I have been thinking for awhile about the myriad ways in which we could wind up knowing less, not more, as a result of the digital explosion. So this will be the first in a series. Feel free to post or email others you’d like to suggest.

The editor of the European Journal of International Law is going to stand trial in criminal court in France, because a book review on a web site associated with the journal displeased the author of the book. The book’s author demanded that the review be taken down; the editor wrote a thoughtful response, inviting the reviewer to alter his review if he wished, and inviting the author to post a comment of her own if she wished. (These are book-review innovations that could not have happened in the pre-Internet world.) The reviewer chose not to alter his review, and instead of posting a response, the author sued the editor, personally, for libel. Apparently, under French law, this ball, once rolling, can end only in the courthouse. The editor, not even a Frenchman I think, has to show in Paris in June to defend himself.

This is madness. Without pretending to any expertise about French law, it seems that the European prioritization of personal dignity over free speech as a human right here has crazy, and more importantly censorious, consequences. Who will dare to write a critical book review on a blog if it means the expense and risk of defending oneself in France?

The editor’s telling of the tale is here. The review itself is here.

Hard to know where this case could end. Even if the editor spends a lot of money, gets a good lawyer, goes to France, and wins his case, who, in the future, will dare either write or publish a critical review of anything by a French author? What sort of system of liberté is this? Is this really what the French fought their revolution to protect?

The editor invites help of two kinds. First, and this applies particularly to scholars who are themselves editors,

You may send an indication of indignation/support by email attachment to the following email address EJIL.academicfreedom@Gmail.com Kindly write, if possible, on a letterhead indicating your affiliation and attach such letters to the email. Such letters may be printed and presented eventually to the Court.

The editor asks that letters not be sent to the book author. And second, the editor asks,

it will be helpful if you can send [to the same address] scanned or digital copies of book reviews (make sure to include a precise bibliographical reference) which are as critical or more so than the book review [linked above].

If you have links to reviews that meet that condition, let me know and I’d be glad to pass them along.

I recently noticed that the latest digital cameras have a feature that not only tags people the camera can identify because you have tagged them before, but stops you to ask if you’d like to identify them if the camera notices that they keep turning up in your photos. Facial recognition is in the camera software. (Here is a Panasoic page describing this feature.)

That didn’t surprise me much, but somehow the Recognizr Android-phone app impresses me more. Point the camera at someone and the phone goes to the Web to identify the person and look up his or her profiles on Facebook and other social networks. Bingo, the phone reports back to you whatever the profiles disclose about them.

Nothing very complicated going on here, if you think about it, once you accept that facial recognition is a solved problem. The rest is just web search and retrieval. Underlying face recognition is by Polar Rose.

But think of it. Just miniaturize a bit more and we can all put these in our eyeglasses. Meet someone for the first time, and greet them by name. It will feel weird at first, but I suppose we will get used to it, in the same way that it no longer startles us to see pulled-together businesspeople striding confidently down the sidewalk talking to no one visible.

In B2B we briefly noted a couple of coming technologies in the advertising and marketing field—stores that would welcome you when they “saw” you coming in the door, perhaps suggesting things you might like to buy based on what they knew about what you had bought, etc. The New York Times reports today that it’s all here. It’s a good story, describing multiple technologies. It leads with the idea of pointing a cell phone camera at a window display after hours and having the item recognized from its image, so the shopper can buy it literally right out of the window. Here is another technology that I find particularly interesting:

Other retailers have begun testing a product from I.B.M. called Presence. Shoppers who sign up can be detected as soon as they set foot in a store. That enables Presence to offer real-time mobile coupons. And tracking shoppers’ spending habits and browsing time in various departments can help the system figure out who might be moved to suddenly buy a discounted item.

Presence can also make product recommendations. If a shopper was buying cake mix, Presence might suggest buying the store’s private-label frosting and sprinkles, too.

“We’re also able to do predictive analytics — predict what we think you might want based on what we already know about you,” said Craig W. Stevenson, an I.B.M. executive who oversees Presence.

We were imagining RFID chips in clothing as the identifiers. We should have expected that GPS phones would be ubiquitous and that people would happily tell merchants their whereabouts in exchange for small perceived rewards.

I am giving a talk with that title at Cornell on Thursday. It will be livestreamed at 4:15pm—details here. Thursday morning I am giving a talk on an earlier book, Excellence Without a Soul—that too will be livestreamed if anyone is interested. Same link.

Yesterday was the “Fairness Hearing” in the Google Books Settlement case. The New York Times has a good report on it. Judge Chin’s questions suggest he is worried that the settlement goes way beyond what was needed to settle the issues between the parties—which is true, of course. A class action lawsuit over copyright infringement should not be a platform for a world-changing business partnership, with the biggest rewards going to the infringer.

Alas, so far I see nothing to suggest that the privacy issues with the settlement have caught the judge’s attention. I found this paragraph from the ACLU particularly interesting:

Because the settlement does not contain any privacy protections for users, Google’s system will be able to monitor which books users search for, which pages of the books they read and how long they spend on each page. Google could then combine information about readers’ habits and interests with additional information it collects from other Google services, creating a massive “digital dossier” that would be highly tempting and possibly vulnerable to fishing expeditions by law enforcement or civil litigants.

Among the reasons Google will rue the day it decided to roll out Buzz as an opt-out product with your social network harvested from your Gmail address book is that it renders worries like the ACLU’s far more credible. With all that useful data about reader behavior, Google itself will be highly  tempted to repurpose it. After all, it has shown itself willing to do that with your address book, which many of us consider confidential information—why not do it with the information about which books, and which pages of which books, you spend your time reading?

A Harvard Law School student has filed a class action lawsuit against Google for Buzz’s privacy violations. The student, Eva Hibnick, says “I feel like they did something wrong,” which is surely true but probably not her best lede. “The document cites the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Federal Stored Communications Act and California common and statutory law,” says ABC News. The kitchen sink, in other words.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has already complained to the Federal Trade Commission (see here for EPIC’s press release, with a link to the complaint itself). This lawsuit seems like overkill, no matter how mad people are, given the risks we’ve written about elsewhere of stretching any available law to make a club with which to attack a technological innovation.

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I was on the Callie Crossley Show on WGBH radio in Boston yesterday giving Google a piece of my mind about Buzz. But I was gentle compared to Callie herself. You can hear the short segment here.

Google yesterday reversed the crucial error it made when it rolled out Buzz. It decided not to initialize the service to follow your email correspondents, but simply to show those people to you as suggestions. In other words, you now have to opt in to following people, rather than opting out if you don’t want to follow them.

Bravo. You can pick at the edges–the company responded at first just by making the opt-out clearer, and didn’t go to opt-in until it realized that the first change wasn’t making the tidal wave of criticism any less powerful. But all things considered, this is a very professional response to a very serious self-inflicted wound.

The Toyota analogy I mentioned earlier sticks in my mind. Was there something in their management structure that allowed this horse to get out of the barn? Will there be some mistrust of Google now, some greater awareness that the company never guaranteed Gmail users absolute privacy in the first place and that it retains the right to make commercially advantageous use of their data?

Sigh. It is so sad to see Google lurch from doing the wrong thing (helping the Chinese thought control regime) to doing the right thing (announcing they’d rather lose the business than keep censoring in China) to doing a spectacularly wrong thing: The much-hyped Buzz social network service sets up your initial group of contacts from the list of people with whom you’ve been exchanging email and instant messages. And then makes that list of contacts public to the world. So lawyers could be exposing their clients, doctors their patients, husbands their mistresses, journalists their tipsters, you name it.

Buzz is an opt-out service–you’re in it until you tell Google you want to be out. And it is hard to get out (though in the past few days Google has, in response to the furious reaction it’s gotten, made the instructions a bit more visible). Even if you get out of Buzz, however, your secret lover may be exposing you. Happy Valentine’s Day!

This reminds me of Facebook’s Beacon fiasco, in which the company did not think through the consequences of having members announce to their friends what they were buying. Except worse, because ANYBODY knows that your email contacts are private information. How could Google not have had this pointed out to them in some focus group? For that matter, don’t they employ some house skeptics who are there just to point out the kinds of flaws that lots of bloggers pointed out almost immediately after the product was released?

Google’s response, according to today’s New York Times, is that a lot of people like the way it works. Which I am sure is true, and is a reason why big industries get regulated. The interests of minorities, no matter how serious, are not as important as providing the majority a product they like. Except that this time it looks like Google miscalculated the size of the minority of people concerned about their privacy, and the intensity of their feelings. I hope Google, like Toyota, is doing some soul-searching about how they got into their current pickle.

Thanks to danah boyd for pointing me to this excellent post from a lawyers’ blog explaining and analyzing the privacy problem and giving specific instructions about how to turn Buzz off. Very much worth a read.

In a move that is remarkably aggressive even by the standards of totalitarian regimes, Iran has announced that Gmail will be banned and that a government-run email service will take its place. The Wall Street Journal explains,

An Iranian official said the move was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government.

I get it. People will trust the government more if they know the government is watching all their email and there is nothing they can do about it. Wait, no, I don’t get it. Could you explain that again?

I have gotten two unsolicited emails over the past year from Iran. One was from a Gmail address, enclosing a manuscript about teaching for me to read. When I responded that we all think about the people of Iran and their struggles, the unguarded reply was “That is why I chose green for the cover of my book.” I hope that did not get him into trouble. Another, from a Yahoo mail address, asked for my help in locating a relative. Apparently the person writing thought the relative had gone to Harvard. I could find no evidence of that but I did find the fellow’s Facebook page, for which my correspondent was very grateful

These experiences left me wondering how thorough the surveillance is, and today’s announcement leaves me wondering if people will put up with it being heightened.

Declan McCullagh of CNET reports that the FBI is pressing Internet Service Providers to keep records of what Web sites customers visit and to keep the logs for two years, to assist in its criminal investigations. It has also asked Congress to require ISPs to keep such logs, arguing that it is only trying to preserve the investigative capabilities it had in the telephone era: for 24 years, phone companies have been required to keep for 18 months logs of the toll calls their customers have placed. McCullagh writes,

What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html.

While the first three categories could be logged without doing deep packet inspection, the fourth category would require it. That could run up against opposition in Congress, which lambasted the concept in a series of hearings in 2008, causing the demise of a company, NebuAd, which pioneered it inside the United States.

Many interesting details there, in particular that the line between “content” and “non-content” information is so fuzzy on the Internet. Would search queries, for example, be content or non-content?

This is way too much information retention.