” has no business being a dad. After all, he seems to be under the shockingly erroneous impression that effective parenthood is easy, and that the problem of child-rearing can be resolved with the click of a mouse, as opposed to, say, rigorous study and earnest commitment.

It troubles me to think that Google is encouraging people to lean on their brand to resolve fundamental human questions for them. Just so that I can beat them to the punch, I would like to recommend against Googling the following phrases, in case their next ad suggests that a web search will provide the answer to any of them:

“How to live my life.”

“How to believe in the one true faith.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Should I commit suicide?”

“Do I have a soul?”

“What is justice, Polemarchus?”

If at any time you have Googled one or more of these phrases, go outside and talk to somebody.