There are completely new issues, perhaps ones that have never risen before, which are coming out as a result of the digital era we’ve entered. These aren’t necessarily IP issues but are at the cross section of law and technology. Given the common overlap of interests between ‘IP-ers’ and ‘Law and Tech-ers’, along with a lack of any specific category I can think of for them, I have taken the liberty to put two of these issues in this blog.
1. Ruining democracy
If you and I search online for the same 10 random terms, there is a very high possibility that there will be a difference in most of our search results. The reason for this is the constant personalization that search engines are doing in order to customize search engines for us. This is true not only of search engines, but also facebook, for instance – where the facebook feed you see is customized according to the profiles you like to visit more often, the links you check, and even as the new lawsuit points out, your other browsing activities. However, I’m not referring to the privacy concerns that this is usually associated with.
While this may help bring us quicker results, there is also a different, perhaps mind numbing side-effect to this. We all have our own biases and while consciously would perhaps like to believe we are objective, we definitely tend to look into topics that we are more interested in / believe more in. The current algorithms, if stretched a little further, ensures that we see this.. and only this. That is, we see the side of the story that we are more likely to relate to / believe / accept.
A personal belief I have is that democracy doesn’t work when people are stupid / uninformed / need to worry about their basic needs. This kind of search result customization certainly contributes to the first two, which – even if they aren’t the reason for democracy’s failures – are still not something we should just gloss over and should worry about!
As I was thinking about this topic and searching online to see what others have said on the topic, I came across this great TED talk, where Eli Pariser puts across some points far better than I have and with examples. It’s a 10 minute video which is worth a watch – available here.
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| Photo by Derek Harper |
2. Information asymmetry
A couple of weeks ago, the NYT carried a piece on Facebook’s ability to shoot new start ups to top positions by combining their knowledge of their tremendous user-base’s web habits along with their ability to promote the companies they choose to. To quote:
“When the company saw a staggering spike of Instagram photos flowing into Facebook, it knew it had to act quickly. It bought the photo service for $1 billion before Twitter or Google could make a move.”
Now, I’m no expert in antitrust/competition law (or whatever else would apply here) and there could certainly be a strong argument that they were only making use of data that was available to them, but for all practical purposes, Facebook can almost completely control who gets ahead and thereby will most certainly have a huge advantage over any of their rivals. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if there’s a strong argument against this – as they have reached where they are due to their success. As per the NYT piece, Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School refers to this is as the Matthew Effect, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Intuitively at least, there definitely seems to be something wrong with that sort of ‘progress’.
The NYT piece is here for those interested.
With all the piracy, privacy and censorship concerns that are taking the foreground of internet-related debates, I’m not sure these issues are getting the attention they deserve. Not to say that piracy, privacy and censorship issues are in any way small, but these too are important and while they may be small right now, it would not be wise to wait till they are causing more of an impact.
Talking about privacy, if you see the data mining facebook does, its mind boggling, they practically know everything about you. even there are dedicated websites where you pay very nominal fee to get details about anyone like SPOKEO. The user preferences, search results, places, all data that is needed to trackdown people or potential customers SPOKEO is happy to provide with.
While researching on an article on the privacy issues of social networking sites i came up with many such issues of violation of privacy and the customization principles.Though this comment is not meant to specifically target facebook but due to its omnipresence nature all over of our lives i thought its policy is the best one to indicate why privacy is important.
On 11th May, 2012. facebook changed its Data Use policy. The major changes were :
(1) Facebook used to keep data it received about you from advertisers and third parties for 180 days; now they say they’ll keep it for as long as necessary to provide you with a service.
(2) Facebook makes it clearer that it can use information about you to display ads to you outside of Facebook. The policy previously stated that the company could serve ads with a social context outside of Facebook. Now it makes it clear they can serve any kinds of ads they want.
The second change is more towards using data and our preferences for example when we like an ad or just hit the like button. The aggregation of hits to the like button can generate a huge amount of data and more data customization which actually refers to the point the blog post is talks about in the beginning when Swaraj said that typing the same search terms would generate different search results.
SAV is absolutely right. Mind-boggling.
It is more than merely Facebook having such features as auto-sharing (frictionless sharing) and similar. More than just setting your privacy and sharing options in Facebook. That is small-potatoes in the larger game.
Reality is, that Facebook web-crawlers follow you around on every web-page you visit to analyze and build your extended profile, interest-graph, and whatever else technology allows to extract from reading everything you read. Any page with an active Share/Like button. Others, like LinkedIn are beginning to follow right behind.
NOTE: This is independent of your privacy settings. By their agreements you have already agreed to both this use of data and any other they might see profitable in the future.
I am personally not really comfortable with any company saving away a database of EVERYTHING I might have been interested in. Building profiles of all ones preferences, political leanings, product preferences, and anything else that can be cleaned from your web-history.
I’d recommend to anyone out there, that they just for fun go through their own web-history and make some guesses on how others might interpret it, if they could get their hands on it and magically analyze it like Facebook/LinkedIn and others can do. Or how its information could possibly be used, if someone that did not necessarily have your best at heart got to interpret it.
Also keep in mind that Facebook’s entire business model depends on how much they know about us. The more they can gather about us, the more revenue they might be able to make for their new Wall-Street friends and shareholders.
See http://riskyinternet.com/part-1-social-networks-tracking-your-internet-slime-trail/
Thank you for this article. Though of course I had known about user-preference targeting by Facebook and other social media, I had not previously known about the extensive use of search result customization. Of course, those in the anti-IP crowd would love to have more evidence that patents are destroying democracy. Though I’m not sure how much I agree, you certainly make a good point.