John's post raises some core questions for discussions about the brave new world of ubiquitous commercial monitoring. <div><br></div><div>To answer the question of the potential harms of tracking and target marketing to kids -- and others (setting aside questions about potential "abuse" or data breaches and focusing on the use proper, as it were), would mean considering the impact of marketing, commercialization, and advertising more generally on children (and society) as well as the ways in which these shape the content to which they are exposed and their access to information (if, as Mark Zuckerberg thinks, his social algorithms will eventually take primacy in organizing our information worlds for us, what does it mean that these are developed in accordance with commercial imperatives? What kind of information will be prioritized and made available via the "social graph" if this is clearly governed by and subordinate to commercial imperatives? How might a Facebook social graph differ from one that was not crafted according to commercial imperatives? These are the same questions we once asked about how commercial imperatives structures the news and information made available via commercial media outlets. It surely retains its relevance and urgency in the online context, yet we don't seem to ask it as much).<div>
<br></div><div>In other words, it's not a new question -- if we are concerned about the impact of commodification and hyper-commercialization in offline realms, the recent developments in the online world would likely exacerbate those concerns. Even if we weren't we might start to get concerned about new marketing strategies and techniques. </div>
<div><br></div><div>What is striking to me is the way in which the online world tends to get a free pass. If someone were to build a "free" private for-profit school that was funded by using students as guinea pigs for market research by spying on them, experimenting on them, keeping data about everything they did, and then using that to see how most effectively to influence their behavior and shape their knowledge in accordance with commercial imperatives, the creator of this school would likely be critiqued and the proposal roundly rejected. We might engage in some serious questions about what we had, as a society, become (or am I behind the times?). At the very least there would be some significant level of public debate. But when important new forms of sociality and self-expression online are funded this way, we all-too-readily accept that this is the "only" way it can be done and go on to ask, heck, what's so bad about marketing anyway: wouldn't we rather have ads that are relevant to us than ones that are not? </div>
<div><br></div><div>John's post also highlights the problems with a privacy-based critique of information collection. There are many pathologies associated with the deployment of the notion of privacy, including the reinforcement of the imagined primacy of the classical liberal subject that underwrites the disturbing social pathologies of, say, the Tea Party with its antipathy to notions of collective goods, shared social responsibility, legal regulation, and so on. In more concrete terms, of course, a certain interpretation of the sanctity of privacy underwrites Facebook's business model, which is based not on "the end of privacy" but on the wholesale enclosure and privatization of huge amounts of data. Even as we become more visible to one another in some ways, what's going on "beneath" the platform or "behind" the screen becomes increasingly opaque (if only because it's getting more involved and sophisticated). </div>
<div><br></div><div>We don't have a clear idea of the experiments being conducted on us, the range of data collected about us, or how this data is used because these practices are not open and available to us. It would be interesting if Facebook were as open as some Facebook users, posting an update whenever they conducted a new experiment on us, and writing on our walls exactly what data they had captured about us (including when and for how long we looked at our walls). There is an asymmetry to the so called "end of privacy": users are subjected to it, whereas those who control the commercial platforms are exempted in significant ways. There are huge emerging asymmetries in the terabyte world of "super crunching": those with access to the databases and the tools for managing them can use data in quite different ways than those without access. Data has different significance and affordances for them. Moreover, the data itself is collected in asymmetric ways. Imagine an application that monitored what Facebook does with our information as closely as Facebook monitored its users (not that that would redress the asymmetry entirely -- I think more is at stake). </div>
<div><br></div><div>It's probably more helpful to approach these issues through the lenses of power, accountability, democracy and social justice than through the lens of "privacy" concerns. When people express their concerns about privacy (even as their behavior seems to belie their words), it may well be that they are attempting to get at some of these broader concerns but don't have enough a well enough established public vocabulary to get at them. </div>
<div><br></div><div>It's worth understanding that target marketing in the world of the expanding database is not simply about collaborative filtering (showing us things that other people who like the things we like also like) or linking ads to past preferences. The folks engaged in cutting edge forms of data-mining and targeted advertising are interested in how knowledge about everything from our moods to our particular anxieties to our DNA can provide leverage over us in ways that we are not aware of (the fear is that if we know what's going on, the strategies might become less effective). They are also interested not simply in tracking but in creating variations in the conditions within which we are tracked in order to conduct ongoing controlled experiments. If that sounds paranoid, just read the marketing literature on this -- it's creepy in a fascinating futuristic kind off way. I don't know if these techniques will actually work, but it's worth understanding that we are incorporating the assumption that they will into emerging economic models for supporting our communicative and informational infrastructure. I'm not trying to over-dramatize the issue - but I think it's worth anticipating the direction in which the industry seems to be headed.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><div><div><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 1:20 AM, John Sobol <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:soboltalk@gmail.com">soboltalk@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:56 PM, Seeta Gangadharan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:seeta.gangadharan@yale.edu" target="_blank">seeta.gangadharan@yale.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Hi Lynn/all,<div class="im"><br>
<br>
Though survey research might be useful in ascertaining snapshots of<br>
low-income communities' sentiments towards surveillance and privacy, I'm<br>
not certain that a survey will capture breadth of harmful experiences<br>
that result from tracking or that are perceived to result from tracking.<br>
I'd love to hear someone who's working toward that end to suggest otherwise.<br></div></blockquote><div><br>Hi all,<br><br>I would be interested to hear from people about this question too, specifically, what are the actual harmful experiences that have resulted from corporate tracking/targeting of teens/kids, as opposed to the perceived or potential harmful experiences? I can think of the RIAA lawsuits but would be keen to hear about others. <br>
<br>Personally, as a parent of 'tweens I sympathize with the perspective that assumes that any and all tracking and targeting of our kids - corporate or otherwise - is inherently dangerous and undesirable. But another part of me wonders whether this is not an unfounded assumption.<br>
<br>For example, I am of the belief that the passion for privacy that is inherent to literate culture and that arises out of the anonymity of literate technology has been a key factor in destroying our perception of the interrelatedness of all things, and thus in enabling our disastrous delusion that it is OK to exploit the earth to death (ours). Perhaps our desire to migrate anonymity into networked culture is a fundamental mistake? Perhaps we need to maximize our interconnectedness and our collective being, not as unknown atomic individuals but as individuals unafraid of being known by our words and deeds (or profile), i.e. not anonymous? Perhaps the price we pay for our targeted social networking is targeted commercial networking? Perhaps it is inevitable and OK that our economy should become personalized - as it once was in oral economies - and our resistance to this stems from our allegiance to literate economic principles and values that are based on impersonal standardization as opposed to targeted personalization and interaction (automated or in-person)? <br>
<br>Targeted marketing already serves us well (or does it? I would say it does) on ebay and amazon and etsy etc. Besides, was listening to the radio not a form of targeting, and of suggestive marketing, or watching TV or reading the newspaper? We let our kids do those things, so the difference appears to be in the personalized tracking/targeting capabilities not in the pushing out of suggestions per se. Partly what I'm saying is, do I care if personalized ads as opposed to generic ads are targeted at my daughter? No I don't. Do I care that a vast store of data about her personal and commercial (and when she gets older, professional) life is in the hands of a company that could be hacked or that could sell it to a 3rd party for non-commercial uses? Yes, definitely. So although I don't really care about marketing, I do care about security. So from my personal perspective, perhaps the focus of researcher's concern should be less on the
not-so-nefarious practice of targeted marketing and instead on the
seemingly more alarming danger of personal data being exported for
non-commercial purposes? <br><br>Obviously the 'potential' harm is 1984ish and nightmarish. But perhaps the 'potential' benefits, on the other hand, are utopian. Or more likely both are somewhat exaggerated. But I disagree with you Danah when you say that the key determining factor is social norms. I think the determining factor is the architecture of the technology, or the code as you/LL put it. Because social norms change as a result of technological architectures and not the other way around, despite the fact that it is heresy to say so. (Unfortunately, the Myth of the Myth of Technological Determinism is even more entrenched than the Myth of the Myth of the Digital Native!) So partly what I am wondering is whether - given that the architecture of networked culture promotes personalization and destroys anonymity, fighting that new digital norm is a less useful activity than building constructively on it, no matter how uneasy this may make those of us who were raised to cherish and expect anonymity in commerce and elsewhere. <br>
<br>For example, I do not believe that the appropriate response to the RIAA's litigious attacks on digital sharing is deeper hiding and sneakier sharing tools, precisely because downloaders will always be trackable. I think the appropriate response is collective self-empowerment in which millions of people should come together and publicly acknowledge their actions as part of a popular movement to challenge IP law and at the very least stop the harmful music industry attacks on students and their families. Alternately, bands should shed their labels and develop digitally-enabled fanclubs in which every single fan is known by name and can be tracked and targeted, so music and media can flow downstream to fans and money can flow upstream to bands and the RIAA can be left out of it all entirely. That would be an excellent example of benevolent targeted marketing and personalized commerce, and I'd have no problem with my 12 year old sharing her personal info in that context...<br>
<br>These are open-ended questions. Just thinking out loud and exploring different perspectives...all comments welcome...<br><br>John Sobol<br><font color="#888888">--<br><a href="http://www.youareyourmedia.com" target="_blank">www.youareyourmedia.com</a><br>
</font></div></div>
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