Chris Peterson

I’ve been pretty haggard with work lately, so I’m a bit late on this, but James Grimmelmann has written a great paper called “Privacy as Product Safety”, to be published in the Widener Law Journal. It’s an adaptation of his “Myths of Privacy on Facebook”, and it’s quite good.

In his “Saving Facebook”, Grimmelmann explained the “social dynamics” of privacy problems on Facebook. He canvassed the social science literature to explain how and why people used Facebook, and what their behavior could tell us about proper regulation and privacy protections.

But in this article, he’s honing in on what I’ll call the “design dynamics” that he explored in his first article – that is, how the design of Facebook (or other such services) relates to its privacy problems. This idea isn’t new – he calls them “privacy lurches” in Saving Facebook, and they’re somewhat the focus of my “Losing Face” – but what is really great about this article is how Grimmelmann maps product liability law onto the scaffold of social network sites.

For example, on Google Buzz:

“Buzz as a whole is a powerful, possibly revolutionary product—but it also launched with a serious design defect. Just as an otherwise-useful buzzsaw is still unreasonably dangerous to life and limb if it sports a flimsy handle, the auto-add feature made the otherwise-useful Buzz unreasonably dangerous to privacy.”

In “Losing Face”, I mostly gave up on law as a tool to fix the defective designs of social network sites. I’m interested, and excited, by Grimmelmann’s effort to adapt liability law to achieve an admirable end.

I can’t stand a lot of popular (and, sadly, sometimes scholarly) writing about cyberspace. So much of it is breathless hype, superficial snapshots, and baseless theoretical wankery.

For example, when Second Life was booming, a lot of people were writing a lot of things about its business and investment potential, without ever having once walked around in it. That’s a critical difference, because you stop thinking about Second Life as next international marketplace the first time you’re caged and accosted by an anthropomorphic fox, endowed in a diverse, imaginative, and physically impossible manner. The data tell a different story.

Now, people like Eszter Hargittai have been diving deep into the data for years. But the great thing is that now everyone is doing it.

Take, for example, ChatRoulette. ChatRoulette is a service whereby any two users with webcams can be randomly assigned to one another. You log in, you click go, boom, you’re chatting with another random user.

Now, just from that, I might imagine all sorts of things about ChatRoulette. I might characterize ChatRoulette as the next wave in deliberative discourse, allowing individuals from different backgrounds and cultures to talk face to face in a totally unscripted and unforced fashion. I might prophesize an even smaller global village, where people could simply reach out to one another, connect, say hello, and find out that hey, someone cares. I could create all manner of handwaving, hypothetical bullshit.

Luckily, we have data. Not drawn from any peer-reviewed journal. This is ChatRoulette, as documented by one intrepid, devoted, and bored reddit user, who spent 12 hours on the site and posted the results:

1276 cams viewed

• Conversations 34
• Avg. Conversation Duration: 23.7 sec
• Long: 5 min 56 sec
• 298 naked masturbating men
• 678 non masturbating males
• 152 fake cams
• 148 females or mixed m/f
• boobs shown you ask? 0.0
• Cum shots: 2
• man having sex with racoon viewed 23 times
• not counted: repeats, no cam, empty rooms people with dolls and signs.

Edit: I generally waited untill the other person switched the cam, although for fake vids I switched the cam Edit: Logged on and saw my first legit real girl with exposed breasts. Final Edit: will log 12 more hrs. after my show to get a complete 24 hr sample.

This, ladies and gents, is what good Internet research and analysis looks like. So thank you to the brave few on the front lines.

On SSRN now. Here’s my profile, and here’s Losing Face on SSRN.

Speaking of which, I’m considering pointing all the links to Losing Face on this site to the SSRN version (rather than to where it is stored on bepress or my server).

On the one hand, I’m thinking that this might be worth it as a sort of publicity thing: if I suddenly get a bunch of downloads, it would be better to have them all on one version for the purposes of it getting noticed, rather than have it spread out across several versions. (The version of Saving Face linked to by the NYT got several thousand downloads, and would’ve made it one of the most downloaded articles on SSRN of all time!)

On the other hand, I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort, and I sort of like having easy control any time I want to make an incremental change and not have to worry about sitting through the SSRN review process.

Anyone out there have any advice? Does it really matter?

I haven’t had the chance to play with Google Buzz yet. I’m usually an ultra-early-adopter, but I’ve been too swamped with work these last few days to do so.

But frankly, after reading the panicked privacy reactions from early adopters, I’m pretty glad I didn’t.

Email address publishing? Autofollowing? “Terrifyingly accurate” Android location awareness publishing and posting photos from cellphones that were never before uploaded?

And everything’s opt-out?

It’s like Google carefully studied every complaint, real or imagined, about the privacy practices of Facebook, Twitter, etc…and then rolled all the rollicking horrors into one service.

No, thanks.

edit: Grimmelmann agrees.

Not to belabor the point, but the “bracketing effect” / “envelope model” for banking is still really, really important. The problem is that no banks will build it into their software (maybe they make too much money off overdraft fees?)

BucketWise is a free, simple, locally-hosted application that allows you to do it yourself. Take your general fund, allocate it among constituent funds, and budgeting becomes comprehensible. Watch the demo video.

Is it as convenient as having it built right into your online banking? No. But it’s better than nothing, and maybe it will finally convince someone that harnessing the bracketing effect for better budgeting is the killer app of online banking.

I attended a Berkman Center luncheon the other day where the keynote speaker was Jeremy Bailenson. Bailenson runs the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. From their page:

The mission of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab is to understand the dynamics and implications of interactions among people in immersive virtual reality simulations (VR), and other forms of human digital representations in media, communication systems, and games. Researchers in the lab are most concerned with understanding the social interaction that occurs within the confines of VR, and the majority of our work is centered on using empirical, behavioral science methodologies to explore people as they interact in these digital worlds.

The talk (video, audio at link) was really great:

Unlike telephone conversations and videoconferences, avatars – representations of people in virtual environments – have the ability to control their physical appearance and behavioral actions in the eyes of their conversational partners, strategically enhancing or hiding features and nonverbal signals in real-time. Jeremy Bailenson – founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab – explores the manners in which avatars change the nature of remote communication, and how these transformations can impact the ability to influence others in social and professional contexts.

A lot has been written about cyberspace law and policy, but not a lot of people (to my knowledge, at least) have done the heavy-lifting on exploring how people actually behave in these environments. Even the HCI literature, or that to which I have been exposed, tends to focus on usability, rather than framing effects and so forth.

I was very much impressed by the talk Bailenson gave, and by the work his lab is doing. While I’m not sold on the merits of all of it – I have a deep and ineradicable bias against anything that takes Second Life seriously – the point is that this is the sort of research that needs to be pursued if we are to understand how digital environments affected human communications and interaction.

Read their papers. Or, at least, check out the talk. It’s good stuff.

From the “How Did I Survive Without This” Dept: PadMapper.com.

Simple enough. PadMapper extracts Craiglists/etc listings, allows you to filter down by parameters (e.g. minimum bedrooms, bathrooms, wood floors, granite countertops, etc), and places them on a map, so you can easily visualize location as well.

Great way for me to make sure my next place is sufficiently close to the Charles River Bike Trail. Now if they’d only overlay it with a map of the MBTA…

In the old days of print journalism, syndication was the sign you’d made it. A symbol of prestige and influence that meant one had a breadth of voice worth reckoning with.

Web syndication? Not so much. But I decided to syndicate with myself today, which feels vaguely dirty, but nonetheless oddly appropriate.

If you see posts from now on posted by the user chris@mitblogs and/or falling under the category mitblogs, those are posts that I have made to MITAdmissions.org. Like today’s entry about FIRST Robotics, for instance. The link in the title also goes there, not here.

I don’t blog for MIT terribly often – our student bloggers are much more interesting – but when I do it’ll be here too!

Yesterday, I submitted Losing Face: An Environmental Analysis of Privacy on Facebook to a variety of science and technology law reviews. Its abstract is as follows:

This Article contributes to the ongoing conversation about privacy on social network sites. Adopting Facebook as its primary example, it reviews behavioral data and case studies of privacy problems in an attempt to understand user experiences. The Article fills a crucial gap in the literature by conducting the first extensive analysis of the informational and decisional environment of Facebook. Privacy and the environment are inextricably linked: the practice of the former depends upon the dynamics and heuristics of the latter.

The Article explores possible interventions. It explains how regulatory solutions and market forces are themselves hindered by the the deficient privacy environment of Facebook and can’t solve all of its problems. This Article recommends renovating the design of Facebook to privilege privacy practices and proposes specific interventions drawn from the computer science and behavioral economics literature. It concludes with a message of cautious optimism for the emerging coalition of engineers, academics, and practitioners who care about privacy on networked publics.

The Article is a heavily revised adaptation of the thesis I conducted for Ethan Katsh and Alan Gaitenby at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. If you’ve read my thesis (entitled “Saving Face”; title changed to avoid confusion with James Grimmelmann’s excellent Saving Facebook, recently published in the Iowa Law Review), then you’re familiar with the broad contours of the idea.

Losing Face, however, has been both greatly refined in its argumentation and noticeably reworked in its format (bah Bluebook) over the last year or so. I received invaluable feedback and assistance over the last from many people during this drafting process, including Helen Nissenbaum, researchers and interns at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, but most indispensably James Grimmelmann, who helped me navigate the convoluted and mystified norms and logistics of the publication process.

I’ve posted a copy of the Article here and on BePress for further comment while it wends its merry way through the editorial process. This is a draft only, and should not be used for citation. I’ve endeavored to make all references as clear as possible, though some are not as clear as they will be in the final version because I haven’t nailed down all the infras and supras yet. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about Losing Face, please feel free to drop a comment here or shoot me an email.

One of the great things about working at MIT is that you have some incredible opportunities available to you. Soon after I started working here, I was approached by MIT student Paul Kominers. In addition to being brilliant, Paul is also hilarious, and is what we call a “glue” kid – the sort of person who really makes things happen, who glues a community together, etc.

Paul is involved in the administration of SPLASH. Here is the Splash description:

One weekend in November, thousands of students of all types flood to MIT just for ESP’s Splash program to learn anything they want. From fractal fun to Hungarian history to aircraft analysis, Splash participants are introduced to a huge variety of topics by over 400 classes taught by teachers from the MIT community. Want to take a class on Egyptian mythology? Origami? Chemical sensors? All are possible.

Over the course of 20 hours during Splash, you can get your feet wet with a short introduction to any number of subjects—things you always wanted to learn, or topics you never knew existed. Or you can dive head first into an in-depth seminar or intensive workshop. The whole thing happens over the course of two intense days on the MIT campus, with classes taught by MIT students and community members.

On this Saturday past, I spent two hours teaching 130 10th-12th graders about the privacy architecture of Facebook. It was a lot of fun. Bunch of great jokes, sharp kids, cool concepts that were mostly interesting and new to them. Caught Paul running around with a top hat on, making sure everything went as planned for all of the 2700+ local students who were attending dozens of classes.

Great opportunity, lots of fun, and I can’t wait to do it again.