Clearing up privacy and access

You can’t go around correcting the Internet–but you can disagree with arguments.

Google Privacy Practices Worse Than ISP Snooping, AT&T Charges (Wired)

“If anything the largely invisible practices of ad-networks raise even greater privacy concerns than do the behavioral advertising techniques that ISPs could employ, such as deep-packet-inspection,” AT&T wrote.

Wired gets it right in stating, “You pay your ISP to carry your traffic to and fro. It can see everything you do online, unless you take extreme measures,” but an additional factor in Google’s favor is that it’s easy to delete cookies and opt out of services that allow it to track users. There is just no way to do this if monitoring happens at the service provider level. I hope the members of congress see that.

Fairness Doctrine Panic hits FCC, spreads through blogosphere (Ars Technica): A good quick read on the history of the fairness doctrine misses one crucial point–it was created to even access to a limited resource (time on licensed broadcast stations). While some may use it as a political tool, it was designed to keep TV from becoming too one sided or political.

As for the actual prospects of the Fairness Doctrine itself, for the most part it addressed the anxieties of the nine-TV-channel world of the third quarter of the 20th century—a landscape that cable and the Internet has transformed.

“Transformed” is a bit of a strong word. Network and local TV news still command a huge audience, and consolidation and shrinking news budgets have the potential to make balance an issue to many in the public. Cable and the internet are a part of the same media landscape, but shouldn’t weigh too heavily on decisions influencing broadcast.

Catchup

IT consumerization & higher ed: legal and educational problems

An Ars interview with Oren Sreebny, “director of emerging technology for the central IT and networking unit at the University of Washington,” reveals an interesting confluence between law, technology, and education.

Q: [Regarding the] legal headaches that higher ed IT departments have to deal with. He said something like “We spend more time being lawyers than we do IT people because of all these government requirements.” Do you find the same thing to be true where you are?

A: If you were a typical corporation, it’s my impression that you’d have lots of control over your data, and you’d say “this stuff can’t move to the cloud, and we won’t let it.” But in higher ed you don’t have that much control over people, because it’s a more loosely knit confederation of enterprises, so it becomes more of an education problem than a control problem.
[emphasis original]

Certainly an addition to the “education problem” is that the laws aren’t crystal clear. Technologists either need access to lawyers, a legal education, or clear guidelines. This offers another perspective on nervous service providers.

Why privacy and copyright make small providers nervous

Another response to my assertion that FERPA has some scared tells me deserves a bit of clarification.

The trouble (and in some respects, benefit) of laws like copyright and privacy, which only become certain after long and expensive litigation, is that they are not completely explicit. Borderline cases leave small providers wondering whether they might be liable if they were sued–and this uncertainty leads some to steer clear of anything that pushes the boundaries.

My own theory is that FERPA was written in a protectionist paradigm, rather than a control paradigm. This means that certain categories of data are completely locked down, rather than giving the student or instructor the options to contol the data how they see fit. With fine-grained facebook-like privacy controls, it should be technically possible to let students control what is publicly released (indeed many do it anyway by doing things like posting a course video project to YouTube). The nervousness creates a situation where law (rightly or even by misinterpretation) limits what people might do with technology.