The other side of access
by Margot | October 2, 2009 | First Amendment, KLAMP, Privacy | Comments Off
Our goal as a practicum, as Nabiha mentioned, is to perform a “sunlight” function traditionally served by legacy media. The structure of “new media”, as many have observed, is extremely conducive to open-access policy: you can now store, search, share, and discuss massive amounts of data and documents, both online and off.
There’s another side to the story, however: when you do your online browsing and posting, the trail you leave, both intentionally and unintentionally, paints an easy portrait for those who care to find it. (See Michael Seringhaus & Mark Gerstein’s “Putting too much information online can erode individual privacy”)
This feature of new media arose organically as part of the search for a new market structure, and it isn’t always as nefarious as it sounds. As content moved online, publishers have struggled to monetize it. Subscriptions failed (see the oh-so-brief run of “Times Select”), and online ads are not as valuable as their print counterparts. (Whether the ad-deflation happened because Madison Avenue overvalued its print campaigns, or because online advertising undervalues its click-throughs is hard to say…)
But one thing is clear: data mining wasn’t invented for the Internet, but its use certainly exploded due to it. As Stephen Baker writes in “The Numerati”, number-crunching became much more valuable when people realized that the Internet offered a new way of marketing. And once it became valuable, the programs proliferated– and once they proliferated, the government stepped in to use them.
The problem with data mining is how unapparent it is to most individuals: you don’t know what’s being collected on you, and you don’t know what it may be analyzed to mean. But data mining isn’t always a bad thing. It can allow a content provider or platform to get value from its user base while still anonymizing all data, by offering advertisers spots that are targeted to groups with particular features (27-year-old females who listen to Radiohead, for example). The content provider or platform gets to sell advertisers access to the group they want, while still respecting user anonymity and not handing anything over to outside companies.
This is the best case scenario.
Where data mining becomes more frightening, as Baker aptly points out, is when it is used to comb through information to predict what you’ll do next. In the context of marketing, few people are hurt by this: few people care if the grocery store analyzes your past behavior and mis-predicts your likes or dislikes. But if the government mis-profiles you based on sites you post on or your credit-card trail, the consequences become a lot more frightening.
New media is wonderful– but even as it allows us to access information, it also allows information to be gathered about us. And we have less control over it than one might think: disparate pieces of seemingly harmless information can be used to “profile”.
Part of our work here, then, will focus on the other side of access facilitated by new media: promoting a right to anonymous speech or search online, and tracking — and “sunlighting”– when tracking occurs.
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