BrainJam, December 2005, search, privacy, transparency
Spent a few hours this afternoon at Chris Heuer’s BrainJam event. Wasn’t able to make it to the morning sessions, but arrived in time for the end of lunch and the “youth user panel”, consisting of four college students. They all love Facebook. Not sure how representative they are of the general student demographic, since two of them are trying to put together a web startup. They all use free online music and movie access, mostly through sharing within the dorm networks.
During the Q&A I asked for the panel members’ thoughts on privacy and about having their college lives online in perpituity. They’re vaguely concerned, but I don’t think the topic is really raising red flags for them. I think the high school and college users have more confidence in Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and others keeping their data private and/or it not making any difference to them in the future as social norms change. Part of it is that people are simply making things up on their pages, for the sake of attracting attention, and part of it is them not caring or not understanding that their web pages, chat transcripts, and even VOIP are mostly staying online forever. I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting conflicts in the future as people start running into their past personae 5, 10, 15 years later in a societal context that hasn’t adjusted yet to perpetual transparency.
Afterwards the group broke out into smaller topical discussions. The first session I went to was on the 2-way RSS proposal from Microsoft (Simple Sharing Extensions, SSE). I’m starting to think of SSE as a way for MSFT to use an RSS container for solving the sync problem for applications like Windows Mobile syncing a device and a desktop, or Active Directory performing distributed synchronization of directory data. I’m not really seeing a federated publishing model based on this, an idea that was floated in the conversation. It really feels like it solves an application sync problem for structured data.
The session on “what to do with all the data?” quickly turned into a discussion on privacy, transparency, and DRM. I’m personally disinclined to depend on trusting anyone’s DRM system to manage my criticall personal data, or for allowing anyone to indexing my private data in a way that eventually gets exposed to the world. One point of view expressed in this discussion was that the world would be better off if everyone just got used to the idea that everything they did was recorded and visible to the world (the Global Panopticon), although I think the majority disargreed that this would actually make people behave better. Personally, I think that documenting everything would break a lot of the ambiguity in relationships and conversations that allow the formation of reasonable opinions, by forcing people into adhering to “statements” and “positions” that were nothing more than passing conversation or exploration of a topic. This was part of my thinking behind asking the college kids about privacy. In real life, there are normally various social transitions that call for stepping away or de-emphasizing some aspects of one’s life, in favor of new ones. It doesn’t make the past behaviors and activities go away, but the combination of search engines and infinite, cheap storage is likely to keep some aspects of these folks’ “past” life in their face for a long time, which may make it harder to move forward.
Someone mentioned the idea of “privacy parity”, i.e. you can ask for my data, but I can see that you’re asking for it, sort of like being able to find out when someone has requested your credit report. This is interesting, but there are substantial asymmetries in the value of that information to each party. A bit of parity that would be very interesting would be a feed of who’s seen my site URLs and excerpts in a search results page — not the clickthrough, which I can already see, but when it’s turned up on the page at all.
A few of us continued a sidebar discussion on search, social networks, trust, and attention networks, and eventually got kicked out into the lobby where we were free to speculate on Google’s plan for world domination next to a huge globe in the SRI lobby. I haven’t bumped into anyone yet doing work on integrating the attention, social, and trust data into search. Doing this on a Google/Yahoo/Microsoft scale looks hard, because of the sheer scale, but I’m getting the sense that doing a custom search engine biased by the social / attention data inputs for a limited subject domain (100-1000’sGB) and a relatively small social / atttention network (1000’s - people you know or have heard of) is becoming more reasonable because of cheaper / faster / better IT hardware and because more of the data is actually becoming available now. Still chewing on this. I just came across Danah Boyd’s post on attention networks vs social networks yesterday, which concisely explains the directed vs undirected graph property which underlies part of the ranking algorithms that would be needed.
Perhaps someone’s already done this for a research project.
If Google Desktop were open source, it might be a logical place to insert a modified ranking algorithm based on attention, tags and social networks and also to insert an SSE-style interface to allow peer-to-peer federation of local search queries and results. This would keep the search index data local to “me” and “my documents”, but allow sharing with other clients that I trust. Perhaps it’s just an age thing. The college kids didn’t seem to mind having all of their documents on public servers, are counting on robots.txt to keep them out the global search engines, and apparently think that access controls on sites like Facebook will keep their personal postings out the of the public realm. For me, I still think twice sometimes about posting to my del.icio.us bookmarks list and keep anything really critical on physical media in a safe deposit box in a vault. So while I’ve gone from being Ungoogleable to Google search stardom, there’s a good portion of my digital life which is “dark matter” to the search engines. I’d like to find a way to fix it for myself, and share information with people I trust, and refine my searches over the public internet, but without having to give Google or anyone else all of my personal data.
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Took a few photos, photos from others will probably turn up tagged with “brainjams“
Update 12-04-2005 21:15 PST: Audio from the Youth Panel discussion on Chris’s blog
KRON-4 television piece on BrainJams. Looks like I missed the hula hoop part in the morning. I also seem to have mostly missed the non-profit community-oriented discussion, as you can see from my notes. Perhaps that’s what was going on when we got kicked out into the lobby for being too loud…
December 6th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
[…] All were interesting in their own way, though I could’ve done without the everyone-vs-Shannon portion of the privacy session. Guess we’re just not ready to throw in the towel on our quaint and antiquated ideals, Shannon. HJL has a good overview, I won’t bother to repeat everything here. I’m still sorting through some of the ideas generated in these sessions, if I’m lucky I might even come up with more to say about it. […]