Now, where we went on is really towards the discovery that all of this would be even better if you had all the logs of everything because once you have the logs of everything then every simple service is suddenly a goldmine waiting to happen and we blew it because the architecture of the Net put the logs in the wrong place. They put the logs where innocence would be tempted. They put the logs where the failed state of human beings implies eventually bad trouble and we got it.
The cloud means that we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore and because we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore we don’t have extra technical or non-technical means of reliable control over this disaster in slow motion. You can make a rule about logs or data flow or preservation or control or access or disclosure but your laws are human laws and they occupy particular territory and the server is in the cloud and that means the server is always one step ahead of any rule you make or two or three or six or poof! I just realized I’m subject to regulation, I think I’ll move to Oceana now.
Which means that in effect, we lost the ability to use either legal regulation or anything about the physical architecture of the network to interfere with the process of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable in the stage I’m talking about, what we might call late Google stage 1.
It is here, of course, that Mr. Zuckerberg enters.
The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.
Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.
That’s the sad part, it works.
How could that have happened?
There was no architectural reason, really. There was no architectural reason really. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.
And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.
I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.
I’m glad I’m with you so far. When I come to how we should fix it later I hope you will still be with me because then we could get it done.
But let’s say, for now, that that’s a really good example of where we went wrong and what happened to us because. It’s trickier with gmail because of that magical untouched by human hands-iness. When I say to my students, “why do you let people read your email”, they say “but nobody is reading my email, no human being ever touched it. That would freak me out, I’d be creeped out if guys at Google were reading my email. But that’s not happening so I don’t have a problem.”
Now, this they cannot say about Facebook. Indeed, they know way too much about Facebook if they let themselves really know it. You have read the stuff and you know. Facebook workers know who’s about to have a love affair before the people do because they can see X obsessively checking the Facebook page of Y. There’s some very nice research done a couple of years ago at an MIT I shouldn’t name by students I’m not going to describe because they were a little denting to the Facebook terms of service in the course of their research. They were just scraping but the purpose of their scraping was the demonstrate that you could find closeted homosexuals on Facebook.
They don’t say anything about their sexual orientation. Their friends are out, their interests are the interests of their friends who are out. Their photos are tagged with their friends who are out and they’re out except they’re not out. They’re just out in Facebook if anybody looks, which is not what they had in mind surely and not what we had in mind for them, surely. In fact, the degree of potential information inequality and disruption and difficulty that arises from a misunderstanding, a heuristic error, in the minds of human beings about what is and what’s not discoverable about them is not our biggest privacy problem.
My students, and I suspect many of the students of teachers in this room too, show constantly in our dialog the difficulty. They still think of privacy as “the one secret I don’t want revealed” and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff of life, that they don’t think of as secret in any way but which aggregates to stuff that they don’t want anybody to know. Which aggregates, in fact, not just to stuff they don’t want people to know but to predictive models about them that they would be very creeped out could exist at all. The simplicity with which you can de-anonymize theoretically anonymized data, the ease with which, for multiple sources available to you through third and fourth party transactions, information you can assemble, data maps of people’s lives. The ease with which you begin constraining, with the few things you know about people, the data available to you, you can quickly infer immense amounts more.
My friend and colleague Bradley Kuhn who works at the Software Freedom Law Center is one of those archaic human beings who believes that a social security number is a private thing. And he goes to great lengths to make sure that his Social Security is not disclosed which is his right under our law, oddly enough. Though, try and get health insurance or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all. We bend over backwards sometimes in the operation of our business because Bradley’s Social Security number is a secret. I said to him one day “You know, it’s over now because Google knows your Social Security number”. He said “No they don’t, I never told it to anybody”. I said, “Yeah but they know the Social Security number of everybody else born in Baltimore that year. Yours is the other one”.
And as you know, that’s true. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data we already know if we know enough things.
So, where we live has become a place in which it would be very unwise to say about anything that it isn’t known. If you are pretty widely known in the Net and all of us for one reason or another are pretty widely known in the Net. We want to live there. It is our neighborhood. We just don’t want to live with a video camera on every tree and a mic on every bush and the data miner beneath our feet everywhere we walk and the NET is like that now. I’m not objecting to the presence of AOL newbies in Usenet news. This is not an aesthetic judgment from 1995 about how the neighborhood is now full of people who don’t share our ethnocentric techno geekery. I’m not lamenting progress of a sort of democratizing kind. On the contrary, I’m lamenting progress of a totalizing kind. I’m lamenting progress hostile to human freedom. We all know that it’s hostile to human freedom. We all understand it’s despotic possibilities because the distopias of which it is fertile were the stuff of the science fiction that we read when we were children. The Cold War was fertile in the fantastic invention of where we live now and it’s hard for us to accept that but it’s true. Fortunately, of course, it’s not owned by the government. Well, it is. It’s fortunate. It’s true. It’s fortunate that it’s owned by people that you can bribe to get the thing no matter who you are. If you’re the government you have easy ways of doing it. You fill out a subpoena blank and you mail it.