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The Network Observer Vol 01 No 10
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 10 OCTOBER 1994
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This month: The gender politics of "exploring" the net
Strange ideas about privacy
Pre-employment background checks
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Welcome to TNO 1(10).
This month's issue includes two articles by the editor. The
first one explores the metaphor of "exploring" the Internet,
suggesting that the gross disorganization of the net promotes
a social construction of the net as a masculine place and a
neglect of the historically feminine activity of librarianship.
The second article lists a batch of unfortunate arguments about
informational privacy that I have encountered in my reading
and travel over the last year, together with my own rebuttals
against them. May these rebuttals serve you in your own privacy
activism.
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Is the net a wilderness or a library?
At the CPSR Annual Meeting earlier this month, Karen Coyle gave a
rip-roaring speech that set me thinking about metaphors for using
the net. Karen is a library automation specialist and a CPSR
activist who is active in getting women and girls involved in
computing. In her speech she pointed out that, as a technology
for making information available to people, compared to any
real library, the Internet is an amateur job. Sure there's a
reasonable amount of information, but it has been haphazardly
collected, is almost completely disorganized, has no standard
cataloguing system, and only the beginnings of a decent, uniform
interface.
Discussing her speech with another CPSR activist, Jim Davis,
later that evening, I suddenly connected several things that
had been bothering me about the language and practice of the
Internet. The result was a partial answer to the difficult
question, in what sense is the net "gendered"? The reason this
question is difficult is that we don't want to be reductionist
about it. It's clearly not true that only men use the net,
or that only men find the net worthwhile, or that all women
encounter more obstacles to net usage than any men do. Our
analysis needs to be more subtle than that. I don't claim to
have a finished answer, but I do think I have one piece of it.
That piece starts with the metaphor of "exploring". I've talked
with several people who have tried to teach Internet usage to
people who aren't computer professionals, and there's one thing
they all tell me: many students give up in frustration after
repeatedly getting lost using "browsing" tools like Gopher and
Mosaic. Even a decent "history" menu doesn't seem to suffice.
They find themselves "somewhere" in the net, don't know where
they are, don't know how to find their way back there, and see
no real logical connection between any one place and any other.
Note the curious collision of metaphors here. The most common
use of "browsing" is in regard to libraries: wandering down
the aisles in known sections, seeing what books might be on the
shelf, just in case something interesting comes up. The word
is also often applied to the analogous activity in bookstores.
Applied to a tool like Mosaic or Gopher, though, the metaphor is
precisely backward: libraries and bookstores have clear ordering
systems that are visible in the spatial layout of the building,
and "browsing" suggests that you haven't got any very specific
goal in your looking-around. But no such visible ordering system
is found in gopherspace or the WorldWide Web, and people often
need to use those tools to actually find something that has
certain properties.
But "browsing" isn't really the generative metaphor that's at
work in systems like Gopher or the Web. The generative metaphor
-- the metaphor that generates new meanings and new language
for the activity of using the tools -- is "exploring". One uses
these tools to "explore" the net. Think what *this* metaphor
entails. One normally explores alone, or with a small "party"
with a definite organization. One has a location at any given
time, yet one does not normally know with any precision what that
location is. One is in strange territory, far from home, and the
assumption is that few others like oneself have been there before
-- at least, any markings on rocks or trees that are recognizable
as being from one's own kind are rare and important signs. One
is normally in danger, or at least in grave uncertainty, and one
must learn to tolerate continual fear. (See my discussion of the
related metaphor of the "electronic frontier", employed by the
otherwise laudable Electronic Frontier Foundation, in TNO 1(5).)
All of this does, in fact, describe the experience of many new
users of tools like Gopher and Mosaic -- and many other such
tools as well. Maybe they get used to it, and maybe they don't.
The real question, though, is: should they *have* to get used
to it? Clearly not. Yet for many people, "exploring" is close
to defining the experience of the net. It is clearly a gendered
metaphor: it has historically been a male activity, and it
comes down to us saturated with a long list of meanings related
to things like colonial expansion, experiences of otherness, and
scientific discovery. Explorers often die, and often fail, and
the ones that do neither are heroes and role models. This whole
complex of meanings and feelings and strivings is going to appeal
to those who have been acculturated into a particular male-marked
system of meanings, and it is not going to offer a great deal of
meaning to anyone who has not. The use of prestigious artifacts
like computers is inevitably tied up with the construction of
personal identity, and "exploration" tools offer a great deal
more traction in this process to historically male cultural
norms than to female ones.
This sort of thing cuts particularly hard in middle schools,
when kids between 10 and 15 establish both their gendered adult
social identities and their formative skills and relationships
with technology. Once the computer room gets defined as a "boys'
place", it's just about all over for girls. Teachers abet this
process when they reinforce the pointlessly masculine metaphors
of exploration through their lessons in the computer lab.
If the net necessarily worked this way, or if it worked this
way for a good reason, then we'd have a real problem here. But,
as Karen Coyle points out, that's not the case. The net right
now really is an amateur job, and perhaps it's not surprising
that the missing element is something that historically has
been strongly coded as a female activity, namely librarianship:
ordering, marking, and cataloguing information so that people can
actually find it and use it, and staffing the desk where people
go for help with this process.
Are the net's dysfunctionalities actually central to the gendered
experience of using the net? And what if they are? Then maybe
those heroic browsing tools should be left for the second course
on using the Internet, and maybe the far more useful skills
of communicating on the net should occupy the first course. I
don't just mean technical skills here -- I also mean the skills
of composing clear texts, reading with an awareness of different
possible interpretations, recognizing and resolving conflicts,
asking for help without feeling powerless, organizing people to
get things done, and embracing the diversity of the backgrounds
and experiences of others. Just sending and receiving messages
on the computer is of little use in itself if these deeper human
lessons are not taught and learned as well. Electronic mail
interaction is a good place to learn these skills because the
e-mail texts can be saved, inspected, discussed, thought over,
revised, presented as models, collaborated upon, and so forth.
What's more, the motions of typing slow the process down enough
that impulsive reaction becomes more difficult and thoughtful
reflection becomes more likely.
But I think that an ever deeper question lurks behind the issue
of network metaphors. Where is the reference desk on the net?
Some systems (like the Well) have schemes where you can "shout"
for help to the other users and get technical assistance, but
these schemes are few, not standardized, often unreliable, and
usually limited to technical matters. Why is the net developing
without leaving a place for the important role played by real,
live human librarians in libraries? The librarian is the person
who knows what information is out there, where and how to find
it, which tools work best for searching, which reference works
are best for what purposes, how the special collections are
organized, who is the expert on what, and so forth. A library
isn't just a bunch of books: it's a human system that's set up to
help connect people to information.
Why isn't the net like this? Why does the space you "explore" in
Gopher or Mosaic look empty even when it's full of other people?
Why isn't there a mechanism for asking for help? It wouldn't be
hard to organize. Just as libraries use networks now to share
the costs of cataloguing books through organizations like the
Cooperative Cataloguing Council, they could also share the costs
of on-line professional librarianship assistance in order to
provide 24-hour coverage to participating institutions. This
process would need software support as well: when you need help,
you'd type in a text message (or just enter a voice recording)
explaining what you're trying to do. You would be automatically
connected to a helper, and a snapshot of your "browser" session
would appear on their screen. A simple expert system would guess
at which helper would be best suited to your question, based on
their areas of expertise.
It's important to do this on the library model and not just on a
commercial model. Librarians have no conflicts of interest that
might influence them to steer you toward particular databases,
and they're not paid by the hour so they have no interest in
prolonging the interaction unnecessarily. They do, however,
have an organizational interest in customers being happy with
the library. They also have long experience in balancing the
interests of the organization they're paid to serve (for example,
a particular university) with the larger public interest.
What would the Internet's tools be like if their designers
routinely thought about the social relationships of their use?
It's a hard question, precisely because of the one-user-one-tool
model of lonely exploration that still routinely goes into
the design of such systems. The net opens up a whole world
of possible new ways of connecting people together, but we'll
squander its potential until we appreciate the role of the
helping professions, and more generally the thoroughly social
nature of the activities that are, we are told, rapidly migrating
into the chilly nighttime of cyberspace.
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Some strange ideas about privacy.
The emergence of new digital technologies is opening up a new
world of privacy issues. Along the way, our ideas about what
privacy even *is* will presumably be rethought and refought
in a variety of ways. TNO 1(7) has already looked at some new
concepts of privacy that might be required to understand the use
of computers to track human activities, and TNO 1(6) has taken a
quick look at one attempt to define "privacy" in such a way that
companies protect your privacy by accumulating massive amounts of
information on you.
Here I collect some strange ideas about privacy that I have
encountered in my reading and traveling over the last year.
I have not tried to document any of them in a scholarly way,
and the bulleted quotations represent composite or abbreviated
versions of the lines I have heard. My purpose is not to make
accusations against the people who use such lines. Many people
honestly believe them, and many others are just passing along
half-thought-out ideas that they've heard elsewhere. Instead, I
want to help you to recognize these lines when you encounter them
-- and equip you to argue back against them when the situation
calls for it.
* "We've lost so much of our privacy anyway."
This line plays upon the dire rhetoric of privacy campaigners
and somehow turns it on its head: we've already lost our privacy,
so further steps to protect it are futile. I hear this a lot
from technical people when I recommend that they employ privacy
protections in their newly designed systems. It's important
to spread the word about the routine invasions of our privacy,
but it's also important to remind everyone of how much privacy
we have left to lose. You can still drive pretty much anywhere
you like without leaving records behind. You can still pay for
most things in cash. Hardly anyone has to report their sexual
activities to anyone else -- or whether you eat fattening
foods, or who your friends are, or your religion. You don't
need an internal passport to travel in most countries, and
so you don't have to register your movements. If you live in
the United States then you enjoy a fair amount of protection
under the legislation such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act and
the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. We can lose these
things, and we *will* lose them, unless we ensure that each new
generation of technology has the privacy protections it needs.
* "Privacy is an obsolete Victorian hang-up."
The basic idea is that we'll soon lose all control over our
personal information, and after some hand-wringing we'll just
get used to it. Protecting our personal information is equated
with prudishness, obsessional modesty, cultural embarrassment,
and unliberated secrecy. People who believe such things are, in
my experience, invariably either ignorant of or in denial about
the realities of social oppression. Let's send them to live in
a place where everybody knows everything about you for a while.
There's a world of difference about being voluntarily "open", on
one's own terms, about one's liberated sexuality and experiencing
mandatory invasion and publicity of the less happy details of
one's sexual life. The same thing goes for your phone records,
where you've been driving, what you ate for dinner, and a great
deal else.
* "Ideas about privacy are culturally specific and it is thus
impossible to define privacy in the law without bias."
This argument is found often in the American legal literature,
principally among people whose political commitments would not
otherwise dispose them to heights of cultural sensitivity. It
is true that certain ideas about privacy are culturally specific
-- Oscar Gandy, for example, reports that African-Americans find
unsolicited telemarketing calls to be less invasive than do their
fellow citizens of European descent. But this sort of argument
quickly turns obnoxious as the issues become more serious.
Amnesty International is not based on any sort of relativism
about torture, and neither should Privacy International be
overly impressed by governments claiming that their culture
is compatible with the universal tracking of citizens, or that
objections to such things represent cultural bias. The argument
is especially specious with relation to tort law, the area where
it is most commonly made, since tort law arises in large part
through the rational reconstruction of the decisions of juries in
particular cases. If you throw out concepts of privacy on such
grounds then you must also throw out concepts like contract as
well.
* "We have strong security on our data."
In my experience, this argument is common even among people
who regard themselves as privacy activists. It arises through
a widespread confusion between privacy and security. Privacy
and security are very different things. Informational privacy
means that I get to control my personal information. Data
security means that *someone else* in an organization somewhere
gets to control my personal information by, among other things,
withholding access from those outside the organization. Of
course, this organization may have my best interests in mind,
and may even seek my approval before doing anything unusual with
my information. The problem arises when the organization itself
wants to invade my privacy, for example by making secondary uses
of information about its transactions with me. Those secondary
uses of the data can be as secure as you like, but they are still
invasions of my privacy.
* "National identity cards protect privacy by improving
authentication and data security."
It might indeed be argued that my privacy is not protected
if individuals in a society don't have enough of a standardized
institutional identity to authenticate themselves when they make
claims on organizations (for example, when buying on credit).
But the holes in current mechanisms for officially conferring
identity can be patched to a major extent without resorting
to universal identification cards. State Departments of Motor
Vehicles in the United States, for example, need to institute
much better policies at one of the notorious weak points in the
system, namely the issuance of replacement drivers' licenses.
It would accomplish a lot, I think, simply to mail out a letter
about the new license to all known addresses of the legitimate
license holder.
* "Informational privacy can be protected by converting it into
a property right."
This one has suddenly become extremely common, as articulated
for example by Anne Branscomb in her book "Who Owns Information?".
Additionally, many people have begun to spin elaborate scenarios
about the future market in personal information, in which I can
withhold my personal information unless the price is right. These
scenarios might hold some value for certain purposes, but they have
little to do with protecting informational privacy. The crucial
issue is bargaining power. The organizations that gobble your
personal information today have computer systems that, by their very
design, profoundly presuppose that the organization will capture
information about you and store it under a unique identifier. They
mostly capture this information with impunity because you can do
little to stop them. If your personal information were suddenly
redefined by the law as personal property tomorrow, assuming
that the lawyers figured out what this idea even *means*, then
I predict that, the day after tomorrow, every adherence contract
(that's legalese for "take it or leave it", the prototype being
those preprinted contracts for credit cards and rental cars and
mortgages that are covered with fine print that the firm's local
representative has no authority to modify or delete) in the affected
jurisdiction would suddenly sprout a new clause issuing to the
organization an unrestricted license (or some such legal entity)
over the use of your personal information. You can refuse, of
course, but you'll be in precisely the same position that you are
today: take it or leave it. The widespread belief to the contrary
reflects a downright magical belief in the efficacy of property
rights. Establishing property rights in your personal information
might actually be a good idea, but it's not nearly sufficient.
What's really needed is machinery that establishes parity of
bargaining power between individuals and organizations -- the
informational equivalent of unions or cooperatives that can bargain
as a unit for better terms with large organizations. That machinery
most likely doesn't need property rights to be defined over personal
information, but maybe it would make things clearer. That's the
only real argument I can find for the idea, and it's not a very
strong one.
* "We have to balance privacy against industry concerns."
This is probably the weakest of these arguments. It is
also probably the most common in administrative hearings at the
Federal Communications Commission and the like. It reflects a
situation in which a bureaucrat is faced with privacy activists
on one side and industry lobbyists on the other side, and so they
are forced to construct the notion of a "balance" between the
two sides' arguments. The bureaucrats will profess themselves
impressed by the economic benefits of the large new industry
said to be in the offing. These benefits are often framed in
terms of "wealth creation", without much consideration of whether
this wealth will be delivered to the people from whom it was
extracted. But the arguments just don't compare. Privacy is an
individual right, not an abstract social good. Balancing privacy
against profit is like balancing the admitted evils of murder
against the creation of wealth through the trade in body parts
for transplants. It simply does not work that way.
* "Privacy paranoids want to turn back the technological clock."
Beware any attempt to identify privacy invasion with technical
progress. It is true and important that routine and rapidly
expanding privacy invasion is implicit in traditional methods
of computer system design, but plenty of technical design
methods exist to protect privacy, especially using cryptography.
This kind of argument has been used with particular force in
the case of Caller Number ID (aka Caller ID, or CNID). It is
well known by now that CNID promises a thousand applications at
the intersection between the world of telephones and the world
of computers. Privacy advocates are upset about CNID because
industry keeps promoting rules that make it difficult for people
to "block" their lines, thus preventing their phone number from
being sent out digitally except when they explicitly ask for it
to be sent. Proponents of industry's view have gone to great
lengths, though, to define things in terms of "pro-CNID" versus
"anti-CNID" camps, and I have found myself that it takes great
determination to stay away from this terminology. As soon as
any kind of technological debate get defined as "pro-" versus
"anti-", whole layers of rhetoric start cutting in: they're
Luddites! But it doesn't work that way. Most technologies worth
having can be designed to provide inherent privacy protections
-- not just data security (see above), but convenient, iron-clad
mechanisms for opting out or for participating without having
one's information captured and cross-indexed by a universal
identifier. I'm not normally inclined to advocate technical
fixes, but when it comes to information technology and privacy,
I actually do think that they're the only answer that can stick.
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This month's recommendations.
Jack A. Gottschalk, Crisis Response: Inside Stories on Managing
Image Under Siege, Detroit: Visible Ink, 1993. A book by and
for PR people, a couple dozen case studies of crisis management
written by the PR people who were on the front lines. Some of
them derive from cases, like the Tylenol poisoning, where a more
or less faultless company did more or less the right thing, and
others record the good clean fun of corporations fighting with
one another over billion-dollar court cases. But many others
are represented as well, all written by people whose profession
is the rationalization of egregious conduct. The chapter about
the isocyanate leak at Union Carbide's Bhopal plant is in this
category -- a cornucopia of special pleading that is worth the
price of the book.
Colin J. Bennett, Regulating Privacy: Data Protection and
Public Policy in Europe and the United States, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992. An intelligent study of the politics of
privacy in several countries. Bennett is a political scientist
who uses privacy as the occasion for investigating general
questions of how issues get defined and negotiated within
societies. His book sets standards for intellectual seriousness
and scholarly rigor in research on privacy policy.
Democratic Culture is the newsletter of Teachers for a Democratic
Culture, PO Box 6405, Evanston IL 60204, jkw@midway.uchicago.edu.
TDC started out as a liberal academics' answer to the "political
correctness" craze started by the likes of Dinesh D'Souza. Its
newsletter, though, has grown into an interesting, politically
diverse, and unusually high-quality discussion of the complex
realities of intellectual freedom. You can sign up for $50 if
you can afford it, $25 if you can't, and $5 if you're a student
or have a low income.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
CDB Infotek
Six Hutton Centre Drive
Santa Ana, California 92707
(800) 427-3747
(714) 708-2000
CDB Infotek is one of those companies you keep hearing about that
will look up all kinds of personal information about you for a
fee. One large market for this information is in pre-employment
background checks. Their price list is fascinating. It may or
may not be reassuring that a nationwide felony search is $1500.
Consumer credit reports are $25, FAA aircraft ownership searches
are $20, and registered voter profiles are $25. Motor vehicle
ownership searches by name vary between $8 and $20 by state.
Real property ownership searches run between $15 and $30 per
state. All manner of superior court records are available for
usually $8 to $10 per court (e.g., San Diego County Divorce Court
searches are $7.75). The new subscriber fee is $199 plus $25 per
month. I find it comforting that these prices are all so high.
Just think what the world will be like when they drop by a factor
of twenty or fifty.
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Follow-up.
The New South Polar Times, an amusing diary of life among
the scientists at the South Pole, is available on the Web at
http://139.132.40.31/NSPT/NSPThomePage.html
Chris Mays <cmays@mercury.sfsu.edu> has issued a new edition
of his Frequently Asked Questions on California Electronic
Government Information. The URL is
http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/states/california/cal_gov_info_FAQ.html
You can also view the ascii text by gopher at CPSR.
Host=gopher.cpsr.org
Port=70
Path=0/cpsr/states/california/941101.cal_gov_info_FAQ
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460
USA
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Copyright 1994 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The
Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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