The Saturday market is one of my favorite weekly events here in Galway. Colleagues captured a few shots of on film.

vegetables at the Galway Saturday Market

It’s more diverse than vegetables, but that’s a good start. And pretty vegetables they are!

See also this pointer to a photoessay of Galway; and feel free to recommend others.

Our breakout session on privacy was well-attended, with about 15 people, mainly coming from backgrounds in healthcare, insurance, and the like. There was a quite active discussion.

Alpha release privacy icon indicating "your data may be bartered or sold".

In addition to the questions I shared earlier, I was asked to give pointers to a few things I mentioned.

Aza Raskin asked, Could we make privacy policies as simple as CreativeCommons has made licensing? There’s now an alpha release of the privacy icons. Earlier info about the project is also in Aza’s blog.

…the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.

But I came across that article in conjunction with a story about a teenager whose publicity had caused her embarrassment and harm, when a sports blogger posted her picture along with a 4-paragraph note excerpted as “Meet pole vaulter Allison Stokke. . . . Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds.”

…what could she do now, when a search for her name in Yahoo! revealed almost 310,000 hits? “It’s not like I could e-mail everybody on the Internet,” Stokke said.

She felt like

Her body had been stolen and turned into a public commodity, critiqued in fan forums devoted to everything from hip-hop to Hollywood.

danah boyd, who has extensively researched teens and the Internet, has also written and spoken sagely about privacy.

Here’s an except from a talk she gave: “The Future of Privacy: How Privacy Norms Can Inform Regulation”

All too often, folks presume that privacy is about hiding information or controlling access to information. This is a very limited view. For teens, privacy has more to do with feeling safe and in control of a situation, trusting people and systems, and leveraging an understood context for intimacy.

Let me ground this in an example. If I’m dealing with an illness, I’m not hiding it from people just because I’m not talking about it. If I choose to share my illness, I’m probably not going to start by standing up in the middle of the town square and shouting loudly to everyone who could possibly hear that I’m ill. I may start by gathering my family and sharing in an intimate situation where I feel supported. I open up to them, make myself vulnerable, in exchange for support. This is privacy. I also have expectations about that social situation. I expect my family to respect the situation in which I shared something deeply personal. I _trust_ them to understand how far that information is supposed to be spread. Any one of them is capable of breaking my trust, telling someone against my wishes and expectations, but what’s at stake is the relationship. My agency, my power, in that situation does not stem from me locking my family in a closet after I told them something personal. It comes from the social expectation that they respect the context of the situation.

There are certain structural assumptions baked into this unmediated scenario. First, and most importantly, there is an assumption in everyday interactions that conversations are private-by-default, public through effort. In unmediated situations, publicity takes effort. We have to consciously tell other people what we hear. Shouting to the entire town square is a lot harder than telling just a few people. Even when we share in public places, there’s a huge difference between sitting in a cafe talking with a friend and screaming to the entire room. Sure, people can overhear us in the cafe. And they do. But that doesn’t mean that they’re in the conversation. Sociologist Erving Goffman noted that there’s a societal value of “civil inattention.” Even when we can overhear conversations, we generally try to not listen. Doing so is a way of indicating that we respect others’ space. This isn’t universal and people are always jumping into conversations that they’re not a part of. But all of the parties know that they’re “butting in.”

What’s different about the Internet is not about a radical shift in social norms. What’s different has to do with how the architecture shifts the balance of power in terms of visibility. In online public spaces, interactions are public-by-default, private-through-effort, the exact opposite of what we experience offline. There is no equivalent to the cafe where you can have a private conversation in public with a close friend without thinking about who might overhear. Your online conversations are easily overheard. And they’re often persistent, searchable, and easily spreadable. Online, we have to put effort into limiting how far information flows. We have to consciously act to curb visibility. This runs counter to every experience we’ve ever had in unmediated environments.

When people participate online, they don’t choose what to publicize. They choose what to limit others from seeing. Offline, it takes effort to get something to be seen. Online, it takes effort for things to NOT be seen. This is why it appears that more is public. Because there’s a lot of content out there that people don’t care enough about to lock down. I hear this from teens all the time. “Public by default, privacy when necessary.” Teens turn to private messages or texting or other forms of communication for intimate interactions, but they don’t care enough about certain information to put the effort into locking it down. But this isn’t because they don’t care about privacy. This is because they don’t think that what they’re saying really matters all that much to anyone. Just like you don’t care that your small talk during the conference breaks are overheard by anyone. Of course, teens aren’t aware of how their interactions in aggregate can be used to make serious assumptions about who they are, who they know, and what they might like in terms of advertising. Just like you don’t calculate who to talk to in the halls based on how a surveillance algorithm might interpret your social network.

I’d particularly recommend “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity” and “Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data“. As danah points out, social media conversations essentially *require* sharing personally identifying information. But it’s personally embarrassing information that people don’t want spread.

Today at 3 (in Heidelberg) I’m running a breakout session on QS & Privacy: How can we ensure privacy as we share our data stories? What rights and responsibilities do we have? Where is the public-prviate boundary?

Here are a few provocative thoughts from conversations so far today.

Body Blogger Kiel Gilleade talked about heartrate this morning:

My boss called me to ask whether I was working on a deadline because my heart rate was in the green zone rather than in the red zone like the last paper-writing deadline.

He observes: situational & contextual info is crucial for interpretation.

Tom Hume tweeted:

You don’t control your identity. It’s manufactured by those around you. #qs2011

Joshua Kauffman tweeted:

There is no such thing as personal health data. All matters of health are socially shared and derived. #qs2011

My talk on exercise and weight tracking at QuantifiedSelfEurope was video’d and will be world-viewable on the Quantified Self blog at some point in the future.

So far being visible has been beneficial, so despite the challenge, I’m sharing slides. As I said during the talk, an exercise monitor is something of a conversation piece: to ask a fat person “Are you trying to lose weight?” is generally rude. But an exercise monitor has been a point of entry to me for useful conversations and interesting ideas (like weight averaging and tracking tools).

I’ll add video when that’s available.

What is this Quantified Self stuff, anyway? Here’s a brief intro (prettier PDF version) Nathan Yau and I wrote.

This weekend I’m in Amsterdam for Quantified Self Europe. So far this morning I’ve met Arduino hackers, seen several talks about monitoring heart rate (continuously, cool, or even with swimming goggles) and lung capacity. Oh, and given a talk about Exercise and Weight tracking.

There’s lots of blogging/photoblogging going on. Twitter hashtag (formerly #QSelfEurope) is #QS2011.

Here’s an argument made on Twitter:

Difference between cakes and biscuits? When stale, cakes go hard, biscuits go soft. Hence Jaffa Cakes are cakes. (Was official EU ruling).

I just love this example:

1. First, you can find it with “hence” (see cue phrases from an appendix to Marcu‘s thesis).
2. Second, the notion of this EU (tax) ruling amuses me.
3. Third, it shows that 140 characters is enough for a complex argumentative structure. This has three main claims: When stale, cakes go hard, biscuits go soft; Jaffa Cakes are cakes; and [Jaffa Cakes are cakes due to] official EU ruling.
4. Enthymemes anyone?

It’s hard, though, to draw the line between an argument and an explanation in this context.
Jaffa Cakes, for you North American readers, are a common dessert-y snack in Ireland and the UK. Vaguely like Kandy Kakes found in the Philadelphia area/East Coast, but usually have an orange filling.

This is my kind of performance art, from this year’s Printer’s Ball. Got pictures, anybody?

Busted Books: The Great Soaking. Performance by Davis Schneiderman. Attendees are invited to use a artisan-constructed dunk tank to soak either a book or a Kindle—depending upon the dunker’s feelings regarding the printed word and e-readers. With this simple choice, this physical act, readers can finally stop theorizing about the future of the book and do something about it.

When the topic of discussion changes, how do you indicate that? Tender Support seems clunky in some ways, but their forking mechanism helps conversations stay focused on their topic:

Forking with Tender Support

Lately forking has also been on my mind as the Library Linked Data group edits and reorganizes our draft report: wiki history and version control is helpful, but insufficient. What I miss most is a “fork” feature, where you could temporarily take ownership of a copy (socially, this indicates that something is a possibility, rather than the consensus; technically, it indicates provenance, would allow “show all forks of this”, and might help in merge changes back). Perhaps naming and tagging particular history items in MediaWiki could help address this, but I think really I want something like git.

I’ve seen a few examples of writing and editing prose with git; I’d like to get a better understanding of the best practices for making collaborative changes in texts with distributed version control systems. Surely somebody’s written up manuals on this?

Yesterday, our local hackerspace/makerspace re-opened!

For awhile now, Fiacre O’Duinn has been talking about the shared purpose between libraries and these spaces:

The ideas that fuel hackerspaces, such as cooperation, resource and information sharing, self-directed education, and a diversity of views are concepts that are central to our profession’s ethos.

Not to mention the cool tech (3D printers, laser engravers, tool lending libraries, …) we’d like to see in libraries in the not-so-distant future.

It’s a conversation I hope to pick up with Willow & others (thx!)at CCCamp.

GetSatisfaction does so many things right. Smart, immediate feedback is one example.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed this message while adding a post:
“EASE UP ON THE ALL CAPS IN YOUR TITLE. It looks like you’re shouting”

This is great in several ways:

1. It’s immediate.
2. It makes a single, clear, personalized¹ suggestion.
3. It uses a familiar analogy (“shouting”) — helping to explain the perceived problem.
4. It’s not enforced: this nudges the poster, but leaves them to make up their own mind.
5. It hints at humor/puts the shoe on the other foot (by USING CAPS FOR THE START OF THE MESSAGE).
6. It’s not overwhelming.

Like their mood feedback it’s lightweight and appears to be effective.

1. i.e. specific to the situation