This Tuesday at 6 PM PST the Second Life Future Salon will meet with Justin Hall and Mark Barrett on the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower on Sheep Island [<--SLURL, click to launch Second Life]. More details here. The meeting will be conducted in voice over Skype and made available as a podcast thanks to Johnny Ming of Secondcast and Metaverse Sessions.
The theme of the night is balancing the deep creative possibilities of transparency and lifelogging with issues of privacy and control of personal information. As prep reading, viewing, and listening, here are a few timely links on the topics of transparency and privacy on the web:
•Justin Hall's short video about passively multi-player online gaming (PMOGs)
•Onlife, a program Justin Hall mentions in this MP3 of his keynote at the Mobile Games Conference:
Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time.
•Mark Barrett inverviewed on Secondcast, responding to criticism over SLStats.com originally being opt-out, not opt-in for avatar tracking, as in the Second Life Herald article Is Big Brother Watch-ing?-- that, I might add, starts by calling out my avatar, SNOOPYbrown Zamboni, for not having any SLStats friends, ha!
•Podcast of futurist Jamais Cascio on Personal Memory Assitants and the Participatory Panopticon from Accelerating Change 2005. From the abstract:
The value of mobile camera phones as a means to capture events in one’s life will only be further enhanced as these devices become more powerful, their cameras improve, their capabilities increase, and the speed of connectivity continues to grow. There will be an opportunity to view and save everything we do. This is monitoring on a huge scale but we will do it willingly. Moreover, the sheer size of the numbers of people involved will overwhelm any attempts to use this monitoring in a 'Big Brother' way.
•danah Boyd writes about backlash within the Facebook community over news feeds that let you easilly follow every little change your friends make to their pages: Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama. She lists her main takeaways:
- Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
- The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
- We've experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot. When are we going to learn?
- Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
- Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
- Facebook lost its innocence this week.
• MoBuzz YouTube video on the Facebook feeds. I like this analysis.
• A New York Times article on a woman identified by piecing together her AOL search queries that were made public along with thousands of others: A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. From the article:
No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”
And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”
It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.
•Links to David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, on privacy and surveillance
Join the SL Future Salon group in Second Life for inworld announcements and reminders and I hope to see you on Tuesday!
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