Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

  • Copywriting
    • Content Marketing
    • SEO
  • About
  • Contact

Online Privacy vs Mass Disinterest

June 16, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - nostri-imago (Cliff) on Flickr | Online Privacy vs Mass Disinterest

You might have heard the myth that, during FDR’s presidency, the media had a sort of gentleman’s agreement with the office of the president not to detail Roosevelt’s condition – particularly with regard to his wheelchair, and the effects of Polio he suffered. It turns out that’s mostly a myth – that even in 1932, the New York Times Magazine described then-Governor Roosevelt’s “wheel[ing] around in his chair.”

Did this get suppressed, or did we simply forget about it in favor of the more convenient narrative? Convenience in this case being the uplifting idea that the media of the day were somehow more respectful, because they didn’t pry into America’s leader’s personal life – that they knew his public image was important enough to obviate focusing on his person itself.

Fast-forward to 1975, when an attempt was made on then-President Ford’s life, and a former marine foiled the attempt. The marine, Oliver Sipple, made an agreement with the media not to focus on his sexuality… But Harvey Milk, of all people, decided it was better that the world know that gay people could be heroes too. Milk didn’t consider the outcome of his outing Sipple – that the marine would lose his entire life, effectively. Milk focused, like many people in that kind of situation, on the idea of the greater good that would be served through the story. Here, the media isn’t the bad guy, a gay rights activist is… Or is he?

Fast-forward again, to 2012, when Gawker journalist Adrian Chen publicly outed a Reddit troll and cost the man his job, and the health insurance that kept his disabled wife cared for. All because Chen felt like it was a good story. The troll, Brutsch, is not the good guy. But neither is Chen, who destroyed someone’s life for a story on a news website by violating their online privacy and tracking them down. Chen’s reasoning? From the Wired article describing both of the above stories as parallels;

In identifying Butsch and shining a spotlight on his insidious practices, Chen’s article condemns Butsch’s choice of using the mask of pseudonymity to hide behind actions that have societal consequences. Public shaming is one way in which social norms are regulated. Another is censorship, as evidenced by the Reddit community’s response to Gawker.

Privacy is a troubling concept; the idea that anything about you, things you wish to keep personal and secure, could be revealed to the wrong audience at any time keeps a lot of us up at night. And for good reason! No one wants to be strung up by the court of public opinion, for any reason, ever. Even people who choose lives of public visibility (actors, media personalities, etc) who don’t need to be outed in detail to give context for their bad acting shrink from the idea that something they’ve done, or an offhand comment they’ve made, could run afoul of The Public’s ideals.

The “Out By Proxy” Issue is Not New.

Much of the discussion around online privacy frames this outing of people – the publication and focusing on their private information – as if it were a result of new tools, recently available to the web. That’s simply not the case – as Milk/Sipple proved 40 years ago. Out-by-proxy was an issue even when I first started in online communities 20 years ago.

In the mid- to late-90s, I spent a lot of time in chat rooms. Text systems built on Perl scripts, designed to log and display serialized entries from those signed on, at a near-realtime pace. We used it for roleplay – collaborative fiction writing – and I was part of a community that had about five years’ history on this chat alone, by the time everyone grew out of it. In the 90s, 5 years was an eternity in web time.

No one played under their own real name. Handles were par for the course. Even if you got to know someone fairly well and met them “in real life” – which I did, one of them was my first real relationship, and people looked at me like I was asking to be murdered by internet weirdos… There was still the chance that everyone else you were writing with wasn’t what they said they were.

During my time on these chats, I can easily recall at least two instances of people being “found out” by a number of means, and having their real details publicized within our small circle. Names, addresses, photos, schools they attended, whether they had been married or had kids – the names of their pets.

Keep in mind, this was the late 90s – nearly twenty years ago – before Google was properly a thing, much less reverse image search. In both instances, the person who’d been found out disappeared – one without a trace, and the other simply stopped playing, but kept in touch with those people who didn’t care about the revelation through non-chat means.

This process of discovering, revealing, and using the data around an otherwise anonymous person on the web is known as doxxing – and it’s becoming rather common. In an Economist article on doxxing, comments section in particular reveal attitudes on the effects of doxxing. How this intentional destruction of online privacy works, and the complete lack of accountability related to it are the subject of deep discussion in a lot of places.

Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that The Online Privacy Lie is Unravelling – and made a case for why that’s important… But they’re a bit late to the party, clearly. When Milk doxxed Sipple forty years ago the idea of privacy as we think of it was already under fire – and on the web, it never existed at all. Any belief otherwise is delusion. At that time, being outed as gay was damning on its face. Now, however, being outed can include much more than your sexuality – any behaviour you exhibit, anything you allow to be recorded and documented – especially if it goes into the web – becomes a condition you can be outed for.

Spent too much time drinking in your teens? It’s probably documented. Kicked a dog by accident? Might be a viral video without context before you know it. Participating in a chat, or on twitter, behind a mask of anonymity? Be ready to be doxxed, apparently, because that’s the big red button hanging over us all.

We do have some control over our own data, if we look for it.

If you’ve put that information into an electronic form, it might be less of a breach of privacy and more of an intentional disclosure. It has its upsides, however – one of the reasons I’ve written for the last six years on a domain carrying my name was a concern over identity fraud. I don’t get enough visibility to qualify a public figure, which is fine, but there’s definitely value in owning your namespace and controlling the context around it.

We rely on mass disinterest for protection, but that’s not privacy.

The reason TechCrunch’s article rings false, at least for me, is that it’s not Google or Microsoft who’s doxxing people. Most of the privacy debate is now focused on marketers, businesses, advertisers and so on. Almost none of it comes back to what more often than not puts people in danger; the laser focus of targeted and specific public attention.

When you see a video of someone committing animal cruelty, and hear about how the person was found in record time by a crack team of investigators… It’s other stakeholders, independent actors and occasionally smaller groups who create this publicity for that bad actor. It’s this process that brings context and focus onto an individual, in a way no advertising targeting or aggregate data point ever could.

TC’s right, though, in that “Start-ups should absolutely see the debunking of the myth that consumers are happy to trade privacy for free services as a fresh opportunity for disruption.” But the answer is not necessarily that transparency related to data and algorithms is a must. Education about what online privacy is, and what it isn’t, will become very important in the near future. Their last note, “Services that stand upon a future proofed foundation where operational transparency inculcates user trust — setting these businesses up for bona fide data exchanges, rather than shadowy tradeoffs” is particularly apt. However, that should have been a general commentary about the need for education, not an admonishment of businesses doing business things.

Our reliance is on being part of the crowd. There’s definitely safety for your person as part of an aggregate – without identifying data and backing context, the most you can do with a data point is throw off the averages a bit. And even then, there are very likely to be bigger outliers in some other region that make your data look uninteresting. This means that until there’s a very particular reason for people to care about who you are, that will offer them some gain, there’s no value in the effort it takes to back you out from the crowd and doxx you.

The safety of the herd. It’s effective for most, but not very attractive because we know precisely what it takes for this system to fail us individually.

We don’t have a good answer for online privacy yet, no matter what anyone says.

Even the best software – and hardware barriers can’t prevent breaches in data security. We see this all the time with stories about government actors attempting to breach national firewalls, proving that security on its own is not enough. We also saw this with last year’s iCloud hack that released hundreds of celebrities’ nude selfies and caused a massive kerfuffle. Apple’s since gone on a total “This Is Your Data” bent, and pooh-pooh’d Google, America’s NSA, and other bodies for trying to destroy privacy with their data collection techniques.

Backing all of your data out of the aggregate would destroy the value of that aggregate – as well as limiting your potential to benefit from its value. Many services are tied to data aggregates, whether we believe they’re related to online privacy or not. Social networks improve their features by way of aggregate data analysis, as do online games. However, where most people are now concerned with the amount of personally identifying information bodies such as Facebook have attached to their accounts, very few people ever worry about how a multi-player online video game could negatively affect them (in which case, see above regarding doxxing).

Think of the census – your country probably conducts one. It’s not just used for making sure everyone’s in the right place; it’s also used for economic projections, spending plans, as background information for poles, and many other statistics that help keep the country running. This real world, physical aggregate is no more or less valuable than its online counterpart – though it’s never referenced in the same bad light.

The other side of this, is that the argument “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is utter and demonstrable bullshit. Everyone has issues about their person that they’d simply rather not have brought forcibly to light. It doesn’t matter if it’s a a particular kink, a lifestyle choice, what sort of small-clothes they wear, or a self-esteem issue because the right side of their nose is slightly more rounded than the left side… No one likes their very-personal weirdness exposed without consent or control.

Jeff Jarvis suggested, years ago, that no one really cares about privacy – they just hate being surprised. That, I think, is a major key to solving for privacy in the future; creating situations where, by our intentional delivery or withholding of information, we’ll understand the potential outcomes of that action.

That’s not privacy as an outside regulatory force, though; it’s self-censorship. And that’s a lot harder to sell.

Back to FDR’s wheelchair. My point here, on the whole, is that privacy is a result of context and framing. We believe that things are private not because no one has access to them, but because they’re framed in a private context – these bits and bytes of information about us are obscured, or undisclosed, and as such exist within a framework of privacy. When that’s breached, we’re right to be upset. However, just like that “unreported” wheelchair, even information within a broader public knowledge can be respected, and treated with dignity such that eventually we believe it was never public at all (even though we all know it).

The conversation about online privacy has to stay a cultural one – not the subject of a business or regulatory study.

Filed Under: Communication Tagged With: community, internet, privacy, sociology

Facebook Timelines – First Look

September 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

From the site that brought you eight different news feeds in six months, comes a wonderful new toy. A profile dedicated not to what you are, but everything you have ever been. Timelines, introduced last week through developer beta, have been getting a lot of press – but what might they actually mean for your profile?

Here’s what my Timeline looks like at the moment:

Facebook Timelines - Ian M Rountree

 

It’s fairly spartan for now – I’ve put in some extra information, but largely, the moment you activate your Timeline, the magic… Doesn’t exist. I’ll admit, for the first few minutes, I didn’t see what the big deal was.

What do Timelines do that Profiles didn’t?

Liam Quinnlan Rhomyk-Rountree was Born, June 14th 2007 | Ian M Rountree - FacebookOne of the biggest features the new profile system enables is called Milestones – you can set one for just about anything. A birth, a marriage, a death – the new system allows you to go back through your life and mark out the things you want to communicate as important to you.

First thing I did? Marked the birth of my son, Liam. Pretty important event in my world.

I’m sure I’ll get around to finding a picture for my own birth in 1982 eventually – but there’s no rush. Milestones aren’t time-sensitive the way status updates are. I can wait until I’ve got access to all the slide shows from the year my family spent in Australia before adding the marker in my profile that says I went there. Next time I travel, I can build a Milestone out of the trip as it happens – and use one of the photos from the trip’s album to do so.

But that’s not all – with the Timelines system, Facebook’s changed how their entire update methodology works.

Facebook Timeline Update Box | Ian M Rountree - FacebookIt’s not listed specifically as a feature, and it’s certainly not obvious, but Facebook seems to be moving away from the pure “timely updates” theory of social networking, toward creating a full life record within their system.

The box you’ll see on your Timeline (and it’s not clear whether this will look similar on your Home screen) does the common Status/Photo/Place combination as usual – but the kinds of milestones you can add seem to suggest a much broader scope to the site.

Sure, we can mention we had a child or got married… But adding a pet? Losing a loved one? Achievements, awards, and health and wellness goals? This isn’t the usual profile-hygiene fare here – it’s a pretty big deal.  When combined with the marked difference in how Facebook is now displaying news on your home feed – thanks to this month’s News Feed revamp – it’s clear the network is putting some thought into the kinds of news people want to read.

The same people who religiously review the Obituaries in their local paper might, for example, might be the kind to mark only Milestones in their family’s Timelines as top news, and train the system only to promote big events.

The people who are most interested in music culture may de-prioritize their friends’ news in favor of a particular set of band and artist pages.

Relentless business people? We know what they’ll mark as important, don’t we?

HA HA BUSINESS!

How Timelines might affect your personal brand.

Facebook has never really been good for a personal brand directly from the profile side of the site. Pages, sure – we can optimize them to work with a marketing strategy… But now? Imagine tailoring your milestones and life events to only highlight your professional life. Conferences, speaking engagements, promotions, job changes – the list is endless. You can build your Timeline to reflect a single aspect of your life, and go for as much completionism as you can stomach.

Again, it’s a case of choose your own level of involvement. I’m sure we’ll see a whack of personal branding guides over the coming weeks from some very opinionated voices.

Has privacy on Facebook changed?

Naturally, the changeover to Timelines – and associated App-level permission changes – is causing some concern over privacy. But, then, every change the social network makes to its system and capabilities seems to have that effect. This time, particularly, there’s some concern over apps gaining permission to automatically share what you’re doing. For example, if you authorize the New York Times as an app, you may find mentions of every page you view on that site in your timeline.

This persistent auto-sharing may not be a big deal for some people, but imagine seeing 75 to 100 updates in your stream, from one avid news reader.

Yeah. Not a privacy concern. But I imagine a lot of people will either get annoyed, or immediately shunt these kinds of updates off their feeds – thus destroying any value for the app-makers. Once again, it’s an opportunity for thoughtless publicity (not a bad thing) to turn into obsessive annoyance (a very bad thing). And only your friends list can determine which you’ll end up receiving.

I’m not concerned about privacy on social networks…

Because that’s not what they’re for. By their very nature, social networks are sharing platforms – you don’t share privacy. That’s not the point. Any assumption going against this grain is fundamentally flawed – so why worry about it?

We’re still not very good at dividing our personal and professional lives, or our online and offline lives, or our family lives and public lives. So rather than being concerned that Facebook and other social networks are “stealing our privacy” we need to get better at self-censoring.  If you don’t feel comfortable sharing something with the world – it may not be a good idea to put it online. While privacy and restricting options do exist, assuming they’re solid is not a good idea.

In the end, it’s all a game of “Choose Your Poison” anyway.

How you present yourself online is closer to your choice of haircut, than it is your choice of friends. There will be bad hair days on your social networks, and times when it’s so fantastic you worry about being narcissistic. Learn to live with that, and you’ll be fine.

We used to think of Facebook as another photo sharing service. Then it was a microblog alongside. Then it became ten thousand other little parts of our lives.

But now…

What do we call Facebook now, I wonder?

Filed Under: Content Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, meta, preview, privacy, timelines

A Social Media Policy for Awesome Knowledge Workers

May 11, 2011 by Ian 4 Comments

Awesome Bat-shirt - istolethetv | FlickrIf you are a knowledge worker – whether a marketer, a programmer, a blogger, any other form of writer, a critic, a human resources professional, support personnel for a company, or even a cook – you have one purpose inextricably tied to all your public activities, on and off the web.

You are here to be awesome on your clients behalf.

Your better understanding of social media, traditional media, and the communicative web will help you be awesome. It’s really not that hard; You Cannot Suck. How you achieve this is where it gets complex – but it’s not complicated out of intention, it’s usually complicated because of lack of savvy and situational awareness.

Doing better work, in any position, requires that we recognize just how in-public our lives are, and get used to living that way – or making adjustments in our behavior to allow only what should be public to be public.

Awesomeness includes, but is not limited to:

  • Making positive comments on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and other social areas about your employer, your clients, and yourself.
  • Adding perspective where it can be helpful, through status updates, blog posts, and links to other helpful perspectives.
  • Helping people by providing information
  • Helping people by passing along useful tools
  • Making connections between people in your network, and others who can help
  • Not always being the most important person in the room
  • Allowing others to do what they do best
  • Recognizing awesomeness when you find it

… And just all around being a good, helpful person.

Awesome Street, USA - Moonlightbulb | FlickrAwesomeness expressly forbids, for everyone:

  • Grumpiness
  • Stoicism
  • Self-deprecation
  • Self-abasement
  • Anger
  • Fear
  • Expressed angst
  • Passive aggression

… and all other forms of public nastiness you wouldn’t want to see on a first date (or a fiftieth).

If you are a knowledge worker tasked with communicating, you must acknowledge that;

  • … living in public is not for everyone.
  • … your best work can still be misinterpreted.
  • … your employers deserve your best at all times.
  • … your employers need to provide you with clarity of purpose and message.
  • … only you can set your own limits (awesomeness requires that they are not beyond your grasp).
  • … you must set goals which are achievable by your own level of awesomeness (which will, and should, grow over time).
  • … you should avoid promises on behalf of others without prior confirmation or consultation.

If you are an employer of knowledge workers, be aware:

  • Not everyone is capable of living in public.
  • Those not willing or capable of living in public will do better work when they are allowed their privacy.
  • Media savvy workers do better work – providing training is a good idea.
  • It’s bad form to make promises on behalf of others without prior confirmation or consultation.
  • People will make mistakes. To deal with mistakes, first educate, then punish, then eliminate – in that order.
  • Not all mistakes you perceive will be received as such by the public, or even the clients on behalf of whom your employees are being awesome.
  • Not all successes you perceive will be received as such by the public, or even by the clients on behalf of whom your employees are being awesome.

Social Media is constantly evolving.

As such, by the time this policy is published, it’ll already be outdated. So, a challenge. Write your own personal social media awesomeness policy. Keep it people-focused. Think about the human costs of your holistic publicity. Let your people – whether clients, employees, or employers – shine with awesomeness in the way that’s best for them to do so.

What would you add?

(Obligatory note; this is not a lawyer-approved document. It’s intended to make you think. Did it achieve its goal?)

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: awesomeness, business, clients, employees, employers, policy, privacy, social media, social media fatigue

Just how bad is the over-share?

January 21, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Body Dumping on FlickrThere are three kinds of people on the internet: the anonymous, the bumblers, and the intentional.

I removed the anonymous from the intentional because this is a post about sharing information, and the anonymous are proving themselves unwilling to share alike. This is not for them; they are not for the rest of society, they’re for themselves. Seems harsh? Let me explain.

The idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy is one of the trickiest things societal law is tackling these days. It seems like a fairly straight forward idea (like all buzzwords) but to just about any situation it’s applied to, there are too many variables to allow the idea to be so cut and dry. There are varying levels of personal privacy, entirely depending on where you are – no one likes having their dirty laundry aired without their consent. But what if it’s the other way around?

I hate it when people invite me to play games on Facebook. That’s not how I use the program. I don’t care if you just killed eight thousand people on Mafia Wars, I will NEVER play that game. Stop inviting me. The over-share invades my privacy by forcing your info down my throat. Chances are, though, if you’re inviting your friends to play Mafia Wars or Farmville or whatever else is hot on Facebook this week, you don’t see this as an over-share. You either just clicked past the button that said “broadcast bullshit” or sincerely want me to come and enjoy something you see as innocuous. This makes you a bumbler. Your lack of discretion in choosing what information to put into the public’s lens means that eventually this habit of disclosure will haunt you. There are a lot of ways this could happen – college students who post pictures of themselves drunk having called in sick to work is a widely used example – but happen it will. Either there will be real consequences of your unintentional sharing, or intangible ones like friends missing things you have to say because they eventually just hid your news from their feed.

The other possibility is that everything you do is on purpose. If this is the case, I’d suggest that you’re either smarter than the average bear, or don’t give two shakes what others think of you. For a great example of this category, look at Penelope Trunk. She’s gotten in a lot of trouble (perceivably) by over-sharing, but at the same time, it’s one of her biggest strengths. Whether it’s tweeting about a miscarriage, or working through a break-up-then-not-break-up situation over Christmas, every word that comes out of Penelope is on purpose. And, to add to that, there’s a consistency about Penelope’s writing that speaks volumes about her personality – more thoroughly than her data filled tirades about working through Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s a powerful statement of how much she believes in transparency.

So, do you actually believe in transparency? Once you start broadcasting the colour of your bra on social networks, its hard to stop there. But are you fumbling into being so visibly carefree, or is it a long-term strategy for communication? Be sure, because it’s really simple for people to hit that hide button on their news feed, and you’ll never be the wiser – no one will warn you when you stink.

On the flip side, it’s possible that your rampant disclosure may become a great strength, if you can husband the discipline to be interesting enough that people don’t feel like you’re diving on them with the contents of your closet, skeletons and all. Convincing people to join up, knowing what they’re to expect, is a lot more sustainable than suddenly changing course and stripping yourself bare.

Awareness used to be the only difference between bumbling and working intentionally. Audiences have gotten significantly more discriminating, however, so it’s worth your time to be sure that what you have to say is framed in such a way that people are going to care. Are you splattercasting emotionally driven tirades? The voyeurs will love that, but not the rest of us. Similarly, coldly analytic dissection of your faults looks like a pity party at best, and can be dehumanizing at worst. Which do you figure will harm you and your pursuits more in the long run?

If you’re going to go naked, have the decency to look good in the buff.

Photo by bigcityal.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: channels, consistency, invasion of privacy, penelope trunk, privacy

Categories

  • Announcements
    • Event Notices
  • Blog
  • Communication
  • Content Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Personal
  • Reviews
  • Social Media
  • Technology

Archive

  • January 2016
  • June 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • July 2008
  • February 2004
  • Copywriting
  • Blog
  • Reading Lists
  • Colophon

© Copyright 2023 Ian M Rountree · All Rights Reserved