We’ve got OCR. We’ve got cameraphones. We’ve got web-based license plate lookup services. Amazon Japan has a fancy cameraphone-based product search feature. What’s more naive, imagining that somewhere somebody has a SMS/MMS-based license plate snooping and facial recognition services and fingerprint scanners, or imagining that they don’t?

cameraphone, civil liberties, facial recognition, license plate recognition, mms, mobile technology, picture phone, privacy, sms, snooping

Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.

These are the stories we’ve come to expect: teen does or post the results of something [stupid|illegal|dangerous] in [MySpace|Facebook|some other online place] and gets caught. The point here is that the (meatspace) community’s existing means of enforcement worked, and perhaps worked better, in these new electronic forums.

Our youth’s new Wild West may have instead turned out to be an Orwellian nightmare that no kid can escape from.

It’s bad enough, anyway, that Nate Anderson had to give some advice to the young’ns:

What can you do to keep yourself out the crosshairs? The obvious first step is to internalize the idea that no section of the Internet is your private playground, and to keep your mouth shut in public forums about information you would rather the rest of the world did not know. Beyond that, though, it can be difficult to eliminate traces of stupidity online. Good luck getting Google to remove all links to that embarrassing office karaoke video that comes up first when you search your name. It ain’t gonna happen. The moral of the story is: don’t expect privacy on the Internet and you won’t be disappointed.

embarrassing, facebook, moral responsibility, myspace, online policing, playground, privacy, public forums, social internet, social software, youth

News came out a while ago that many of our laser printers were embedding “fingerprints” that allowed folks who knew how (like, say, the feds) to trace a printed page back to the day and time it was printed, and the serial number of the printer.

Or, at least that was the theory, until the EFF got all CSI on it. The image above is magnified 10x and illuminated with blue light to increase the contrast of the yellow dot pattern used by Xerox DocuColor printers. Some good reverse engineering efforts now allow folks to decipher those fingerprints, and the EFF even has a handy little form (go to the bottom of the page) to allow you to figure it out yourself.

dot patterns, eff, electronic frontier foundation, fingerprint, forensics, printer, printer fingerprinting, privacy, spying, tracking, xerox, xerox docucolor

Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:

I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.

The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time. So say “hi” to Andrejs and Nora in Normunds‘ photo, above.

So the good news is that there’s a chance that you’ll be able to use this to reconnect with that interesting someone you hooked up with the other night, but the mixed news is he or she may be able to find you — not so great if you instead hoped to disappear anonymously.

And all of this connects to my old chorus: identity is reputation. It’s too early for me to judge how this will effect our lives — well, my life anyway — but 2006 is now the year that facial recognition emerged from the dark halls of law enforcement and counter-terrorism and started greeting us on the street.

That foolish face you made in the background of some unknown tourists photo might be tracked. But is that really so bad? Sure, it might lead to embarrassing explanations, but it might also lead to new connections. Stealing the words of a friend, we seem to enjoy gossamer stories of lives barely touching, and maybe we’ll appreciate the opportunity to occasionally find or be found by the anonymous people who fill the blurry edges of our pictures.

I’m betting we’ll become aware of our social identities, our electronically tracked reputations, and we’ll start to act with some greater consciousness of them. Many bloggers are already familiar with this, sometimes painfully. Our notions of privacy and anonymity will certainly change, but we’re unlikely to be able to stuff this genie back in the bottle. And I’m not yet sure we’ll want to.

anonymity, brave new world, face, face recognition, facial recognition, fear, identity, identity is reputation, idm, photo sharing, privacy, recognition, reputation, riya, six degrees, social software, spy, spying, Spytech, surveillance, tracking, zool

Ryan Eby speaks with tongue firmly in cheek in this blog post, but his point is well taken. Privacy is serious to us, but we nonetheless make decisions that trade bits of our patrons’ privacy as an operational cost. While we argue about the appropriate time keep backups of our circulation records, we largely accept them — and the way they connect our patrons with the books they read — without question.

The problem here is that it’s a decision we make on behalf our patrons, often without bothering to inform our patrons of the risks we take with their privacy. And the problem there is that it violates users’ expectations of transparency and self determination — some of the same expectations you’ll find in Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto.

So here’s the trick: how do we deliver targeted and customized services online, without unhinging our patrons’ privacy? The answer so far is that we allow patrons to choose, giving patrons the tools and knowledge they need to make their own decisions about how much they reveal. But that answer depends on the notion that library services must be self-contained, that the only way our patrons can manage reading lists and the like is if libraries offer those services.

One only need look at LibraryThing to see an alternative. It’s not that I think LibraryThing or Listal or any other service will make better privacy decisions than we will. My point is that our attempts to build out customized services will likely draw resources away from efforts to improve the way our existing services interoperate with the rest of the internet. Listal and LibraryThing work because Amazon built an outstanding API and made it freely available to all. If libraries offered an API like that, those services could easily integrate our holdings, and LibraryThing users could match their interests against materials available at their local libraries without revealing themselves to us. Patrons could run desktop applications like Delicious Library and (mostly) avoid revealing themselves over the network. Libraries are in the awkward position of having identifying information about their patrons, but online-only services might not need any more identification than an anonymous username and password.

But even more simply than that, it’s worth asking how easily our online services work with basic expectations of web sites. Can users bookmark an item in your catalog in their browsers? Can they send the catalog URL of their new favorite book in an email to a friend? Can Google or other search engines index your catalog and help your patrons find materials even when they don’t know to search your site specifically?

Circulation records can be subpoenaed, but getting at the reading list I’ve been keeping as bookmarks in my browser is more likely to require officials to serve me with a search warrant. Building systems that work with the internet puts users in charge of their own privacy decisions.

library, libraries, privacy, transparency, web 2.0, internet, bookmarkability, durable links, web20, web architecture, usability, privacy, privacy and libraries, future libraries