"Global privacy invaders" awards

Kim Cameron points us to this story:

Privacy International announces global privacy invaders

02/05/2007

In an event in Montreal, Canada, Privacy International ran the first International Big Brothers Awards ceremony. At the 'Computers, Freedom and Privacy' (off-site) conference, with over 200 attendees, PI outed the most invasive companies, projects, officials, and governments. A special award for the 'Lifetime Menace' was also announced.

Background

PI's 'Big Brother Awards' have been running for nearly ten years, with events run in eighteen countries around the world. Government institutions and companies have been named and shamed as privacy invaders in a variety of countries and contexts.

This year was the first time that Privacy International ran an international event to identify the greatest invaders around the world. The event was hosted by 'the pope', as presented by Simon Davies in full regalia [my emphasis!]. Previous hosts include 'Dr. Evil' and 'The Queen of England'.

Nominees and Winners

After reviewing the variety of nominations received from around the world, Privacy International and leading international privacy experts selected the following nominees and winners in the following categories:

Most invasive company

Nominees

• Google, for their retention practices and their purchase of Doubleclick, an on-line marketing and profiling firm
• Choicepoint, for their vast databases of personal data, sold to nearly anyone who wishes to pay
• SWIFT, the international banking co-operative for sharing personal financial transactions with the U.S. government
• Booz Allen Hamilton, the international consultancy, for taking the knowledge and contacts of their senior executives, mostly from U.S. intelligence agencies, to sell and share their experiences with firms and governments around the world

Winner: Choicepoint

Worst Public Official

Nominees

• Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, for his relentless work over ten years to expand the UK into the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations
• Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, for returning the surveillance policies of his nation to the age of the Cold War
• Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and now undersecretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, behind and at the forefront of most disastrous U.S. surveillance policies, most recently the EU-U.S. agreement on Passenger Name Records transfers
• Alberto Gonzales, current Attorney General for the U.S., for pushing expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution in order to create new powers for the Bush Administration without Congressional authorisation and judicial oversight

Winner: Stewart Baker

Most Heinous Government

Nominees

• China, for implementing even greater surveillance policies and continues its oppression of various groups, and moves towards the international stage with the Beijing Olympics with additional surveillance schemes
• The U.S., for leading the world down the path of greater surveillance and its disastrous influence on policy and technology
• The United Kingdom, for being the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations, rivaling only Malaysia, China and Russia as it also leads other countries across the EU down its same path
• Tunisia, for being stupid enough to have invasive and despotic practices even while hosting a UN summit on the information society, and then oppressing guests and groups from around the world while in the public eye
• The European Union, for pretending to be founded upon a bedrock of civil liberties and fundamental rights but then spending decades establishing invasive policies without any democratic oversight

Winner: The United Kingdom (for more information please see Taking Liberties documentary (off-site))

Most Appalling Project or Technology

Nominees

• U.S. Border Policy, and most recently the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, for fingerprinting visitors from around the world while hoisting fingerprinting and ID card programmes upon citizens around the world, including Americans
• International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency, for implementing a variety of invasive policies behind closed doors, including the 'biometric passport' and passenger data transfer-deals
• India's Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions for requiring government employees to disclose their menstrual cycles on job appraisal forms
• the CCTV industry, for promoting a technologically 'effective' policy around the world despite all the evidence to the contrary

Winner: The International Civil Aviation Organization

Lifetime Menace Award

Nominees

• The Biometrics Industry, for selling a limited technology to governments and public institutions around the world, promising much while delivering very little except for minimisation of personal privacy
• The Military Industrial Complex, for being behind almost every invasive surveillance policy around the world, where we showed the example of General Dynamics, contractor to a variety of governments, who own companies such as Anteon (UK) who in turn own 'Vericool' (UK) who is responsible for selling surveillance technologies to schools that want to fingerprint their students to verify class registries, library privileges, and cafeteria purchases
• The Intellectual Property Industry, for promoting and pushing invasive policies around the world in order to keep track of the habits of on-line users to pursue their agenda of 'protecting' content
• Communitarianism and the proponents of the 'Common Good', because every bad policy around the world is justified based on the philosophy that is good for society and the individual must sacrifice his or her selfish rights in favour of the needs of the many

Winner: The 'Common Good'

Winners were given the classic BBA award, a golden statue of a boot stamping upon a human head, as promised by George Orwell in 1984 on a vision for the future.

Sounds like it was quite an evening!

A virtual identity custody battle

Dave Birch writes:

Who cares about custody of the quids [sic] when there's virtual assets at stake! A divorcing couple in China are fighting for the custody of virtual identities in the Zhengtu Online virtual world. The couple met each other through the game in September 2006 and got married in November. The two jointly own more than 10 Zhengtu Online accounts (each of which is, in essence, a different virtual identity) that are each above level 100. This, incidentally, makes them a liquid asset as they can be sold for 10,000 Yuan each online. The husband wants all the game accounts and in return is willing to give their newly purchased and renovated apartment to his wife: in other words, he wants the virtual stuff and she can keep the real stuff. As they say in Yorkshire -- or they did in the era when my mother was born in Catterick -- there's nowt as strange a folk. The dispute? The wife wants to split the real and virtual stuff equally... how old fashioned.

Which is all further proof that "real" and "virtual" aspects of value are becoming practically indistinguishable—if someone cares about something, it has value, whether that something is a game-world avatar or an apartment.

Speaking at chinwag live: dark side of social media

I have been invited to speak at the chinwag live event on June 19 in Soho, London. The topic is the "dark side of social media":

Despite the hype there are downsides to social media - virtual problems are invading our real lives, or is it vice versa..?

Identity theft, scurrilous accusations, libel, stalking, scams and even violence. Social media, once hailed as the great new "Naked Conversation" where the planet would talk to itself in a spirit of open debate and companies would 'crowd source' fantastic new products, is starting to turn sour.

High profile bloggers like Rachel From North London and Kathy Sierra have been stalked online. Teenagers are finding out the downside to having a MySpace page as cyber-bullying takes off.

Brands are finding that their carefully crafted marketing campaigns are being remixed and mashed-up in a way they never intended. Political sites are swarmed with negative comments. Comment spam is hampering open debate. Splogs are stealing content. Social Media is turning out to have a very unsocial dark side. What can be done about it?

Can an online code of conduct have a hope of succeeding? Will freedom of speech be affected? How can organisations prevent their interactions with social media from backfiring? Chinwag Live: The Dark Side of Social Media will look at all these questions with a panel of experts.

Lots to get our teeth into, then; it promises to be a pretty lively debate!

Reflections on Identity Mashup

I enjoyed being on the panel at the Identity Mashup event at the BT Centre, London the other night. Pursuant is a summary of some of the key points that arose and my further thoughts (mostly towards the end).

Tom Ilube spoke about his company Garlik, which aims to help people track information others hold about them. I find this interesting in that it chimes nicely with my musings on supersurveillance (watching what the watchers are watching about us).

Richard Baker talked about the enterprise in general and BT in particular, and the challenge of providing identity-enabled services to a relatively non tech-savvy mass market. He touched on the strategic model of risk, value and convenience that my friend and white paper co-author John Madelin has developed at BT.

Simon Willison told us about OpenID, a technology protocol that obviates the need to remember lots of passwords (or risk using just one) for all the different web services you use by allowing you to authenticate ("sign in") in one place, then have other web services recognise that you have already signed in, rather than you having to sign in separately for each one. (Wow, that concept is really hard to communicate succinctly without visual examples!)

Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics' Information Systems Group was sceptical about OpenID's accessibility to the masses, expressing concern that technology like the UK government's ID Card will have to be simpler to use than OpenID is if it is to be used at all (there was some disagreement amongst the panel over OpenID's relative ease of use or otherwise—personally, I suspect ongoing innovation will make it progressively even more approachable by non-geeks).

Tony Fish, the discussion moderator, wanted to know where the beef was: where is the value in identity, and who can leverage it? I opined that advertisers found value in being able to build the richest possible picture of a person in order to target adverts at them optimally—which is why Google is making so much money. Conversely, Tom pointed to identity phraudsters who can extract several thousand pounds of value from a target individual (mostly by getting credit) by obtaining just a handful of key data about them.

There were many other interesting points and observations that came up, but there was also a familiar sense in the room of "how the heck does all this fit together in a single, intelligible picture?" I suggested that looking at identity in terms of value could be a way of pulling the many threads together: corporations, government and individuals alike want to realise for themselves the tangible value of identity, and individual people value—to varying degrees according to person and context—privacy, convenience, service personalisation, transparency and pretty much any other attribute of identity-enabled information services you care to name. In other words, we each place particular values on information and the ways it flows or does not flow.

In the summing up, I lobbed a provocative thought into the room: "privacy is dead; long live privacy". Things would be so simple if we didn't try so desperately to hang on to our little sense of bounded self and melted quietly into the identity soup of this webbed world. That is a scary, scary process—but surely an inevitable one, carried as we little people are on the rip tide of C21st cultural evolution?

That said, money is only a particular kind of information, so the massive imbalances of wealth could not be sustained should we collectively allow information to truly flow freely (as in, in an extreme example, the information that allows me to log into my bank account, although of course I am talking about a far broader spectrum of information value here, most of it only indirectly related to cash!).

It's hard to see the rich letting the poor at their lucre willingly (scary!), and indeed the current trend is massively in the other direction, with megabrands (Tesco, Google, Virgin and so on) increasingly acting as massive re-aggregators of value created by others. So we're left with a huge conundrum—information needs to flow freely to create value, but collectively we're not willing to let it do so beyond specific, highly circumscribed contexts. Indeed, if we did so all at once, our whole ecopolitical system would surely collapse.

This all raises many more questions than it provides answers. One thing's for sure: the dual imperatives of information fluidity and information control look set for some spectacular showdowns over the coming years!

After the main session, I got to chat with a number of interesting people. I felt right at home immersed in a crowd of identity nuts! ; )

For another angle on the Identity Mashup event, check out this thoughtful post by Graham Sadd.

"The Evolution of Human Morality"

Charla and I listened to an interesting podcast on "The Evolution of Human Morality" the other morning. The shownotes:

Incest, infanticide, honour killings - different cultures have different rules of justice. But are we all born with a moral instinct - an innate ability to judge what is right and wrong? Could morality be like language - a universal, unconscious grammar common to all human cultures? Eminent evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser and philosopher Richard Joyce take on these controversial questions in impressive new tomes, and to critical acclaim. But could their evolutionary arguments undermine the social authority of morality? Is biology the new 'religion'?

One insight that emerges from the discussion is that personal and cultural differences in morality tend to exist mainly in the context of relatively complex and context-specific concepts—"the rights of the fetus", for example—whereas simple concepts that underlie such complex concepts, such as "using another person to achieve one's own goals" tend to arouse fairly universal moral responses (negative, in this example).

It seems that we are hard-wired as altruists, but we learn to selectively block our altruistic impulses according to our learned belief systems and our emotional response to others that those belief systems mediate. We learn to identify with the interests and well being of some individuals and groups more than others—and then engage in frantic post-hoc moral self-justification to make ourselves feel ok about that.

So if you'd like to probe your sense of morality, click here to take the Moral Sense Test from the Visual Cognition Laboratory at Havard. I just tried it and learned something interesting about myself (they asked me not to reveal what so as not to bias others' responses!) in about 6 minutes.

Surveillance judo

Bill Thompson ponders, on the BBC News site, the growing shadow of surveillance over our lives:

We're used to reports that the UK is the most-watched country in the world, but we may well look back on the days of simple closed-circuit television with some nostalgia.

This week we've heard reports of 'intelligent CCTV' systems like 'the bug', an array of eight cameras that scan an area and use movement tracking software to look for unusual behaviour, allowing an operator to zoom in on anyone suspicious.

London is planning to follow Middlesbrough in installing cameras with loudspeakers so that anyone thinking of behaving in an inappropriate manner can be hectored from the control room and told what to do, just as the telescreens ordered Winston Smith to do his exercises in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

There is a danger that the art, like other aspects of control technology, will only serve to dull our senses and dampen our indignation

More and more mobile phones come with GPS built-in, a boon for the geographically-challenged but something that could seriously damage our ability to go about our daily lives unobserved.

And of course almost everything we do online is recorded somewhere and will be available for inspection by the police if current EU plans to retain details of all emails sent, websites visited and files downloaded go through into national law.

Yet, despite the scare stories about the potential abuse of this information, we seem remarkably sanguine about the situation.

Millions of people share personal data online, from friendships on Facebook to favourite bands on MySpace, and not forgetting the photos of our friends, family and feet that go up on Flickr and Photobucket.

I'm as bad as anyone here, handing over my shopping patterns to supermarket loyalty schemes; sending unencrypted emails and visiting websites without seeking to disguise my identity; using Google for my searches and wandering the streets, often walking randomly around in a way that is guaranteed to make me look shifty.

It would be nice to think that the legal framework of data protection and human rights would go some way to protect us here, but I fear that we are going to have to take more direct action rather than rely on the Information Commissioner.

Direct action yes, but opposition is not necessarily the only kind of effective action here. In some surveillance situations it may be more creative and effective to act judo-style, going with the trend towards ever-greater surveillance rather than opposing it. For example, this is what initiatives like MySociety's FOI filer and archive are about—helping us to find out what information government holds on us.

So yes, let's engage in a debate on what is appropriate for the watchers to watch, but let's also insist on watching what the watchers are watching about us. Let's trancend surveillance with supersurveillance!

Self and Identity as Memory

"Self and Identity as Memory", by John F. Kihlstrom, Jennifer S. Beer and Stanley B. Klein of University of California, is a fascinating (albeit densely condensed) survey of philosophical, cognitive and behavioural psychological and neurological research findings that establish the basis of our sense of self and identity in our memory (as the paper's title suggests).

The authors do an admirable job in pulling together myriad strands of narrative (their diverse research sources) into a coherent whole, and there are many intriguing insights along the way—for instance, on the mutually-discrete nature of semantic and episodic memory, and on the possible existence of a separate brain module for self-awareness (as opposed to awareness of others). All the same, I couldn't help feeling that the authors were having to work pretty hard to get all their material to hang together—as if they were trying to facilitate a discussion by a hundred blind men groping their way around an elephant towards a consensus on what the elephant actually is.

Such is the slippery beast of identity... ; )

Legal ruling on information transparency

BBC News reports:

A new ruling, which said a college had breached a woman's privacy by secretly monitoring her emails, means employers cannot spy on staff, say legal experts.

Lynette Copland, who works at Carmarthenshire College in west Wales, successfully sued her employer for breaching the Human Rights convention.

She was awarded more than £6,000 by the European Court of Human Rights.

Employment law solicitor Alison Love said if employers were going to monitor emails they must tell their employees.

It's interesting to note that the ruling doesn't outlaw the spying altogether, but rather obligates employers to do it transparently. More a victory for the inexorable tide of information freeflow than for "privacy", then?

Gapminder—geographical identity visualisation

Seamus McCauley points us to what is effectively a geographical identity visualisation tool.

Here's a lovely bit of design and presentation - the Gapminder tool from the Gapminder foundation. It plots all sorts of demographic and economic data from different countries on a chart over time, so you can see for example how life expectancy plots against per capita income or how the gender balance in schools relates to Internet users per thousand. Fascinating. Reminds me a little of my favourite tine-series design ever, the BBC's US elections since 1948 map.

Why not have a play? It's an intriguing experience (hint: you have to press "PLAY", after selecting some options, to see it working).

Watching what the watchers are watching

If the act of watching others is called "surveillance", and that of watching the watchers "sousveillance", what could we call it when we watch the watchers watching us, as if over their shoulders—in other words, when we watch what the watchers are watching?

As we become surveilled in more and more moments of our lives, the typical absence of such transparency around surveillance is becoming a huge issue for society. However, I am not aware of a word that describes overseeing what the watchers are watching about us.

How about co-opting "supersurveillance" from its current usage as a mere superlative of surveillance?

Netvibes Universe—personally branded portals

Sam Sethi reports on the new Netvibes Universe:

This afternoon Netvibes will announce the launch of Netvibes Universe, allowing users to create highly customized versions of Netvibes and publish them for public access.

Netvibes has created 100 or so branded versions for the launch - users will be able to create these in about six weeks. In addition to making the page public, publishers can also highly customize their Universe page by adding their own CSS and HTML.

This sounds like a pretty powerful way to re-aggregate the web through the filter of your own identity, in terms of your personal interests and "brand". I shall experiment with interest...

Shopping 2.0

I couldn't resist passing on this quirky video (via Ivan), even though the in-crowd "web 2.0" references will be lost on my non-geek readers. The concept of free-tagging supermarket products with keywords and phrases chimes nicely with the concerns of my previous posts on product identity.

Google's defacto "identity system"

Scott Lemon discovers that "Google wants MORE of your identity!":

Well FINALLY, Google adds the ability to annotate and more [on Google Maps] through their new My Maps features ... BUT ... I MUST create an account and be tracked by Google in order to use the features!! What the heck? I can't just hack out a quick annotated map for a friend or family without providing information to Google about who I am and having them permanently note my interest in some specific point on earth?

Once again ... the average person has NO idea they are now going to have even more records kept of every place they have marked or annotated, and when they did it. Google continues to gather even more information about you ... who you are ... what you do ... where you do. Amazing.

I know a number of people who are pretty annoyed that they have to use a gmail email account (which they may not even use regularly for email) to access services such as Blogger and Google Groups. I am one of those people!

With the rapid rise of OpenID as a means of individuals integrating their personae across web service providers, I suspect Google's attempt to lock users into Google's own defacto "identity system" could become a real competitive weakness for them at some point.

An ID Cards revolt?

The Times reports:

The government is predicting that some 15m people will revolt against Tony Blair’s controversial ID card scheme by refusing to produce the new cards or provide personal data on demand.

The forecast is made in documents released by the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act. The papers show ministers expect national protests similar to the poll tax rebellions of the Thatcher era, with millions prepared to risk criminal prosecution.

Opposition MPs said the new documents proved their case that the programme would never work. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “This will cripple the system. Fifteen million is a massive number. What the Home Office is accepting in private, but refuses to accept in public, is that a massive number of ordinary law-abiding citizens simply will not go along with their scheme.”

Davis, whose party’s policy is to scrap the cards, added: “This will render it completely useless as a security or check mechanism of any sort.”

The documents, quietly released during parliament’s Easter break, also show that the government is planning to make ID cards compulsory in 2014, despite the expected revolt.

The first cards are due in 2009, alongside new passports. Labour has said it will make the scheme compulsory if it wins the next election.

The ID card scheme could be an election loser for Gordon Brown, make no mistake about it. And given the way that the current Labour government has consistently dodged the opportunity to foster an informed public debate about the scheme's huge ramifications for information control and transparency in society, it's hard to feel too sympathetic.

Web site über-identities

Fred Wilson riffs on Rich Skrenta's observations about the standardisation of web site types:

Rich Skrenta points out the web pages have begun to be standardized.

Back in 1995, when the web was new, visitors to a new site would lean forward, squint at the page, and try to figure out how it worked.

That metaphor didn't last. People don't lean forward and squint at web pages to figure out how they work anymore. They instantly recognize -- within 100 milliseconds -- which class of site a page belong to -- search result, retail browse, blog, newspaper, spam site, message board, etc. And if they don't recognize what kind of page they're on, they generally give up and hit the back button.

That's an interesting observation and I think its true... Maybe the web has become like every other media before it. It's developing its own categories of services. In television, a show is a sitcom, a drama, a news show, etc, etc. It doesn't take very long to figure out what kind of TV show you are watching.

Is this good or bad? Has most of the innovation on the web already happened? Are we now in mainstream mode, sucking as much cash out of a mature model as we can?

I am not entirely sure. There have been a number of new web page metaphors successfully introduced in the past five years. The wiki style, the blog style, the web video page, the photo page model, etc. I think we aren't done with innovating, but it's interesting to think that the web has become so standardized in such a short time. Just a bit over ten years and it's certainly not the chaotic adventureland it once was.

We could recast this issue in terms of identity. There is a natural tension between the attraction to users, from an ease-of-use point of view, of websites which conform to a stable über-identity (a "blog" a "wiki" a "news site" and so forth) on one hand and the lure of innovative, sometimes useful, yet often disorientating website features on the other ("is it a video site? Is it a splog? Is it a plane?").

Of course, the huge majority of innovative site types languish or die with the pioneer site itself—they may offer marginally or even significantly improved utility over the standard models, but not sufficiently so to counterbalance the cost to the user of learning a new set of interactive metaphors. Sadly, thousands of "web 2.0" sites fall into this category.

It is only when a site type that offers a particular demographic a readily comprehensible, compelling and radically differentiated value proposition in comparison to existing site types arrives or evolves that the status quo of stable website über-identities is disrupted. Blogger and Typepad did it for blogs; Wikipedia and Mediawiki for wikis; Digg and Reddit (and others) for content rating services.

That is not to say, however, that successful website types must be mainstream: with the explosion of the widget universe, there are myriad opportunities for entrepreneurs to target very specific demographics—and particular types of web site may well evolve for very particular market segments. A niche service like MyBlogLog, which serves bloggers and their communities, is a great example here.

You are what you phone?

Nielsen Media has been asking some Australians about mobile identity—or rather, the identity of mobiles:

If you're carrying a Motorola mobile phone the chances are you are under 24 and fashion conscious.

But if you've got a Nokia in your pocket (or briefcase), it's a fair bet you might be a family-minded, middle-aged manager.

Sony Ericsson handsets are favoured by ambitious young men trying to make their mark; LGs are tops with mums; while Samsungs are wielded by young women focused on their career, a study of mobile phone usage shows.

Nielsen Media Research associate director Mr Jody Loughlin said all makes of mobiles had a wide spread of customer types but some groups were more attracted to certain brands than others.

Hum, am I really an ambitious young man trying to make my mark? Or does the insight only apply to Australians? And is 34 young these days? ; )

Consciousness and attention: not invariably linked

From Science Daily:

University College London researchers have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain's attention on a subconscious level. The wider implication for the study, published in Current Biology, is that techniques such as subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but still legal in the USA, certainly do leave their mark on the brain.

...

Dr Bahrami, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the UCL Department of Psychology, said: ... "This is exciting research for the scientific community because it challenges previous thinking -- that what is subconscious is also automatic, effortless and unaffected by attention. This research shows that when your brain doesn't have the capacity to pay attention to an image, even images that act on our subconscious simply do not get registered."

The research challenges the theory of the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher, William James, (1842--1910), who said: "We are conscious of what we attend to -- and not conscious of what we do not attend to".

The team's findings show that there are situations where consciousness and attention don't go hand in hand.

So we can be busy identifying the world around us, by paying active attention to it, and yet not be conscious of that process. Interesting.

Racial identity in the media

Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin writes about the crude representation of racial identity prevalent in the mainstream media:

“After having many talks with my mother about the issue, she reinforced what she had always taught me. She said that even though you are half-black and half-white, you will be discriminated against in this country as a black person...” – Halle Berry

...

The latest evidence of the media’s unwillingness to recognize racial diversity is the case of a young British racing car driver who gained almost instant fame in the racing world on April 25, which should not have been for the color of his skin. Finishing third in Melbourne, the 22-year-old became the first Formula One rookie since 1996 to appear on the winner’s podium. His name is Lewis Hamilton and he is of mixed racial parentage and light brown skin color, with features which cannot readily be categorized. Yet various media, not least that US standard of correctness, the Associated Press, and most of the media in Australia insisted on describing him as the “first black” Formula One driver.

Bloomberg called Hamilton “Formula One's first black driver, (who) finished third on his race debut in Australia to underline his potential and rebuff doubters who said he was promoted too soon.”

Quite clearly Hamilton is no more or less black or white than Halle Berry, who was acclaimed not long ago as the first “black” woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress. This is not merely inaccurate as a physical description. It must be viewed with some puzzlement, to say the least, by her mother who is a very white person from England.

The notion that anyone who has some black African blood is therefore “black” is perhaps the most evident sign of how deeply rooted racism remains in the US and Australia, including in the pages of supposedly liberal newspapers. (The British media has, to its rare credit, mostly chosen to adopt Hamilton as a new sporting hero without always defining him in racial terms).

The black/white categorization in the US remains as entrenched as ever despite the best efforts of Tiger Woods to focus attention not on his “black” identity but on the diversity of his background. Woods’ refusal to be thus classified was not only correct, to have done otherwise would have been to deny the identity of his mother, a Thai with part Chinese ancestry.

The mainstream media craves a simple message to sell. And that means forcing people's identity into black or white boxes, amongst many other kinds of boxes.

Moo cards

Moo is a natty service that allows you to create 100 little business cards for £10, where each of the cards can have a unique design or image. For me, this nicely reflects the way we are increasingly understanding and performing our identity in a rich and multifaceted way—as well as being fun!

I decided to have a go at using Moo to create a set of weaverluke cards, each of which will show a different "identity" quote from this blog. Then I can give appropriate cards out to each individual I network with—an "identity politics" card to a political journalist, an "identity and value" card to an investor and so on. Maybe I'll even put the individual blog post URL (web address) after each quote... Lots of possibilities...

Right, time to go trawling the archives for those quotes!

Another identity-related blog

I just discovered Ryan Lanham's blog, Identity Unknown, which is about "mashup, theory and opinion on ecologies, cultures, societies and individuals coping with identity in an Age of Unintended Consequences."

The blog's "topics" page gives a more detailed description of its remit:

What is the tie that binds across this admittedly eclectic blog?

In a word, it’s identity–but that word is vague at best. What I am about here is studying and reporting on the melting I see (that is, theorize) going on in various institutional and organizational forms during the current time of extensive global and technological interaction. My wife hears a lot about melting chocolate…melting shaving foam and the like.

I am also interested in the moral issues this institutional melting raises, particularly for realizing public action. That is, I worry about fading government institutions, proliferating jurisdictions, complex public networks of action, and public-private sorts of partnerships and their inadequacies.

Unlike many public administration scholars, I don’t seek to revitalize old institutions. Rather, I’d like to see them through to transformations that are sustainable and productively dynamic. You might say that I am trying to make sure that no one gets burned in the melting process however it may go.

Structures create borders. So I also worry about border disputes of various sorts such as those between “sectors” and other “imagined” categories. This takes me into conflicts and their resolvers of all sorts. As such, I study nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurship and a strange type of quasi-organization that eschews identity for action–I call these “post-organizations.” They include forms like community foundations, which is my dissertation topic. These post-organizations operate so as to downplay identity in favor of innovation–a very new concept, I think. I am big on enabling versus solving–I see them as points on a continuum of sorts.

I view innovation as approximately an inverse to social structure. Following actor-network-theory, I refer to the relationships that hold in a given situation for a given person (or an actant or group), as an ontology. That is a key term on this blog. Strong ontologies make innovation difficult. Strong ontologies=structure.

Overall, I think in terms of many co-operational and conflicting ontologies being in play all at the same time. We live in an ontology soup. It can either mesh gently or like a bunch of unsynchronized bits of steel.

In my theory, when an ontology fails to support a situation for the one applying a given version, the person/actant/group who thought they had it all together is thrust into dissonance–a sense of psychological unease. That cognitive dissonance leads to innovations. Innovation is thus the attempt to make ontologies more inclusive to absorb new situations.

Structure works in the opposite way but toward the same end. It prevents dissonance by enacting the same rules over and over again. While very efficient when things are relatively stable, structure doesn’t work very well in a time of uncertainty and interaction. Classic structure, in this sense of the term, is a bureaucracy in a corporation or government. But it is also as much found in the strict religious teachings of a fundamentalist sect. Anything that locks thinking is structure.

Surrounding an ontology are borders of boundary objects–another key term in this blog. A boundary object is something that is contested between ontologies. Thus, any ontological relationship or fact held by a person could be a boundary object with someone else’s ontology in any given situation–that is, everything can be contested by someone. Such contests also cause dissonance and thus also contribute to innovations when the conflicts arise in different situations.

“Strong ontologies,” e.g. orthodox faiths, reiterate certain key ontological boundary objects that underscore how that strong ontology is expected to be applied in various situations by its masters. Strong ontologies tend to isolate themselves and those who apply them. Consequently, they don’t work well in ages such as ours. Weak ontologies tend to be exploratory, but they have a tough time surviving very long. It is almost like the cell walls of plant cells versus animal cells. One is forceful, the other mobile. Both can find niches and thrive under various circumstances–a reason I am interested in ecology and evolution.

As I have already suggested, we are in an age where there is, in general, much greater interaction (e.g. globalization and Web 2.0). This age is causing much friction between various ontologies and the identities they support. As such, there are many identity-related crises and counter-crises of nationalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, classism, racism, etc.

I take no specific position regarding most ontologies. But I do tend to hold very weak boundary objects myself. I also respect, or try to respect, those with deep beliefs of one sort or another. I am generally inclined toward a pragmatic tolerance. I have my biases and boundaries, too.

The topics I treat in Identity Unknown relate to the milieu of all these considerations. I’d be happy to have your comments or, if you are truly engaged, your contributions.

This all sounds most interesting, and the focus on ontologies is right up my street. However, when I subscribed to the blog's feed, I found that very many of the posts (of which there are very many) make no explicit mention of identity itself. This seems to be mainly a link blog, with content very loosely constellated around "identity", with the occasional bit of commentary from Ryan. I shall give it a good try out in my aggregator and report back on anything of particular interest to identity truth seekers.

The identity of money

Michael Williams asks what the difference really is between "real" and "virtual" money:

The line between "virtual" money and "real" money is very fuzzy, especially in an age where even real money is earned and spent mostly electronically. I get my paycheck directly deposited to my bank account, I manage that account through a website, I spend the money with a credit card, and I pay off the credit card through another website. I rarely handle cash, even for very small transactions. So what's the difference between a Chinese yuan and a QQ coin?

HONG KONG -- China's fastest-rising currency isn't the yuan. It's the QQ coin -- online play money created by marketers to sell such things as virtual flowers for instant-message buddies, cellphone ringtones and magical swords for online games. ...

Then last year something happened that Tencent hadn't originally planned. Online game sites beyond Tencent started accepting QQ coins as payment. The coins appeal as a safer, more practical way to conduct small online purchases, because credit cards aren't yet commonplace in China.

At informal online currency marketplaces, thousands of users helped turn the QQ coins back into cash by selling them at a discount that varies based on the laws of supply and demand. Traders began jumping into the QQ coin market as an opportunity to make a quick yuan off of currency speculation.

State-run media reported that some online shoppers began using QQ coins to buy real-world items such as CDs and makeup. So-called QQ Girls started accepting the coins as payment for intimate private chats online. Gamblers caught wind, too, and started using the currency to get around China's anti-gambling laws, converting wins in online mahjong and card games back into cash. Dozens of third-party trading posts sprouted up to ease transactions, turning the QQ coin into a kind of parallel currency.

The only thing that separates QQ coins from yuans is that the former isn't issued by a government... but then that's never been a requirement in the definition of "money".

Michael goes on to explore Wikipedia's definition of money, and there's an interesting post comment on the same topic by Francis Porretto. One thing's for sure, though: when the tax man comes knocking on your virtual door, you'll know that your Linden Dollars or QQ coins are the real money deal.

Facebook's identity blinkers

Peter Parkes wants to know why Facebook doesn't show him ads that correspond to his identity.

I’m ineligible for their basketball promotion, and can’t join the US Army—yet Facebook insist on showing me ads for them. Irritating, and commercially suboptimal.

This tendency to focus primarily on serving and monetising the huge and homogenous US market, at the expense of other countries' citizens, is a natural tendency of many US-based startups. Hopefully, as the web and its associated economies continue to mature, US startups will come to see the value in thinking a little more globally.

Identity rape

Dick Hardt posts about the Kathy Sierra debacle:

Mitch Ratcliffe of ZDNet posted about the Identity Rape of Allen Herrell. He is one of the accused attackers in the Kathy Sierra controversy, and wrote a long email to Doc Searls explaining that his entire online identity has been compromised.

The dark side of society is emerging and taking advantage of the identity weaknesses in the Internet. It is very sad to see events like these be the drivers for the technology that us in the Identity Gang are working on.

The essence of the problem here is attribution. It seems that it may be difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt who was responsible for the dreadful comments made about Kathy Sierra; meanwhile, those accused have had their own online presence and reputation destroyed. And despite Dick's hopeful words about the Identity Gang's technology initiative, intrinsic limitations in biometric and security technologies make it very unlikely that we will ever be able to tie the physical and virtual spheres of identity together with sufficient reliability to rule out the possibility of this kind of horror recurring. In fact, the closer we get to the unattainable goal of absolute identity assurance, the higher the prize for troll hackers who manage to break a system that is popularly assumed to purvey "true" identity information.

UPDATE: David Weinberger writes about trying to second guess the ways that CNN might misrepresent his views in their edit of an interview he gave about the Kathy Sierra affair.

Pub wisdom

Spotted chalked on an A-frame blackboard outside a pub—you know, the kind that usually advertise sausage and chips, locally brewed ale or a quiz night—on the way home from a walk on Hampstead Heath:

The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.

So true. And I guess its such a hard challenge because we care about what other people think about us, so we react to our perceived victimisers' judgements and, in judging them back, become their victimiser in turn. Sigh.

Saying which, walking down St Andrews Street in Cambridge earlier today, I also saw on a church noticeboard this quotation from Martin Luther King written on a poster campaigning for justice in Palestine:

Until all of us are free, none of us are.

Seems like the universe is trying to tell me something today.

Value and identity

I increasingly feel that understanding value is key to understanding identity. Value is a concept that faces into our psychological and economic worlds. We value things and people emotionally; but things and people can also be of value to us in a concrete, material sense. And in "identifying" something or someone, are we not effectively assigning a complex set of values to them, whereby, for example, {entity type = human}, {eye colour = green} {relationship status with me = colleague} {name = Andrew}? Moreover, this kind of variable/value pairing is something that every geek understands—suggesting the possibility of a seamless extension of the values in our head to those in our computers if we could only understand how the heck our brain, and beyond it our consciousness, ticks.

My brilliant friend and white paper ("Towards the Identity Society"—pdf) co-author John Madelin talks about a three-dimensional business context of value, risk and convenience for information transactions; recasting this concept purely in terms of value, we might understand the dimensions of John's model as positive value potential ("value"), negative value potential ("risk") and the friction involved in realising the positive or negative potential value. An example: I buy a coffee grinder on eBay. The positive potential value for me is making a good-value purchase; the negative potential value (risk) is that I will be ripped off; the friction (convenience level) is how easy or hard my computer's software, eBay's web service, my bank and the seller make the whole process for me. And, of course, I value convenience highly.

Zoom out a little and look at the blue-green jewel of our planet from space. Value that? And the little creatures scuttling around on it? Thought so.

Value. It's a valuable concept.

Multilingualism—the default human condition?

This report on a recent British Council seminar on multilingualism has an interesting headline:

"Language experts push multilingualism to promote 'identity'"

It always make me chuckle when I read about "promoting" identity—like we could discourage it. ; ) But I think I get what they're getting at: when we learn to speak the language of the Other, we learn to see the world in a quite different context. I always feel like a rather different person when I speak, hear or read Japanese.

Linguistics specialist David Diamond is quoted towards the end of the report: "As we look around the world, we see that multilingualism is the default human condition, a principle that has been obscured in parts of Europe as a consequence of colonial history. We urgently need to reassert it, and to implement it in practical ways, for, in the modern world, monolingualism is not a strength but a handicap."

Multilingualism as "the default human condition" is an interesting concept to ponder. I once heard David speak at the Hay Festival, and found him full of intriguing ideas.

Now, I must get down to the Japan Centre to pick up a good novel, or the rusting of my Japanese will become irremediable...

Witness.org—persistent video narratives of human suffering

Bruno Giussani reports from the second day of the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, being held in Oxford, UK:

Singer Peter Gabriel (of Genesis fame) tells about the almost-15-years-long experience of Witness.org, the non-profit he set up to encourage use of visual media (mainly video) and communication technology (Internet) to document human rights abuses (see here for his speech at TED2006). He tells about his epiphany meeting people that had been tortured and abused, "and what I found extraordinary is that people can suffer in extraordinary ways and then have their experience denied and forgotten. But it seems that when there is video and photo it is much harder to deny the story and for people's experience to be forgotten". Witness.org was started to give out cameras to local activists and NGOs helping them to tell their stories and raising awareness around the world -- "cell phone manufacturers did a pretty good job at that". Of course, he says, it isn't enough to get a camera out to a remote location, people need training and support. Fifteen years on, Witness.org still reaches small numbers of people. Now Witness.org is about to launch, in a few months, a Human Rights hub, "a sort of YouTube + Wikipedia for human rights", to allow anyone from anyplace in the world the chance of telling their story, have it uploaded and seen, and perhaps not forgotten nor discarded.

Gillian Caldwell, the director of Witness, gives some details on the site, as a destination for all kind of human rights-related media (audio, video, pictures) where everybody can upload, see, get educated, and act on it. This last point is crucial in the Witness.org approach, which she calls "video advocacy": use video as tool, as evidence, to raise awareness, to target key decision makers, to inflect policies, etc. There will be features on the site for organization, for activism (things like: print out 15 copies of this picture and get them delivered to members of Congress), for syndicating the content out to other sites, etc. Witness will also be organizing a "video advocacy institute" next July in Canada, bringing people together for training, with case studies, examples from all over the world, etc.

Hats off to Witness: giving people a chance to tell their own stories is a key ingredient of an Identity Society; just as important is enabling the reframing of those stories within overarching narratives that let us to feel our human commonalities—in this case, revulsion, anger and sadness at the suffering we blindly inflict upon one another, and a desire to do better. Hats off to Witness on both counts.

Winsome corporate girlies

Nic Brisbourne writes (at the end of this post):

I am hearing worrying rumours that less than half of MySpace profiles belong to true members (as opposed to corporates and spammers) and that MySpace is even encouraging corporates to set up fake profiles (usually of pretty girls) that make lots of friends and recommend their products.

It's a weird, weird world we are living in—is anything or anyone what they seem to be these days? (If they ever were?).

Second Life and narrative friction

Alan Graham critiques Second Life's lack of overarching narrative structure:

A lot of people ask me what I think about Second Life.

I'm not going to pull any punches. It's boring.

Really…really…boring.

...

While there are no "rules" and the world is largely capable of anything the users wish it to be or do…it is that lack of structure that makes me not care. It simply isn't enough to buy a piece of virtual land and put something on it. Without story, without mythology, without a living and progressing narrative…without goals and dreams…what's the point?

Buying a giant virtual penis for your avatar is not the same as a narrative that removes us from who we are and explores who we might be… through mystery, a quest, or a challenge.

Narrative is a tool with which we construct our identity through time, in relation to the world around us. People have traditionally constructed those narratives within a world that imposes very material limitations upon them; yet it is in the often arduous process of transcending those limitations that we find wisdom, authenticity and fulfillment.

So for me, it is as much the lack of narrative friction as the lack of a ready-made "über narrative" per se that makes Second Life seem so empty, despite all of its surface complexity and invention.

[UPDATE:] I just saw a comment by "MarkTwainWhite" on Alan's post that chimes nicely with my narrative friction idea, but also serves to caution me against taking too simplistic an attitude to the potentials and limitations of Second Life or virtual worlds in general. This guy is clearly strongly engaged with his Second Life narrative because he is trying to build a profitable business that he cares about within Second Life.

Second Life is the blank page on which people write their own stories. The alphabet of Second Life is the program that Linden Lab provides (singular lab by the way Alan). The language is the fabric of reality that residents created prior to your arrival in world. It's up to you to write the story or to simply interface with the language provided and "play" as you did as a child.

In my case I turned my attention to creating and running a successful sub-continent of sims where those SLers who love sailing and golf can come and play out their dreams and exercise their skills to play golf and race sail boats.

They say a good story has character arc. Believe me, my character has been developing an arch of successes and failures for two years now that keep him coming back for more. They say a good game should provide a goal that is attainable but only with great effort. Will my Holly Kai Golf Courses succeed to become one of the truly profitable businesses in Second Life that doesn't involve land sales or sex? I don't know. But I can tell you that I sure as hell am not bored as I watch this fascinating story unfold before my eyes on a daily basis.

I guess wherever people find emotional engagement, they find narrative depth and mirrors and resonances of their identity. It's all in the perception.

Supermarket as airport

There was a brilliant piece in last week's Green Room on the BBC News site from Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation (Nef). Andrew details the massive environmental and socioeconomic costs of the implacable rise and rise of the Supermarket. A key quote:

"Supermarkets have trained us to believe that nothing but affordability should constrain what, when or how much we consume."

For me, supermarkets have a rootless quality of identity, a bit like airports; their products are branded like ever-cheaper flights to the most "exotic" global destinations. The rich geographic and socioeconomic context of the Product is subsumed within the supermarket's transnational brand.

Is there a way beyond this supermarket identity soup? A way to plug products back into the socioeconomic fabric, as they were when we bought a pork chop reared by Jim the farmer from Bill the local butcher? These are great questions for us to ponder...

Carbon footprint labels scheme

BBC News reports:

A labelling scheme that will show customers the size of a product's "carbon footprint" has been unveiled.

The initiative, operated by the Carbon Trust, will show shoppers how much carbon was emitted in the manufacture and transportation of the goods.

Participating companies also have to agree to cut the product's carbon footprint over a two-year period or face being thrown out of the scheme.

It will be interesting to see how detailed the label information is—and whether it breaks down shipping carbon costs into its inter- and (much larger) intra-national elements. (There's no indication that it will do so on the relevant Carbon Trust page here.)

On a related note, Jamais Cascio points out the need for carbon labels to not only show the carbon cost of the product but also a guideline "recommended" figure:

[N]ow the Carbon Trust, a UK non-profit that works with businesses to reduce their greenhouse impacts, has embarked on an effort to build a labeling standard for adoption across industries. (It should come as no surprise that I'm very much in favor of this sort of labeling!)

So let's say this works out, and soon every bag of crisps you buy has a little label on it showing how many grams of carbon resulted from that bag's production. Now you can compare it to other snacks, and try to eat only the goodies with smaller numbers in the label. But while that level of comparison is helpful, it doesn't offer the larger context necessary to make the comparison meaningful. You still don't know whether both the (e.g.) 100g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of crisps and the (e.g.) 50g of carbon resulting from the production of a bag of carrots are outrageously high, ridiculously low, or vanishingly irrelevant.

Giving purchasers a more contextual sense of product carbon cost may actually be an area that is ripe for disintermediation of the retailers by social web services—if I could scan a product's barcode with my phone camera and then view it's carbon cost in relation to other equivalent products (via a web service), I could readily get a sense of its carbon cost in its relevant context.

False product memory: a love/hate thing?

Reader Andy Pearson kindly emailed me a link to this post by Clive Thompson on a fascinating bit of research into website interactivity and false memory:

Can an interactive web site produce false memories?

Possibly so, according to a fascinating paper to be published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington. Schlosser performed an intriguing experiment: She took two groups of people and had them check out two different web sites devoted to the same digital camera. One site included static pictures; the other was interactive, allowing users to play around with a virtual version of the product.

Later, she tested them on their ability to recall details about the camera. She intentionally included details that were false, but sufficiently plausible that they might have been true. The result? The people who viewed the interactive demo of the camera were much more likely than the folks who'd only viewed static images to "remember" the false details as being present. Or another way of putting it: The interactive demo was more likely to produce false memories of the product -- potential buyers who thought the camera could do things it can't.

Why? Schlosser theorizees that it's partly because interactivity encourages more "certainty" in our memories, and thus increases the likelihood that we'll believe suggestively false details to be true.

I pondered for a while how this phenomenon might be understood in terms of identity. Then it struck me that, when a person interacts with the digital representation of a product, the difference between a one-dimensional interaction on one hand, and a rich and fluid interaction on the other is rather akin to the difference between a platonic and romantic interpersonal relationship.

With a platonic friend, we experience the relationship from a relatively consistent perspective; boundaries are clear, the social and functional context of the relationship firmly established.

With a lover, by contrast, our whole world view is turned upside down and inside out as we experience the boundaries between Self and Other becoming deliciously (and sometimes alarmingly!) fluid, and we feel the soul of the Other resonate in depths of our psyche that we visit seldom or never. In our desire for union with our lover, we want to know everything about her—and what we don't or can't know, we happily imagine.

Is it too far fetched to imagine, then, that our greater willingness to believe that we know information about a product when we have experienced an interaction with that product that is relatively rich, fluid—intimate, even—could be no more than the effects of an incipient romance?

On the other hand, it would also be interesting to know whether or not the false memory effect arose in the case of products which the subject fluidly interacted with but ultimately disliked, as well as with those they liked. This would actually also make sense to me, as we tend to project identity traits onto those we feel strongly about positively