ChatRoulette, Google, and Privacy Collide
Recently, I came across a posting from a personal blog discussing the large proportion of explicit photos that are popping up on ChatRoulette. The author intoned the comfortable rhetoric of a practiced Internet-ian, avowing that yes it was perfectly fine, things like that happen on the Internet all the time. And, as an addendum, the author noted that “so does community moderation”.
To that end, and because he and the wife find such things kind of “perv”, he decided to create a kind of “rogues gallery” of “pervs”, the idea being that if you publicly “shame” them, they will stop it, thereby making the world a safer place for, well, him and the wife.
Aside from the general asshat-ery of such an endeavor, it proffers a certain selfish implementation of the social contract. “I am offended, so I should be able to unilaterally attack you for it”. No live and let live, I’ll just change the channel. Unfortunately, not uncommon behavior among technocrats. I wondered how he would feel if someone wrote an app identifying blog posters with cloy and offensive children, including their IP addresses, and mashed it up with a Google Map app so we could locate them. You know, shame them into not having children.
Invasions of privacy aren’t left to entrepreneurial individuals. Lately, corporations have been getting into the act. Google’s recent Buzz offering only seemed to highlight a disturbing creed within the company that everything you do is public, and if it isn’t, well “you probably shouldn’t be doing it”, as in the words of their CEO, Eric Schmidt. This places the technocrats in a disturbing position, having to defend a “free Internet” on one face, while also having to defend the rights of corporations to abscond with that freedom when they desire content.
What happens when governments and corporations create an alliance in such matters? We’re finding out as Google plays its “censorship” cards in China vis a vis the US State Department. Nevermind that they didn’t mind censoring results for 4 years, or that they didn’t mind turning over web history records on an individual in Brazil who had been simply accused of child pornography. Privacy is to be applied on a privileged basis. It’s also interesting that prior to the accusations against the Chinese government, they had lost their chief executive in the region who claimed that they could not win in the Chinese market and weren’t doing what would be required to win.
In the latest row involving Facebook, Argentine authors of a book mildly satirical of the enterprise found themselves suddenly erased from the user lists, and their fan page unceremoniously removed. After 3 weeks of no response, the organization finally restored their user profiles. But only because news organizations from the region had started to spotlight their lack of transparency and the dangers of using the service.
My point in discussing these corporate and personal behaviors is that – ultimately – organizations and individuals expect the Internet and services like Google and Facebook to behave like a utility, a required dependance as participation in society. And yet, they are also willing sometimes to behave willy-nilly in the application of doctrine and rules, to suit personal biases and prejudices. Therein lies the creation of an unacceptable discrimination.
However, the network topology of the Internet is remarkably resistant to control, no matter how hard it is tried. It’s either on or it isn’t.
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