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Verizon and AT&T have announced that they will not track their customers’ Internet wanderings without their explicit request. The key is that the default is no tracking; only if the customer affirmatively “opts in” to tracking will it occur.

ISPs were getting some heat from Congress because of privacy concerns, so the move by these ISPs surely is enlightenment prompted by anticipation of a mandate. Nonetheless, it’s not a small matter. The data on what we do on the Internet is an extremely valuable commodity, and these companies might have put up a stronger fight for their right to collect it. Comcast, will you please adopt the same posture?

The Washington Post story on this makes several important points. The opt-in provision is likely to result in a very low level of participation in tracking, unless customers who are being tracked have a perceptibly better experience than those who do not. Still, with millions of users, a lot of data can be collected even if participation is low in percentage terms.

Nothing in the announcement by these service providers limits what individual web services can do to collect data about you by storing cookies on your computer. That mechanism aids the targeting of advertising toward your particular interests. And while informed consent and education about privacy should be major goals for the industry, it is worth remembering that the explosion of the Internet as a service to noncommercial users is largely funded by advertising revenue. Though one should always be skeptical about sky-is-falling statements by trade group representatives, there is some truth to this claim:

“If Congress required ‘opt in’ today, Congress would be back in tomorrow writing an Internet bailout bill,” said Mike Zaneis, vice president of public policy for the¬†Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group. “Every advertising platform and business model would be put at risk.”

This week saw two significant developments in the world of copyright and digital information described in Blown to Bits chapter 6, “Balance Toppled.” They signal that things just might be starting to move back towards balance.

On September 24, Judge Davis set aside the jury’s October 2007 verdict in the Jammie Thomas case.¬† That’s the case discussed in B2B of the Minnesota single mother who who was fined $222,000, $9250 per song, for sharing 24 songs on the Kazaa network, the case that became the recording industry’s “we told you so” for why people accused of file sharing by the RIAA should settle even if they are innocent, because the stakes in losing can be so high.¬† As we described in the book, Thomas’s penalty demonstrates the egregiousness of the statutory damages for copyright infringement when applied to the Internet.

Last June, as I noted in this blog, trial Judge Thomas asked whether he had made a legal error in instructing the jury that simply making music available from a computer counts as unauthorized distribution under copyright law, even if no actual distribution takes place.  (See “Sending a Message”: Revisited.)

Now Judge Davis has decided that this was indeed an error, and has granted Thomas’s motion for a new trial.¬† This is a blow to the RIAA’s lawsuit strategy: Not only does it erase the current scariest example of damages, but it’s another court that has rejected the “making available” theory: to convict someone for music-sharing copyright infringement, they will have to demonstrate that actual distribution took place, not merely that files were available on the accused infringer’s computer.

Perhaps even more notable is Judge Davis’s plea to Congress to reconsider the law about statutory damages.¬† As he writes in his opinion:

“The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer to peer network cases…. The defendant is an individual, a consumer. She is not a business. She sought no profit from her acts…..[I]t would be a farce to say that a single mother‚Äôs acts of using Kazaa are the equivalent, for example, to the acts of global financial firms illegally infringing on copyrights in order to profit in the securities market……. [T]he damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs.”

Amen.

See Signs of a Move Towards Balance? (Part 2 of 2)

After yesterday’s anguished report on surveillance of children, let’s try something today that at least starts off on a lighter note.

A report out of New Zealand says that of all the time people spend online while in the office (and for many people, that is most of their office time), about a quarter of it is spent doing personal business. And more than three-quarters of all emails sent from office computers are personal.

Ah, I hear you cry, but it makes me so much more efficient that I get more done than I used to.

Maybe.

And someone in the story points out that it’s better for the business if we do our banking online from our desk than if we take half an hour to walk to the bank.

Maybe.

In any case, these reports cause the corporate efficiency experts to do the lost-time calculations, the vast cost to business of this wasted time. If only we could get our employees to focus on their work, we’d be more competitive.

And it is exactly these considerations that drive companies to install on office computer tools like the ones we discussed yesterday for children — software that monitors what web sites employees are going to, and perhaps blocks certain external connections. (There are other reasons as well. Not a good thing if you email your friend Mary in Oklahoma the spreadsheet you meant to email Mary in accounting.)

The cultural issues are going to take some time to sort out, but once put in place they tend to be hard to move. So read your corporate privacy policy. As we note on page 57, Harvard’s employee privacy policy is surprisingly Orwellian, though I am confident that it’s never used the way it’s written:

Employees must have no expectation or right of privacy in anything they create, store, send, or receive on Harvard’s computers, networks, or telecommunications systems. …. Electronic files, e-mail, data files, images, software, and voice mail may be accessed at any time by management or by other authorized personnel for any business purpose. Access may be requested and arranged through the system(s) user, however, this is not required.

I was pretty shaken by the end of the first day of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force yesterday. I had a meeting right afterwards, which I entered by yelping a primal scream.

All day yesterday, company after company gave presentations on how their products would help keep little Johnnie safe from predators and away from pornography. (You can check the conference program for the names of these businesses and hot links to their products. I should hasten to add that while I didn’t like much of what I was hearing, the meeting was run flawlessly — civil and lively and punctual too. Congratulations for a superb job by John Palfrey and the Berkman Center staff.) Some of the businesses offering solutions then answered the question of what we should do when Johnnie, frustrated with his overbearing parents, goes down the street to Libertarian Libby’s home, where the computer has no spyware: If we didn’t either keep Johnnie out of Libby’s house, or walk down the street ourselves and sell the same product to Libby’s parents, well, we were bad parents.

I tried to make the point that it is developmentally unhealthy to surveil your kids constantly, and safety was not the only value at stake. Growing up and learning trust and self-reliance are important too. Absolutely, was the answer. When your cell phone rings half a continent away because our product just caught Johnnie typing “boobs” into his Web browser, that creates a great opportunity for parent and child to sit down for a heart-to-heart.

I rather think that kids growing up in a 1984 childhood will expect to live in a 1984 adult world, with Big Brother watching over them constantly.

In any case, I am given to understand that there actually isn’t any evidence that predation on children is on the increase, in spite of the Internet horror stories, some of which we repeat in Blown to Bits. (One company actually reported that after monitoring tens of thousands of children, they had reported exactly 3 potential predators to the police.) Moreover, children who are victims are statistically likely to have other issues, and to come from families whose parents (if they have any) wouldn’t spend their nights worrying about their children’s safety. Child predation is a problem, but there are worse problems at which societal resources should be directed (for example, brutal child pornography is on the rise, I understand). Where we seem headed with Internet safety seems mad.

Several of the companies reported that the would retain the information they collected “forever.”

The fundamental problem with the agenda the states’ Attorneys General laid out is that it is premised on a moral and perhaps legal presumption that parents have an absolute right to know everything that their minor (under 18) children are saying and hearing. If society worked that way, it would never make any progress, as the prejudices and taboos of the parents would be handed on perfectly from one generation to the next. That isn’t social conservatism; that’s the preservation of human ignorance.

I am sitting in the meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at the Harvard Law School, in Pound Hall. Meetings go on the rest of today and through noon tomorrow, and are free and open to the public. There are two separate issues: How can you tell if someone claiming to be a child (when registering for a Myspace account, for example) really is a child (rather than a child predator, for example). And how can you tell if someone claiming to be an adult really is an adult (rather than a 13-year-old boy, for example, trying to look at dirty pictures).

I find the level of interest and investment in these questions quite remarkable, in the absence of data showing that child predation is on the increase or that the number of young adolescents trying to satisfy their curiosity can be decreased. The session was kicked off with remarks from the Attorneys General of both Massachusetts and Connecticut.

And there is almost no acknowledgment of the social costs of heavy identity verification technologies — for example that children who want to learn whether it’s really true that you can’t get pregnant the first time, as they’ve been told by their social peers, will be discouraged from finding the truth on the Internet if their parents don’t want them to get it. It’s neither practical nor (I think) lawful to keep older children away from information they want to get, but that seems to be the way the world is moving. The AG of Connecticut put a grand challenge to the group: “If we can put a man on the moon, we can find a way to make the Internet safe.” Sure — if you don’t mind restricting the free flow of lawful information between willing speakers and willing listeners.

A lot to think about here.

Two Oklahoma college students partnered with local restaurants to run parties and invite the public. Men paid a $5 cover charge, and women were let in free. Their little venture, which they dubbed Kegheadz, ran 22 parties in all. Some lost money, some cleared a few hundred dollars. It sounds typically collegiate. They didn’t bother with niceties if becoming a real business, filing forms with the government and paying taxes.

Then one day a tax bill arrived: $320,000. Where did that number come from? According to a report in the Oklahoman,

Tax officials got the wrong idea because of embellishments on the Kegheadz MySpace Web site that boasted things like “Over a billion served,” “Biggest party in the state,” and “Biggest party in the country,” Glover said.

The tax office is inferring head counts and percapita consumption from such statements, and calculating profits and taxes owed accordingly. The students are trying to explain that that was all baloney, and that they don’t even have enough money to hire a lawyer to defend themselves, much less pay that kind of money. The tax officials seem pretty humorless, but I suppose that is the way such officials have always been.

When you put it out on the Internet, anyone can see it. Even if you’re putting it out there to be intentionally outrageous, you may want to be careful what you say!

It would be interesting to know just how this came about. Are the tax authorities spending less time visiting businesses and going over their books, and more time just cruising the Web from the comfort and safety of their offices, looking for businesses, whether Internet businesses or not, that seem bigger than their corporate tax returns say they are?

Wikipedia is a marvel. In spite of the fact that anyone can edit it and all editing is pseudonymous, it works. For a lot of math theorems, for example, the resource is fantastic for quick lookup. If you’ve never used it, try it for whatever interests you and judge for yourself. If the entry is imperfect, just fix it. You can see the result instantly.

Wikipedia is very inclusive since anyone can start an entry. But there are standards for inclusion; if you try to make an entry for your dog, it will get deleted, unless your dog is famous for some reason.

So, storage being cheap, someone started Deletionpedia, an inventory of all the entries that have been deleted from Wikipedia. It’s kind of interesting, I guess.

And then someone created a Wikipedia page about it.

Which was deleted. Go figure. It was restored, and a debate is raging among Wikipedians about the right and justice of all this. The page is still up for now, but that link may die at any moment.

Apparently, a college student in Tennessee reset her password. (This was one of the possibilities I raised, but doubted, in my previous post. I am surprised to learn that Yahoo!’s security questions aren’t stronger, and that it uses this method for resetting passwords at all.) Here is Wired’s account of how easy it was:

‚Ķ the Palin hack didn’t require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse — the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.

How much trouble is he in? Probably not too much, according to authoritative sources quoted in another Wired story.

It should not surprise anyone, but a survey of 3100 employers confirms that 22% of them check social network sites for information about candidates. That’s twice as many as checked Facebook and MySpace two years ago.

Sometimes what the employer discovers hurts your candidacy, especially if you or any of your buddies posts information about your drinking or using drugs. Of course, it’s also unwise to post information about your qualifications that is inconsistent with what you submitted when you applied for the job.

Sometimes the information can actually help, for example if it demonstrates your good communication skills.

Ready for another non-surprise? College admissions offices do it too.

Digital photography, not the palmtop computer, is my favorite example of the triumph of Moore’s Law. Ten years ago we were still using film and Kodak was still making a lot of money doing it. Black and white ISO 400 film could be pushed up to 3200 if you had to underexpose it, but the results looked terrible. With color film pushed negatives would look even worse, and you needed a custom color lab to do it for you.

Today you can buy a Canon EOS SD Mark II, which has 21.1 million pixels per frame, and ISO up to 25600. Those are numbers beyond the imagination of anyone shooting pictures a decade ago.

Of course, in ten years, after the technology moves on, no one will be impressed.