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Google already knows what you’ve been looking for with its search engine, and whether you have a swimming pool in your backyard (and it will happily disclose the latter to anyone who wants to know — just use Google Earth). Now Google is toying with the idea of “activity recognition,” such as watching you eat. “Activity recognition systems unobtrusively observe the behavior of people and characteristics of their environments, and, when necessary, take actions in response — ideally with little explicit user direction.” So states a recent paper¬†by Google researcher Bill N. Schilit and two coauthors. Why would they want to do that? Well, to improve your health, for example.¬†”Information about household activities can even be used to recommend changes in behavior — for example, to reduce TV viewing and spend more time playing aerobic games on the Wii,” the paper suggests.

Lovely. An automated nag.

To be fair, home health care is a huge market, and it’s very costly to have people see physicians just to be told the same things about behavior modification every six months. If people want it, why not?

Well, what if it’s their insurance company that wants it, on pain of canceling their policy? Or the government that wants it, in exchange for a tax credit?

Health improvement is a good thing, but where does it stop?

And, of course, there are all the usual questions about the bits: who gets them, how could they be repurposed, and what if they leak.

Thanks to Information Week for its nice summary story on this.

Readers of Blown to Bits know that when it comes to bits, nothing goes away (koan #6). Information, even information you’ve deleted, can come back to your surprise – and your embarrassment. In the book, we illustrated this at Harvard University’s expense by showing that an outspoken presidential statement on Harvard’s Web site about the scientific abilities of women had quickly been replaced by a more conciliatory version, and yet the original remained accessible to anyone who thought to look in Google’s cache.

The McCain campaigners had similar fun last week at Obama’s expense when they revealed how the Obama Web site’s statement on the plan for ending the war in Iraq was substantially rewritten between June 11 and July 14. For instance, where the earlier version led with “Bring our troops home,” the later version spoke of “A responsible, phased withdrawal.” The McCain camp scolded that this was politics-as-usual flip-flopping; Obama supporters replied that that it was simply elaborating a position and to more details. The tussle is unlikely to sway any votes.

What’s more interesting from a Bits perspective is that the McCain folks discovered the change through a new on-line service called Versionista <http://www.versionista.com/>, which is set up to track just these kinds of changes to web sites. Tell Versionista to monitor a web site, and it will watch it constantly, keeping track of every addition or deletion, and show you side-by-side comparisons of the different versions with the changes highlighted. You can compare Obama’s before and after Iraq plans yourself by following this Versionista link.

We can be sure that Obama and McCain through November – and perhaps all political campaigns from now on – will think twice when they modify their Web sites. That goes for the rest of us as well: anything you place on the Web can now be monitored by an automated agent in the service of a competitor, enemy, or rival, and any change or inconsistency can be thrown back in your face.

There are many more shoes yet to drop in this tale of automated change monitoring. Here‚Äôs something to ponder, relating to subpoenas for email and other documents: Word processors make automated backups as you write. You might type a phrase as you are composing and delete it almost immediately, and yet the original fleeting text might have been caught by a backup. If your documents are subpoenaed, do you have to turn over only the final versions, or the backup drafts as well? You might end up having to answer not only for email messages you sent, but for the unedited drafts of those messages, including the stupid   ill-considered words that you later edited out. The issue hasn‚Äôt yet come up in court, but those drafts fit the legal definition of ‚Äústored documents‚Äù and so in principle should be turned over. We can be sure that the issue will arise before long.

As the book says, bits never go away; they can’t even be replaced.

The more an advertiser knows about you, the better it can target ads at you. So there is enormous value in information about your Internet behavior. For a long time it wasn’t feasible to analyze every packet your Internet Service Provider delivered to you; there were too many and the analysis would slow them down. Moore’s law has solved that problem, and there are now boxes to do such “deep packet” inspection. A company called NebuAd is in the forefront, and when some ISPs announced that they were going to experiment with the product, privacy advocates got into the act. There were hearings today before the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee, as reported by PC World.

Much of this report is centered on Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey’s pressing the question of whether such deep packet inspection should be the default, with consumers being given the option of not having their packets inspected and data collected about them. That would be an “opt-out” protocol. Markey, and privacy advocates, prefer an “opt-in” protocol, where consumers have to affirmatively state that they wish the data to be collected (which might be to their advantage; who wants to see irrelevant ads?).

NebuAd apparently claims that opt-in or opt-out isn’t as important as informing the public of what they are doing. In theory that might be right, but in practice it isn’t. Few people ever change the defaults on anything. There has been widespread discussion, in the US and the UK, of changing the default on cadaver organ donations from opt-in (stating at the time you get a driver’s license, for example, that you wish to be an organ donor) to opt-out (you’re a donor by default, unless, when given the information, you affirmatively declare you don’t want to be). An opt-out protocol would greatly increase participation in organ donor programs. And an opt-out protocol on NebuAd would result in vastly more useful data about consumer behavior.

As in the case of the draft Massachusetts legislation about web surfing privacy discussed here last week, we are facing a situation where technology is advancing faster than social practices. A lot more than advertising revenue is at stake here, since deep packet inspection is the very antithesis of the end-to-end philosophy on which the Internet was founded, and threatens net neutrality. (See page 313-315 of Blown to Bits. In today’s hearing, MIT professor Dave Reed “compared ISPs using NebuAd to a package delivery company looking inside every box it handles,” the same metaphor we use near the bottom of page 315.)

Apparently Congress knows it’s important, but — reasonably enough — can’t pass a law protecting it because it doesn’t know what it is. According to the Washington Post, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida can recognize it when he sees it — and he doesn’t want his online newspaper keeping track of what he’s reading.

Too late — that’s probably happening right now.

Industry representatives, and some other members of Congress, claim no legislation is needed. Everyone knows privacy is important, so of course the industry has an incentive to safeguard it.

Well, yes; they have an incentive to be seen as guarding it, and also have an incentive to make the most profitable use of the available information. And if you’re a newspaper, for example, you probably can’t afford to throw information away that would be useful to your advertisers.

An interesting question noted in the article is that it’s not even clear what “personally identifying information” is. Is an IP address “personally identifying”? The Recording Industry surely thinks so — they use them to make charges against copyright infringers. But there is hardly a one to one correspondence of IP addresses to individuals.

And by the way, IP addresses are going to be less and less identifying, because we are running out of addresses. These are 32 bit numbers, so there are only about 4 billion of them. They are 85% gone already, and the supply will reportedly be exhausted by 2011. IPv6 with its 128-bit addresses is the solution, and a transition is occurring, but it’s unlikely to have been completed in time. There are workarounds, which will be annoying and clumsy. It would be cleaner if we could all move to IPv6 tomorrow — just as it would have been cleaner if the US had gone to the metric system. In the Internet too, the world won’t come to an end because we haven’t moved to a sensible standard all at once.

On page 29 of¬†Blown to Bits, we talk about the tiny dots that certain laser printers print, identifying the printer and the precise time at which the document was printed. The official rationale is to catch counterfeiters, since color laser printers can produce excellent facsimiles of US currency. But that’s not the only possible use. Today this became a national story, in USA Today. Worth a read — the possibility we talked about has become standard as Moore’s law and its relatives have driven down the price of color laser printers.

A bill is before the Massachusetts legislature that would require web sites to give users the option of not having the records of their visits retained to be used to aid in targeted advertising. I am quoted briefly in the Patriot Ledger story on the bill, which seems unlikely to pass because, well, it’s July and the legislature wants to go on vacation. (See also this State House News Service story.)

I can’t speak to the details of the bill, in which many devils generally lie. It’s hard to argue against requiring an opt-out provision, which is likely not too hard to implement and won’t affect the advertising business model very much since few people ever change the default options on anything. (If you have the option of registering as an organ donor when you renew your drivers license, for example, participation rates vary hugely depending on whether the default is to be a donor or not to be a donor.)

Nonetheless, some of the sweeping statements about this issue are debatable. “It’s really your business what you visit on the internet,” said Rep. Daniel Bosley, speaking in support of the bill. Well, sort of; it’s also the web site’s business decision whether to send you a page when you ask for one. Google is not a public utility, even though it doesn’t require you to register in advance. Disclosure and transparency are good principles, but so are the laws of economics.

Randy Skoglund of the Americans for Technology Leadership, also supporting the bill, says “Most consumers aren’t aware how much info on them there is and how it’s being used. Consumers need to feel safe and protected online.” The first statement is absolutely true; people need to be more aware, and our book and the various disclosure mandates are steps toward educating the public. I am not so sure about the second. Is is the job of the government to make the public feel safe and protected online?

The worlds of copyright and privacy collided on Tuesday to cause a massive, privacy-shattering digital explosion. A judge ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom all its records of who has watched what videos. What clip, under what name, and from what IP address. Viacom is suing Google for accommodating its copyrighted materials on YouTube, and the judge dismissed privacy arguments Google tried to mount as “speculative.” The story is here and the judge’s order is here. (Thanks to Wired’s blog for these.)

Readers of Blown to Bits will recall how easily “anonymized” search records were de-identified, so there is serious reason to doubt that the fact that YouTube users are free to choose non-identifying login names will really protect their privacy.

The logs themselves comprise twelve TERABYTEs of data. There are lots of things that can be done with that data and there are lots of ways it can go astray ….

The judge denied various other requests of the plaintiffs, including a request for the source code of the Google search engine itself, supposedly so the plaintiff could check if Google was doing something special to make infringing material more attractive.

But the judge did require Google to turn over every video it has ever taken down for any reason, so Viacom can sort through them and draw their own conclusions about why. So if you ever put up a video while you were drunk and then changed your mind in the cold light of day, it’s part of the evidence in this court case now.

So much for the illusion that watching YouTube is like watching TV. But I’m sure there’s no reason to be worried about all those activity logs. Surely everyone will understand that you were just horsing around when you were watching that stuff ‚Ķ or maybe you were conducting research, yes, that’s what you were doing ‚Ķ.

As the New York Times reported last week, Google now keeps track of what you’ve been searching for in order to show you more relevant advertising. So if you’ve been asking about various islands in the South Pacific and you search for “Java,” you’ll likely get advertisements for travel offers, not for guides to the programming language by the same name.

Google’s technology for achieving this effect involves leaving cookies on your computer. But the article notes that Google already had access to the previously visited site, even without leaving a cookie. That’s a standard part of the HTTP protocol for web browsers. Click on a link, and the browser dispatches to the web server not just the URL of the page it wants, but the URL of the page that contains the link on which you clicked.

That datum is called the “referer.” (Yes, the word is misspelled that way in the HTTP standard. Oh well.) This is what makes possible some interesting customizations of web pages. For example, if Joe’s Books has a site that links to Blown to Bits, we could greet people who visit our page from Joe’s with a distinctive message such as “Thanks for coming over from Joe’s Books!”

Now this is all wonderful and a little disquieting. Such tricks make the experience more personal, and perhaps more informed. But is that what we really want? Do we like knowing we are leaving tracks that others know about? And if not, would we rather have them know about the tracks but not tell us that? 

At lunch today I did an informal survey.  The question was this:

Is it acceptable for Customs officers to search through the contents of your laptop, look at files, read your email, go through your pictures, pick over your web search history, check to see if you have any illegal MP3 downloads, maybe some movies?

There are actually three parts to the question.

1. Is it legal to search all the electronic stuff you are carrying?
2. Is it legal to do it without any “reasonable suspicion” that you’re doing something illegal?
3. And, most importantly, how do you feel about it?  if it is legal, should it be?

There was 100% agreement, at least among the ten people at lunch today, that it was completely wrong to do so, and they presumed that it was either illegal, or, at least illegal without probable cause and maybe even a search warrant.

Not so.

On April 21, 2008, Judge Diarmuid F. O‚ÄôScannlain issued an opinion in the case of United States of America v. Michael Timothy Arnold.¬† Mr. Arnold, a forty-three year old man,¬† was returning from a trip to the Phillipines.¬† He landed at LAX and went through customs.¬† We’ve all done that – gone through customs that is.¬† They have an important function to peform; making sure that people don’t bring bad stuff into the country, things they haven’t paid duty on, animals, fruits that might harbor insects, contraband, and mostly drugs.¬† Mr. Arnold wasn’t a suspect, nor was he behaving in a suspicious way.¬† He was selected randomly for more careful screening.¬† In this case, the customs agent asked him to turn on his laptop, and proceeded to look through his photo album.¬† The agent found pictures of nude women and called in more experts.¬† They went through all his digital files and found images that they considered to be child pornography.

Mr. Arnold argued that the customs officers should not have been allowed to search his laptop without “reasonable suspicion,” and filed a motion to suppress.¬† The District Court agreed, but that finding was overturned by the Appeals court, as detailed in Judge O‚ÄôScannlain’s opinion.

Contrary to the opinion of my lunch companions, searching your laptop, your cell phone, your flash drive, iPod iPone, Blackberry – reading your emails, looking at your pictures, checking your web surfing history is all just fine – with or without “reasonable suspicion.”

But my point is not to argue the subtleties of the law, it is to recognize that, as we say so often in Blown to Bits, that quanititative changes have qualitative impacts.¬† Looking through your briefcase for undeclared purchases, searching your bag for the cheese you are trying to bring into the country, or for the kilo of cocaine, feels quite different from going through everything on your hard drive.¬† For many of us, our laptops contain a record of much of our lives: years of pictures, enormous email archives (mine’s about 2 GB.), every appointment we’ve had.¬† There is something inherently creepy about the notion of being laid bare in front of a customs agent simply because you are crossing the border.

We have strong legal protections for what we have in our homes.  The Fourth Amendment states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . .” Homes used to be where we kept the record of our lives, the pictures, the correspondence, our entire music collection.  It was inconceivable that you would carry it all about with you. But no more.  You can fit quite a bit if personal history on a 120GB disk drive. The digital explosion blew a big hole in the wall of our house.  Many of us carry our history with us.

Once again our legal structures feel intuitively to be out of whack with the nature of the digital universe.  How profoundly will our privacy be violated if a customs agent can pour through our most intimate thoughts, read our digital diaries, explore our interests and desires, our corporate secrets and health records.

Like all the stories we tell about BITS, this one is not over, but the implication is both clear, and consistent with our other observations: those who make the laws, and those who interpret them need to bring a deeper understanding of the technologies that are so much a part of the fabric of our lives

That’s the title of a story from the Sunday NYT Business page, on a company called Sense Networks, which aggregates billions of bits of location data to predict future movements. Two applications mentioned are predicting where taxis will be needed and what nightclubs people are likely to head toward.
Where does the location data come from? For the taxi application, it’s easy; just put GPSs on all your taxis and let the data roll in, all nicely timestamped. For the nightclub application, cell phone data. Now cell phone locations are covered by strict privacy laws in this country, so that data is obtained by making a deal with the phones’ owners: Let us track you and we’ll keep you ahead of the curve on nightlife happenings. To monetize the product, Sense doesn’t need to track individuals only aggregate trends, but tracking individuals has extra value. Once enough data has been accumulated about what clubs you go to on rainy Tuesdays, maybe you can be prompted with suggestions of similar clubs, selected just for you.

The company absorbs other publicly available information into its predictive algorithms, for example weather data. Another example of the tons of bits that are out there, some for the taking and some for the asking, from which useful inventions can be created. And how easy it is to get past privacy worries by providing the general public very modest incentives.