Tech Policy Seminar

When the Internet is Wrong

Since one theme this week is the ability of internet mobs to shame / gossip / and generally be wrong, I thought I'd share the following graphical commentary on the futility of correcting the internet:

Courtesy of xkcd.

Also, I mentioned an alternative site to YouTube last week, MetaCafe, and how the "small guy" content developers can actually make money off video sharing.  It was featured on the front page of the NYTimes Business section today, apparently home-made "how to" videos can be profitable. Link: here.

The Future of Reputation: a view from Wikipedia

As Mr. Richardson points out, commenting on the first half of The Future of Reputation is difficult.  Solove lays out some examples, but has not yet presented his solutions. However, I would like to add to his anecdotes by examining one of the most prolific reputation and defamation engines on the internet.

Let's look at Wikipedia.

(Solove devotes only a few pages to Wikipedia in chapter 6, so I'm not stealing much thunder by introducing the topic here.)

Control of reputation versus the free flow of information

Solove suggests that people might have rights over their own reputation. Some balance should be struck between control and the free flow of information in order to preserve our freedom.

This is a normative belief for Solove, but it begs an empirical question. Why can't the free flow of information correct itself?  After all, there are social customs for reliable reporting and against perceived invasions of privacy.  Conceivably, ethical reporting could thrive in the marketplace of ideas. Mr. Richardson writes about the battle between slow-spreading good memes and fast-spreading bad memes.  Can conscientious internet users maintain an ethical balance between useful reputation data and sensationalized garbage?

To me, Wikipedia suggests that self-regulation fails. I agree with Solove's premise that the internet disproportionately promotes undesirable elements of gossip.

There’s an asymmetry to reputation, especially when opinions on real people can be delivered pseudonymously. Malicious rumor mongers have never had a better platform for defamation. At the same time, there’s never been a better time for sharing positive or benign information, but the incentives are mismatched. Defamers want to spread their gossip far and wide, while positive feedback only seeks to be logged (if that). Moreover, information consumers find negative material more valuable. Shaming naturally spreads better, and the internet obliterates one of the best safeguards against malice: the reputation of the commentator herself. Traditionally, one would be worried about behaving boorishly or being caught in a lie, but, as expressed in this webcomic, anonymity breeds degenerate behavior.  

Wikipedia is a microcosm of the internet’s reputation problems: the site has a large audience (and is often the number one result in Google), but pseudonymous authors are protected from the consequences of their work.

Wikipedia: where no one controls reputation

Wikipedia fashions itself as an encyclopedia.  Although it has a radically permissive editing policy (most articles can be edited by anyone, without requiring even an account set-up), it has a focused culture. Wikipedia is not a tabloid, political blog, or humor forum.  A community of editors strive to enforce its standards.

Compared to the internet at large, Wikipedia editors are unified in purpose. Less than 2% of editors are responsible for most of the site's edits, and these people—including over 1500 volunteer administrators—bring anonymously-contributed content into line with the site's norms, policies, and guidelines.  There's even a sort of supreme court of Wikipedia (although they object to the analogy).  The Arbitration Committee or ArbCom, accepts cases when four of its members agree to hear the controversy.  ArbCom clerks open up evidence pages, and various parties post evidence and opinion, which the arbitrators distill into a ruling which commands the respect of all administrators.  No cogs in this bureaucracy are paid, and very few content changes are implemented from above by the Wikimedia Foundation. Essentially, Wikipedia is an idyllic cross-section of the internet—a confederation of users unified by strong truth-telling encyclopedic aspirations.

If voluntary privacy controls can emerge anywhere, we should see them on Wikipedia, but the site utterly fails to guard reputation, and decidedly favors the free flow of information over control. 

Over 269,000 biographies of living people exist on Wikipedia. The vast majority of them can be edited by any user without even signing up for an account.

The potential for abuse became clear in the 2005 Siegenthaler incident, which is described in Chapter 6. A bored dock worker decided to edit the biography on John Siegenthaler, Jr., a journalist and one-time associate of Bobby Kennedy. The biography falsely claimed that Siegenthaler was investigated in connection to Kennedy’s assassination, then spent several years in the Soviet Union. Although the claims were wildly false, they persisted in Siegenthaler’s biography for four months.

Wikipedia addressed some of Siegenthaler's concerns by passing a "biographies of living people" policy (WP:BLP).  This rule promises higher standards for such biographies, including a vow to remove claims without reliable supporting sources, but the “BLP problem” has never been fixed. Many editors believe that open and anonymous editing is the project’s central strength, so refuse to compromise these aspects of the site.

It’s thought that defamation should be corrected as it occurs, but distortion on Wikipedia is another case of mismatched incentives. The site’s foundation has weak incentives to prevent errors because section 230 immunity shields them from legal liability. Most articles are corrected by editors, who find some personal satisfaction in correcting errors, but this incentive only works for biographies that are watched by many impartial eyes. For example, the biography on George W. Bush is constantly assaulted, but errors don’t persist for more than a few minutes because of the attention it draws. A mistake about Judge Richard Posner might persist for five days (until Prof. Sunstein cleans it up). Siegenthaler, on the other hand, was defamed for months.

Solutions have been proposed, but no consensus appears likely.  Some editors suppose that “marginally notable” biography subjects should have a right to opt out of having a Wikipedia article.  A handful of articles have been deleted by sympathetic administrators who support their cause. An article on journalist Seth Finkelstein was deleted in this rogue fashion.  The deletion withstood the review process, and remains off the site. But subjects apparently have no right to opt out of their biography if they are deemed too notable. Hollywood producer Don Murphy is an example of this. Murphy stridently opposes the existence of any freely-editable biography on him, and has tried to get his article deleted for months. When an administrator deleted per his wishes in March, the deletion was overturned by overwhelming community opposition.  Murphy's demands to either delete the article or prohibit anonymous editing were deemed unreasonable.  One editor—a Yale graduate in his early 20s—commented on Murphy's supposed harassment.  Deleting the article, he said, would be "essentially endorsing terrorism."  Murphy in turn heavily linked an unfriendly donmurphy.net thread about the individual, propelling it to #2 in google.  Murphy still has an article on Wikipedia.

As a final insult, biography subjects are discouraged from editing their own articles because of the conflict of interest guideline (WP:COI). Subjects can be understandably outraged when told not to fix errors about them. See for example, Pamela Jones’ reaction. Jones is the author of the pro-Linux blog Groklaw, and took offense to a comment suggesting that she shouldn’t correct her own biography due to COI. Plenty of autobiographical corrections occur anyway—see e.g. Martha Nussbaum, who stepped in herself after a colleague was unable to affect similar changes.

Shaming and outing pseudonyms.

Some individuals have taken vigilante action against Wikipedia’s anonymity.  Daniel Brandt, a privacy advocate who became an important critic during the Siegenthaler controversy, began publicly identifying Wikipedia administrators on "Wikipedia's Hive Mind" in 2006.  Most administrators are not on the list—Brandt focuses on those who he thinks have pseudonymously attacked real people, or those who are particularly prominent in the community. Brandt sometimes uses the threat of outing in an attempt to prompt reform. 

For example, Brandt has recently discovered the identity of an influential ArbCom arbitrator called Newyorkbrad. This user is a Manhattan litigator in real life, and Newyorkbrad has momentarily abandoned Wikipedia in light of Brandt’s threat last week. Brandt has presented Newyorkbrad with several optional demands. If none of them are met, Brandt promises to post Newyorkbrad’s name and law firm on his site.  "It's time for Newyorkbrad to leave Wikipedia and save his career," Brandt wrote.

This dialog occurred on Wikipedia Review, a criticism forum, but some of WR's moderators took exception to Brandt's tactics. Newyorkbrad is generally regarded on WR as one of the “good guys” on Wikipedia.

Pseudonymous ax-grinding.

This brings me to my story.

The Siegenthaler incident was basically just simple vandalism—a user marred an article just for the fun of it. What happens when a pseudonymous editor has an ax to grind? Well, in the first place it’s difficult to detect. Problematic users are sometimes banned from Wikipedia, but because people can sign up for new accounts easily and can evade technological detection by using IP anonymity networks like Tor, no one can be decisively banned from Wikipedia. Nor can individuals be limited to a single account. I think this is a design failure of the site, but it’s one shared by nearly all websites on the internet—contributors cannot be verified, and no one can be sure that separate usernames represent separate people.  Apparently different accounts might be "sockpuppets" of each other, controlled by one individual. 

Enter Overstock.com.  Overstock is an internet retailer that claims its stock price is hurt by naked short selling—that is, short sells that don’t borrow the underlying security. Manipulative naked short selling is theoretically illegal, but most commentators assume that Overstock’s CEO, Patrick Byrne, uses it as a diversion from the company’s reliable record of annual losses. Byrne is a colorful character, and is best remembered for the conference call where he referred to a shadowy "Sith Lord" determined to drive down the company's market value.  A plaintiff shop has taken Overstock's case on contingency, suing several analysts and a hedge fund for their alleged criminal conspiracy.

For a time Patrick Byrne employed a publicist called Judd Bagley, known and frequently reviled on Wikipedia as WordBomb. Bagley came to the conclusion that an unkind editor on Wikipedia, Mantanmoreland, was operated by critical Forbes columnist Gary Weiss. Bagley created a site documenting his theories, Antisocialmedia.net, where he claimed that Weiss had started a second account, Samiharris.

Being from the Beehive State myself, I was aware of Overstock’s reputation for nuttiness, and paid no mind to the dispute until I saw an article in The Register, the British tech tabloid critical of Wikipedia. I decided to look at a dispute on the article Gary Weiss. Several editors (including Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales) wanted to include a single sentence stating that Weiss was critical of Overstock.com. Their sources included a New York Times column, and everyone thought it was a fairly neutral statement—a quick look at Gary Weiss’ blog confirms that Overstock.com is one of his main interests. User:Samiharris, however, was violently opposed to any mention of Overstock.com, and disliked the Times article because it quoted Bagley and might therefore spread "Bagley memes."  I concluded that Samiharris was not an neutral party—editors don't normally oppose citing the New York Times for fear of spreading certain memes.

More than a month later, WordBomb shows up with a disposable account and requests a “check user” of Samiharris and Mantanmoreland. Normally, logged-in users do not reveal their IP addresses, and no user can check them unless there is prima facie evidence of abusive editing. Surprisingly, the check users decide to honor the request, even though they know WordBomb made it.  They discover that the Samiharris account always edited from an anonymous proxy, so that it is not technologically possible to determine whether the two accounts edit from the same computer. This seems highly suspicious, and one administrator launches a sockpuppet investigation aimed to discover similarities between the accounts. 

I was honestly annoyed by the accounts’ responses to the investigation. Mantanmoreland argued that the entire inquiry was tainted by the initial request of WordBomb, and that no real controversy existed. On Wikipedia, procedural arguments are denigrated as “Wikilawyering” and viewed dimly by the community. When the sockpuppet investigation advanced to a request for comments, I resolved to present a knock-down case of all the evidence linking the two accounts. Thirty-four users signed my summary of the evidence, and only Mantanmoreland and four other accounts signed opinions dissenting on procedural grounds. The case was accepted by ArbCom.

Nicholas Carr argues that pseudonymous data cannot be secreted away forever, and that's probably the case on Wikipedia. After making over 5000 edits spanning two years, it was noticed that Mantanmoreland had once copyedited the article for a small coastal city in India, Varkala. Four months later, Gary Weiss announced on his blog that he was on vacation in Varkala. One user suggested that we check Mantanmoreland’s editing during the period for evidence of decline. The results seemed surprisingly clear to me.

At that moment, the nature of the case shifted from an inquiry about sockpuppets to arbitrator concerns about slandering a real individual—Gary Weiss. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne wrote a blog post about Gary Weiss, claiming that “All but Gary Weiss’s most dogmatic defenders were silenced, however, when a law student from Chicago published a graph…”    (I would like to state that I'm not suggesting that these accounts were certainly operated by anyone.  It's possible that they were constructed to discredit Gary Weiss.)  ArbCom refused to reach the issue, but meekly concluded that the accounts' editing patters were "suggestive of . . . a relationship between the two accounts."  Hours after the case closed, Samiharris was permanently banned by administrators in the community, by what some called a "lynch mob."

Mantanmoreland has not edited Overstock.com topics since.  Articles formerly maintained by Samiharris and Mantanmoreland have been reclaimed by the others, and some of the changes have been dramatic.

Whoever was behind these accounts, they succeeded in maintaining an anti-Overstock slant in a constellation of articles for many months.  They were only rooted out because of the persistent harping of an organized corporate adversary.  Anyone on Wikipedia could have checked their work, but because they were more motivated than impartial editors, their point of view prevailed.

I believe this is characteristic of the internet.  High profile individuals might have effective error correction online, but a dispersed preference for accuracy does not trump the focused motives of a defamer.  Solove's central observations ring true for me.

The Tangled Web We Weave

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!" - Sir Walter Scott

Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation forces the reader to confront a frightening, undeniable, and possibly inevitable reality in which more and more information about any person's life is chronicled online, and which information makes it to the web is less and less predictable. To make matters more disturbing, Solove accurately demonstrates, if mostly by anecdotal evidence, the vastness and variability of the cast and crew orchestrating this new social order. I want to focus a bit more light on some of the personalities involved, because it seems to me that both Solove's ambitious effort to construct a legal framework for protecting privacy and our class discussion will hinge on properly understanding what is going on and who is doing it.

Viruses and Memes

In order to understand what is happening socially on the internet, one has to look at how social networks - online and offline - work. This depends on an understanding of how real-world viruses are transmitted.

The scientific world was revolutionized by the discovery that diseases are transmitted by direct and indirect contact between living things, rather than by magical forces. Over the last several hundred years, we have come to understand much more. Disease is transmitted in discrete packets (bacteria, viral phages, parasites, and a few more exotic delivery mechanisms like prions). For this to happen, there must be an infected host or vector (e.g., a rodent or insect) and a receptive or vulnerable victim. Some would-be victims, of course, are mysteriously immune to diseases. Before this step, there must also be an "index patient" - somebody has to get sick first. Further, diseases must balance a number of challenges to continue their existence: they must reproduce, resist immune systems and similar defenses, provide for their transmission from host to host, and avoid killing off the host at least long enough to perform those tasks.

The most relevant observation from science is this: not all hosts are created equal. Modern epidemiology recognizes the existence of "super carriers," those few individuals with many personal connections and unusual travel patterns who can launch a local malady into a regional or global menace. The only reason that Ebola, for example, stays confined to the rural areas of Africa where it first appeared is that it has not yet infected a super carrier, at least not early enough in an epidemic to travel very far. Were a Western film crew to become infected before an outbreak was identified, all sorts of chaos could break loose once those individuals caught flights to their homes.

Social Viruses

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, coined the now-common term meme, which he used "for a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation," a much-modified definition, but good enough for this discussion. Today, the concept is especially rooted in discussion of the online world. Marketers and businesspeople now think of memes as being transmitted like viruses; they even refer to viral marketing. A classic example is the Yahoo! offer of a free email account, automatically appended to all Yahoo! user emails; Tupperware and Mary Kay, of which every user is a potential distributor, are others.

Even a recent viral marketing example like Facebook, however, looks slow compared to genetic social viruses like "dog poop girl," not to mention the speed with which web users dug up dirt on Ashley Dupré, the call girl used by disgraced Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer. The question I am hoping to answer here is, who or what drives these explosions of information and discussion?

Super Nodes and the Slashdot Effect

I started by talking about epidemiology because it helps us to understand "super nodes" (see pages 60-61), people who act like super carriers in transforming memes into social viruses and then into epidemics. Looking at the dog poop girl ("DPG") story, the person who took a picture of DPG and put it online was like an index patient, what we could call an index node. Each person who emailed a link to a friend or two was a mere carrier, while each blogger who linked to the story, thereby exposing many more readers, was a super node. The authors of BoingBoing are super nodes of a level unheard of in epidemiology - the sheer numbers involved make such blogs look more like mishaps at biological warfare labs than like any super carrier individual.

What makes the internet so different - and so scary - is that everyone, even people who do not run popular blogs, can be a super node, very easily and rapidly. Microsoft Outlook makes it easy to write or forward a story for the consumption of a user's hundred closest friends. Facebook and the freedom to add information - usually unverified - in the comments sections of popular blogs or on popular forums make it easier still to put information in front of total strangers. Just submitting a story to such a site can have incredible effects.

The power of the web to distribute information at incredible speed has perhaps no better illustration than the Slashdot effect, or "slashdotting" (page 62). Slashdot users tend to descend with such crushing speed on sites that it is now common practice for some of the first readers of a story to "scrape" and archive sites linked to in the main story, because it is a safe bet that all but the largest sites will be offline a few minutes after a single link's appearance on Slashdot.

What Type of Node Are You?

The result of all of this is that everyone online occupies numerous roles, at least potentially. Everyone who has ever been online is a node. Everyone who has ever written a post, comment, or forward is a carrier. Everyone who owns a blog with any readers is a super node and a potential mega-super node, with the potential to bring us the next dog poop girl or Star Wars Kid.

Most of us, though, feed the online reputation grinder innocently and even unconsciously, at least most of the time. Law school gossip demonstrates perfectly the kind of roles we tend to take. Some student IMs a friend a funny video from a party or a story about a classmate's weekend escapade, and nearly the entire school knows within hours, if not minutes. In at least two instances during the last few years, literally every person in my IM buddy list knew certain pieces of gossip within minutes of the first time it reached the ears (or screen) of a member of my graduating class. Nearly everyone who heard these rumors did no more than IM a friend or two about it, if they did that much - it may be that nobody told more than four or five people the stories.

None of this matters; for a real-world epidemic to spread so rapidly is unheard of, for the simple reason that it is easier to spread memes than physical viruses; there is no coughing, sneezing, bleeding, or other physical activity required. A simple "cut and paste" is usually sufficient, if not simply a click on the "Forward" button. We all are potentially incredibly efficient super nodes for traffic in information.

Somebody Might Be Watching

A point Solove repeats many times is how radically technology changes the borders and limits of gossip. One reason for this is that internet users have far less control over who is "infected" with a social virus than patients have over whom they infect with physical viruses. Today's news demonstrates the difference between the spread of physical and social phenomena. Matt Drudge today linked to a story about a man who claims to have "infected 1,500 girls with AIDS." Such a person is at best delusional, at worst a malevolent sociopath. If the story is true, it is an extreme rarity, which is why it made news - we don't expect people to malevolently convey deadly diseases. Also today, blogger David Lat informed thousands of people about a British judge's rebuke of white shoe law firm Allen & Overy, yet this is not news; millions of blog posts are written and read every day.

The difference here is simple: the man who claims to have infected women with AIDS had to invest a lot of time and energy in voluntary (one hopes) encounters with individual women (if the story is true). David Lat's post, however, took at most a couple of hours and reaches a mostly anonymous audience of people Lat will never meet. This is the same factor that blows up stories like Washingtonienne (pages 50-54) and the blog in Orin Kerr's story (pages 54-55): we do not know who reads what we put online, or even who is putting information online about us. In some cases, as with Carpool Cheats (page 100) or the Nuremberg Files (id.) this viewer anonymity can have terrifying real-world consequences.

This potential for two-way (creator and audience) anonymity is creating a world far more like that in 1984 than any government effort ever could. We simply do not know who is watching, who has a phone with a camera, who is blogging about us. At least Winston Smith could stand out of sight of the telescreen; far more treacherous is trying to moderate one's behavior in front of one's friends and even those who are like-minded, but may lack discretion.

Sociopaths? Bold Social Experimenters? Or Both?

When student Jennifer Ringley created JenniCam, she voluntarily put effectively her entire life online for eight years. (Page 71.) Her life outside of her residence may not have been on video, but the aspects of her life that most of us would consider most private, including her sex life, were on display to whomever wanted to watch, an audience over which she had no control. Probably, several starring characters in her show - like the friend's fiancé with whom she liaised - were unaware of their cameo appearances at the time. Ringley explained that she didn't mind being watched.

A generation ago, JenniCam would have been impossible. More importantly, the concept would have been universally condemned no more than a generation before that. Ringley's complete disinterest in privacy is the reverse of what happened when people viciously shamed dog poop girl: it wasn't that she felt compelled to invade anyone else's privacy, but that she felt compelled to invade her own privacy. This is sociopathic behavior in the classic sense, at least in Ringley's apparent inability to feel shame about private acts.

Some will say that Ringley is a bold social experimenter and that her effort was a form of art, in that it was one of the purest self-portraits ever, with no embellishment or distortion. While I would not say so, art is in the eye of the beholder. What everyone can agree about is that Ringley made a statement: privacy - hers and that of her visitors - is nonexistent.

What Are We Left With?

I have described a large cast of characters: there are DPGs and Star Wars Kids; shamers who spread stories about DPG and others; super nodes who accelerate a story's spread; mega-super nodes which turn new or localized stories into major scoops; psychopaths who implicitly and explicitly advocate vigilante justice; and sociopaths who expose the most intimate details of their lives and others' with a "why not?" attitude. What is most horrifying about Solove's book is that we (by this I mean members of this seminar) each can probably find a bit of ourselves in most or all of those characters.

I believe this leaves us with good news and bad news. The bad news is that the world is full of people who take glee in destroying the lives of others and even more who unthinkingly fuel the rumor mill. The good news is that many of those same people keep the rumor-mongers and shamers in line, in turn. Ultimately, though, relying on the "bad guys" to self-police online means vigilantism on the grandest scale possible. Maybe Scott McNealy is right, or at least becoming right: "You already have zero privacy. Get over it."

Meh.

In the first half of The Future of Reputation, Solove trots out anecdote after anecdote, trying to jolt us readers into a state of worry—if not panic—at the power of the Internet to defame and shame. Solove tells tales of ruined careers and exposed affairs to call our collective attention. How should I put this? I’m not panicked. I’m not afraid. I haven’t spent the last three days erasing everything I’ve ever posted online in an attempt to reduce or remove my online footprint. (And this isn’t just because I have a name far too ordinary to produce useful Google search results—although that sure does help limit one’s e-dread.) My reason is that of the two scenarios I can contemplate, neither instills fear in my heart that tomorrow my career and personal life will be ruined by the vengeance of an e-mob or through the exposure of my secret life to the masses. I sleep pretty well at night.

Scenario 1

The first possible scenario is that we remain at current levels of reporting and privacy. This state is marked by the regular emergence of a few reluctant Internet stars every so often and the random reputational harm inflicted by a careless blog post or report by someone we’ve offended. In this scenario, a relatively few other individuals face the ramifications of more significant norm violations and crimes, while others listed on sites such as the bad tipper site face at worst the need to explain their behavior to interested parties. Being a bad tipper or improperly driving in an HOV lane is hardly the type of behavior that ends one’s career or relationship, and rational individuals, such as employers, should likewise recognize the one-sided nature of such sites. (A valid pushback is that some or many just don't recognize this in practice). In this scenario, individual indiscretions such as those mentioned by Solove are quite damaging, and perhaps disproportionately so relative to their actual gravity—mostly because their disclosure is still relatively uncommon.

The size and weight of the problem is also limited by technology. Current search engines are far too imprecise to reliably and accurately cull out information on the average citizen if used by the average web user (such as an employer’s human resources staff). Individuals with common names such as mine become all the more difficult to find online unless more advanced techniques and services are employed. A Google search of my name produces results for a famous singer, model, professional baseball player, and football prospect—none of whom would ever be confused with this Chris James. Professionals in the field and others with special training are more adept at finding personal information on specific individuals, but the majority of those doing the searching—everyday Internet users like most of us—can only glean a rather limited amount through use of what is still a rather crude tool.

Scenario 2

The second scenario I can contemplate is one which I sense Solove believes is possible, namely the emergence of a world where every last mistake or willful norm violation lands us on someone’s “pet norm” grievance blog, full with photos and video of the misdeed.  Solove at first conjectures—and then quickly dismisses the notion--that this reality could lead to the disappearance of some social norms. Says Solove,  if “everybody’s warts are exposed, maybe people will stop readily condemning others, and the social norms that people enforce yet secretly transgress will gradually fade away”. This can’t be right. The social norms, particularly those surrounding gossip, are embedded in human nature and aren’t going anywhere. Rather, if this ubiquity of disclosure is indeed our future, the very ubiquity the scenario describes will only serve to make each violation recorded progressively less significant and less memorable. Only the truly outrageous will stand out, as perhaps they should to a degree and already do anyway.

An analogy may be helpful. I’d say it’s accepted wisdom that the vast majority of drivers violate the speed limit on many or most roads. This behavior is so common that I’m rather confident few of us feel much shame in admitting we don’t really drive 45 mph on Lake Shore on the way to and from school. If this behavior were reported to a potential employer, we’d perhaps feel an ounce of regret, but wouldn’t expect it to significantly dampen our job prospects. If we are to reach a point where violations such as this are equally well-reported, the outcome will be similar: no great outrage will ensue and no significant damage will be done.

Online reports of our behavior are of course different than the speeding scenario, in that an online entry is semi-permanent and laid bare for all to see. We don’t get to choose how and when it’s presented as we usually do with our proclivity for exceeding the speed limit. Nevertheless, in a world where nearly all of us has  some minor indiscretion tucked away on an idiosyncratic web board such as the bad tipper site, the sheer volume renders them unremarkable to a potential dating partner or employer; they’re commonplace, pedestrian.  Were it not so, employers would have few qualifying applicants for employment and nearly all potential romances would be instantly scuttled after a single Google search. This won’t happen, though; just as we’re comfortable with and tolerate a certain level of imperfection in those with whom we interact and do business, so will we eventually tolerate a new but higher level, commensurate with the greater information made public about all of us.

This ubiquity, should it happen, will require some lag time to come to fruition. During the transition, those listed on shaming sites will face the expected repercussions. But once this critical mass is reached—and it would take several years, probably—there is little need to worry any more than we currently do about our daily public and private activities and their effect upon our reputation.

Conclusion

The driver of outcomes in both scenarios is the Internet’s sheer enormity. Because it is such an immense repository of unorganized data, finding information on any one individual can be difficult at present. As the amount of data on each of us grows and grows, each detail is rendered progressively less significant, until a new, equilibrium level of acceptable misbehavior is reached. The continued vitality of human interaction requires it.

(Title redacted to protect the author's views)

To make a few quick comments about Vikas’ and Mario’s postings I would like to push back on the offered solution of a smarter Google to Solove’s problem and point out a few ways in which traditional remedies and privacy protections could be impotent in preventing and righting harms such that their modification is not clearly a solution (assuming the problem is real).

Failure of Monetary and Injunctive Relief

Assuming arguendo Solove’s position, I can see how extant remedies (clear privacy violations, intrusion upon seclusion, false light, etc.) could potentially be inefficacious at remedying the harms to individuals he describes. 

Consider even a quick-moving litigant who immediately detects the harmful footage of herself, which for whatever reason constitutes an actionable tort, but is also enormously funny and spreads at breakneck speed over the internet. She files suit within hours.  Even if she has a high likelihood of success on the merits of the claim, imagine the difficulties of the injunction- how could courts possibly stop the dissemination of a viral video with so many independent and unidentifiable actors spreading the news?  Especially when they have proven completely impotent at stopping similar content distribution in the form of music and software piracy? (two issues of far greater economic import and with stronger political backing) Even if the video is removed, blog discussion certainly can’t be stopped.

Indeed the blogosphere might talk about how much of an ass the litigant is for throwing a fuss over what, for many, has been a humorous internet sensation.  Theoretically no amount of money can buy back the reputation of our hypothetical litigant- although, she may be better off in terms of happiness ultimately, if the award is high enough. To borrow a cliché, “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”.  I can see how traditional methods won’t work and am curious to know what Solove will suggest in the latter portion of the book.

More knowledge is not the answer

The idea that we could ever reach a place where Google, or any central network, contained “all the world’s information”, or enough information for these purposes seems both implausible (mostly because I’m too lazy to read about the good things you done- the bad is so much more fun) and highly undesirable.   Framing the possibility of personal context as a solution to Solove’s identified problem of unjust stigma mischaracterizes his concerns.  I think Solove would see the dissemination of contextual information about individuals to be contrary to the concept of privacy. 

Solove, and I too, would argue that most people wouldn’t want enough information floating out there in the digital ether for anyone to make an informed judgment about their private self.  Is it really a desirable solution for the Dog Poop Girl to expose intimate details about her private life to prove that despite her momentary stupidity (assuming it was transient), she is nonetheless a good person?  It seems a cruel dilemma to choose between standing naked before the mob to beg off their attack and standing silently in the poor armor of your privacy. 

Since the dawn of modern media, this lot was one left to those who chose it- movie stars, athletes and politicians- people who the general public cared enough about to overcome the acquisition costs of the information (buying a newspaper, watching the news, etc.), and who also reap enormous reward from their notoriety.  “Private” citizens are now in “danger” as well because the cost of information is so low and it would seem that people increasingly have no life of their own, and must live vicariously through the misery of others.  We're all morons.  Prosser described the right to privacy as “the right to be let alone”.  More knowledge in Google’s hands would tend to make that difficult.  It can hardly be said that a system, which forces the dissemination of personal information in order to protect one’s reputation is a system that fosters personal privacy.

 

This slice of pie is smaller, but is more nourishing

On page 72 Solove discusses the desirability of private time/space and the need to protect that personal sphere.  This was interesting to me because I would tend to agree that the private arena is a useful tool in mental stability- figuratively letting down your hair for stress relief or the development of the multifaceted “true self” (pg. 69) are all well and good.  However, assuming arguendo that the volume of the private sphere is shrinking due to technology (I guess I should stop picking my nose on the 172…), the amount of time we spend within that private sphere seems to be increasing as a concurrent affect of the same technology.  Solove appropriately mentions Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which supports the proposition that we spend increasingly more time in private situations at the expense of public ones.  The average American spends 4 ½ hours a day watching TV (the number is higher among younger people).  Internet surfing and gaming consume comparable amounts of our time.  The point is that these are all activities we perform within the privacy of our own home and generally at the expense of interacting with other people in a traditional sense.  So even though the reality of the internet may force us to be on guard constantly in the public arena or to retreat more to our homes for protection from outside intrusion, technology is also providing incentives for a natural inclination to spend more time alone, thereby decreasing the amount of time we need to be on guard, and absent any privacy concerns. 

Practically the expected value of being caught in unseemly conduct and the social costs of being on guard (whatever they may be) might be little different than what they were fifty years ago when people spent more time in the public sphere, but could afford to be less careful.  It’s an impossible question, but one worth noting.

Furthermore, the same technology that creates dangerous potential for public humiliation also provides ample opportunity to interact anonymously.  Millions of people interact in online communities like Second Life or World of Warcraft with pseudonymous avatars or even with pseudonyms on a blog.  As these mediums continue gain popularity they may pick up the slack lost to society by enabling people to be a different “public” self without bearing any of the costs of having the actions attributed to their real selves.  I can cheat and backstab other gamers in online games, or post

OBNOXIOUS RAMBLES ALL IN CAPS AND WITHOUT PUNCTUATION ON

BLOGS UNTIL I GET KICKED OFF ONLY TO SIGN UP A NEW ACCOUNT WITH ANOTHER PHONY NAME 

This would seem to cut back on Solove’s concerns that a heightened state of alertness could be harmful to the individual’s ability to be a multifaceted self- it just forces a platform shift for conduct.

The Lemming Award and the Learning Curve

Ultimately we shouldn’t lose perspective of the fact that many of the wounds Solove describes (Star Wars Kid, Numa Numa, etc.), are self-inflicted and that remedial or preventative measures are enabled by the same technology Solove fears.  For example, the Staffer in the Senator’s office could have protected himself if he spent some time investigating his date on Google.  The cell phone thief (or potentially casual finder of mislaid property) should have had the sense not to take pictures, or indeed if he is innocent, should have had the human decency to make efforts to return the phone- perhaps calling some of the contacts in the phone’s call log.  It would also be interesting to see (as Vikas suggests) what the affect the dissemination of the grander context of the individual would have. 

I think we can fairly assume that if Dog Poop Girl put herself out there (perhaps offering an interview with one of the prominent blogs) and apologized, it would be picked up quickly.  Whether or not it would quell the flames of public condemnation is an empirical question I can’t answer, but the proposition is interesting- the source of the problem also provides its solution.  Although I do see some problems with the difficult position this puts people in (see above).  But for the instances where the conduct is contrary to established norms to some degree the victim might deserve a little discomfort.

I also wasn’t terribly persuaded by his appeals to youthful mistakes and second chances.  Frankly if the modern trends in the internet force our youth to march up the learning curve a little faster than they otherwise might, this is a preferable situation in the aggregate.  Society as a whole will be better off (although admittedly potentially at the expense of the individuals crucified along the way).  The kind of youthful indiscretions that one might suffer for later in life in the world of tell-all internet searches- petty theft, drug abuse, etc.- aren’t exactly desirable life experiences, nor are they costless to society as a whole (law enforcement costs, economic loss to stores).  If the practical affect is to so stigmatize those offenders so severely that the acts less oft repeated, we may be better off.

Going forward at least, the more people hear of stories like the careless Summer Associate or the heartbroken staffer, the more careful people will be going forward.  Instances of super-losers like these people should decrease.

Are we better or worse off?

What Solove fails to show, for me at least, is how a vision of a more guarded society will be worse than how we may have lived before.  The advent of YouTube and blogging certainly can increase the costs of mistakes for discrete losers, but in the aggregate we may be better off for not inhibiting free speech, and the benefits in higher enforcement (or enlightenment/refinement) of social norms.  Sure things will be different, but “Different” ≠ “Bad”.

“Different” = “Different”.  And as the current generation grows up knowing the reality of the internet age, it may seem as less and less of a problem and we'll have the sense to watch what we say.  The more common these pointless sites become, I think the less people will care, or at least will have the sense to take them with a grain of salt.

Populist Panopticism

Truly Shallow

Solove’s book has been helpful in debunking an idea that occurred to me after class last week, which is the following. Our discussion of net information as coming in small bits seemed to accept Carr’s premise that this type of information is “dumbed down”—i.e. the net is a mile wide and an inch deep. But it occurred to me that sometimes information delivered in this way isn’t necessarily trivial or over-simplified. It’s possible that a bit of information presupposes a complex understanding of context, so that it actually demands more of the reader than a more fleshed-out version of that information that provides more explanatory background. 

Thus, to take Max’s example from class, the “human interest” item on Fox News about a dog receiving a voter registration card would make sense to a regular viewer not only as a humorous incident but also as a commentary on the need for stricter controls to prevent voter fraud.  The information has greater meaning for the initiated, for whom it constitutes a kind of inside joke about the folly of the status quo. Or, to pick a recent example, a brief mention of Robert Reich’s endorsement of Obama will have more or less meaning depending on the audience’s familiarity with the arc of the primary contest, the importance of the endorsement to various constituencies and the relationship of Reich to the two campaigns. The point is that just because net information can be contextless and fragmentary doesn’t necessarily mean that it presupposes a stupid audience. On the contrary, it can expect more from it. 

This happy story about the readerly depth necessary to parse shallow news is a lot less compelling after reading Solove’s account of internet mobs seizing on possibly erroneous bits of information in order to heap shame on hapless people. It doesn’t require much background knowledge in order to pile on.

(Incidentally, I think fragmentary information’s presupposition of background knowledge might also have pernicious effects in terms of alienation and polarization: alienating voters who have not kept track of evolving stories like election horseraces, and thus lack the context necessary to find the latest development interesting, and polarizing consumers of partisan news, who find it difficult to cross over, lacking the background to grasp the special meaning of, say, a dog’s registration as a voter.)

Populist Panopticon

I have been surprised that Foucault hasn’t been referenced in the book so far, although it’s possible that Solove has been preoccupied with piling up references to U of C law professors. If I recall my Discipline and Punish (and it has been a while), Foucault seemed a bit nostalgic for the old days of public floggings and hangings in that there was a brief public spectacle and then the matter was concluded. I don’t remember his thoughts on the ongoing shame of the transgression, or whether he thought that the one instance of excruciating punishment expiated the crime in the eyes of community, allowing the criminal (in non-death cases) to return to normal life—which seems a bit improbable. 

In any case, as I recall, these brutal punishments at least had the negative virtue for Foucault of avoiding the rehabilitative/penitential mission of the modern prison, which he saw as an institution resembling a school, hospital or psychiatric ward: a “technology” for repressively imposing expert classifications of normalcy and deviance, bringing to bear a therapeutic apparatus designed to minutely document, define and extirpate the slightest nonconformity. (Defining deviance not down, but up.) The problem for Foucault was the modern goal of forced internalization of oppressive social norms, as opposed to simple, brutal and public punishments of gross transgressions. 

Complementing the allegedly pernicious work of modern normalizing institutions is the increased capacity of the modern state to monitor the activities of its citizens, which Foucault famously analogized to Bentham’s Panopticon. Thus, the citizen habitually, almost unconsciously, conforms her behavior and internalizes the norm, knowing that she might be under surveillance at any moment.

I have to confess that I don’t really share Foucault’s concern about rehabilitative prisons and psychiatric institutions. Or at least I think we have come a long way from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I certainly don’t see drawing and quartering as a good alternative. Internalized norms seem to me a precondition to a functioning society, though I suppose one can argue whether at some point they become oppressive. 

So why is this relevant? It seems to me that internet shaming democratizes everything Foucault hated about the modern punitive/therapeutic/surveillance system. It takes the tools of mass surveillance and norm creation and enforcement out of the hands of the experts and government agents and puts them back in the hands of the mob. Or more accurately, it multiplies these tools, which are now shared between government and mob. 

But with internet shaming, I think we get the worst of all worlds. We get 1) the public spectacle, which seems to me a singularly unattractive element of the pre-modern system of punishment, as well as 2) a medieval-like disproportionality between transgression and punishment, and 3) a pre-modern style lack of due process and the associated risk of erroneous punishment.  On the other hand, internet shaming also shares some of the pernicious elements the modern system in terms of 1) the creation and enforcement of an ever-more-minutely-defined normative (see the humiliation of the Star Wars guy), 2) widely expanded surveillance (to everyone with a cell-phone camera), and 3) the permanent branding of the norm-transgressor as a deviant.

Putting aside the occasional contribution to law enforcement (such as stopping the subway flasher), what valuable norms does internet shaming help to enforce? Dog poop scooping? Tipping? Smarter dating (notwithstanding the risks of an ex’s revenge-taking)? Better dancing? Are these really worth the risks of error, disproportionality, permanent destruction of reputation and the promotion of a vicious, McCarthyesque culture of denunciation? Was society teetering at the edge of chaos before we had an electronic pillory?

Metashaming                                                              

Back in the day, people who habitually disseminated shameful information about others were stigmatized as “gossips” and “busybodies.” The community shamed the shamers. I wonder if it would be possible to create a taboo against visiting or posting comments on sites that seek to heap shame on people for minor transgressions. The vast numbers and anonymity of visitors and comment posters make this challenging. Maybe books like Solove’ s are an early step in the creation of a norm against participating in internet shaming, at least of a clearly meritless variety. (“How’s my Driving for Everyone” being an example of an arguably meritorious shaming exercise.) Enforcement will be difficult, but as Solove notes about tipping it seems that norms can be largely effective even without the risk of exposure.

Who owns reputation?

Daniel Solove attempts to balance the competing concerns about reputation. He sets out a few theories of reputation that he attempts to both illustrate and challenge by way of anecdote and example. Yet before embarking on such an analysis one must consider who the beneficial owner of reputation should be. Society constructs the idea of reputation to facilitate relationships. In the information “cloud” of a group, members of society capture the economies of scale of pooling and processing the flow of collective knowledge. Whereas before this information clustering happened at the village level, now we see it exponentially magnified by the effects of the Internet. Nevertheless Solove argues that elements of reputation become lost in translation. 

In puzzling out how to make the most of the new age of reputation, we should start with picking sides. Competing interests are at stake. Reputation can both help people in aggregate or hurt people in aggregate. It can also help individuals and hurt them. Part of analyzing reputation, and its counterpart privacy, will therefore be making a decision about which “ownership” of reputation is more legitimate and useful.

1) Individual valuation of reputation

We can see reputation as the carefully constructed self-image that a person constructs and presents to the world. Solove writes, “Under one theory of reputation, the law professor Robert Post observes, it is a form of property. People earn the esteem of others by ‘the fruit of personal exertion.’” We might therefore see reputation as a type of artwork—people invest years of effort and energy into crafting a mask or persona to present to the rest of the world and they should reap their benefits. Our labors, which usually root our claim to property rights, are immediately and fundamentally twined with our relationships and our representations of self. As a result, “one reason to protect reputation, then, is to preserve the years of effort people put into developing it.”

In a similar thread, Solove writes, “Another theory of reputation, Post notes, is that we protect it in the name of human dignity.” This approach likewise looks at a right to privacy as integral to preserving human dignity. This approach divides between the masses and the individual and erects a protective wall around the individual, because reputation is the lesser-included of human dignity—the original and inalienable basket of rights owned by the person. 

2) Societal valuation of reputation

On the other hand, Solove tries to find support for the idea of societal benefit, a theme that underlies much of the criticism of increasing privacy protection. Solove writes that Judge Richard Posner contends that privacy allows people to “conceal information about themselves that others might use to their disadvantage.” This approach styles privacy as a tool of deception. It struggles to find the benefit of allowing people to conceal information, which, if flowing in free enough form, should allow society to perfectly assess a person’s reputation. In this vein of thought, Solove cites legal scholar Richard Epstein, who contends that the “plea for privacy if often a plea for the right to misrepresent one’s self to the rest of the world.” Privacy, if we understand reputation to be “owned” by society, therefore should serve highly limited functions.

Running in opposition to the idea that individuals own their own reputations because they create them, is the idea that no person owns her own reputation, because reputation is formed in the minds of other people. Solove writes, “once information about us finds its ways into the minds of others, we can’t control what they think about it.” The mask that we wear, on this view, does not come from an individual’s efforts, but rather society’s work to integrate disparate signals into a coherent identity. Identity is therefore not owned by the person, it is constructed by the group. It helps groups manage relationships. In this view, we protect reputation because “the stakes are so high.” Trust, that important social lubricant, will break down without proper respect to privacy.

Solove does a nice job presenting real-life examples of erosions of privacy that have troubling consequences. Solove, unfortunately, fails to present examples that align with the first view of the world, which would offer stronger and more absolute protections of privacy. Rather we can group his examples as follows: 

1) Where the representation is false

Solove writes, “wrongful and undeserved polluting of a person’s reputation not only has devastating consequences for that person, but it also prevents others from accurately judging that person.” In this way he makes a case of the first view of the world, but he relies, for persuasive effect, on the second prong of the claim, which emphasizes society’s ability to use reputation effectively. He comes closest to making the case for individual dignity and individual ownership by referring to the case of Tommy Hilfiger, where the reputation of his company was unable to recover from false rumors of racist remarks. Here Solove channels the scene of John Procter refusing to sign a false confession—we feel the sense that people should not be forced, in practical effect, to testify falsehoods about themselves. We imagine a sphere of protection around the individual. Yet it’s not clear that this same analysis is as convincing if the information is in fact, true.

2) Even if true, child and/or subversion of social policy

Solove struggles to deal with true information. He points, most convincingly to cases involving children. We sympathize with Gary, the “Numa Numa Dance” teenager, because we try to carve out a safe area in youth for people to make mistakes. It seems especially unfortunate that Gary cannot put the cat back in the bag—that he will have to live with his youthful silliness for the rest of his life. In Solove’s words, “…in today’s world, foolish deeds are preserved for eternity on the Internet.” Again, we have a sense of individual ownership being subverted, because Gary’s identity is being seized upon too early and before he can really express it in its fullest form. On the other hand, this concern still centers on the idea of inaccuracy.

The more compelling story in this vein, then is that of Katie, who was wrongly identified as Kobe Bryant’s accuser. Though the identification is false, the example raises the point that we carve out protections even when the identification is true. The Internet then becomes a way to destroy our sexual assault victims’ protections. This idea does not focus on inaccuracy or untruth, although it does represent society trying to align proper incentives for societal benefit.

3) Even if true, old information/misleading

This concern tracks those reflected in the examples involving children. We worry about misrepresentative or old, but viral, information. Yet again, the heart of the matter is that the information is imperfect, not that the individual’s ownership is preeminent.

4) Cruel information

a. Disproportional harm
i. Solove seems to worry about norm-setting “by example.” While the story of “Dog Poop Girl” might demonstrate that society is promoting a norm, it seems to go beyond retribution to punitive damages. We worry about making the members of our society bear a “Scarlet A.” The individual, via the punishment of her sins, becomes a means for enforcing norms generally, an outcome we might worry about as unfair.

b. Gratuitous/mean-spirited
 i. We also see Solove express concern over the cruelty expressed toward “Star Wars Kid.” Ghyslain’s fame on the Internet became a way to provide space for people to bully and ridicule him. This use of reputation strikes us as unnecessary and not useful.

A story of transaction costs?

The second version of the story—that of societal benefit—creates a better setting for solving the problems of privacy and reputation by decreasing transaction costs. For example, as Solove concedes, “With false information, the record can eventually be set straight.” Solove cites Judge Posner who argues that “the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do.” The further we can use the Internet to eliminate false or misleading information, then the less we have to worry about interfering. Privacy protection could therefore be styled as the exception to the rule, accommodating the case of children and specific information that we deem properly protected. 

Solove might counter that even so, online reputation would continue to be a vehicle for bullying and martyr-making. He notes, the “Internet lacks the village’s corrective of familiarity.” Nevertheless that also could be styled as a story of transaction costs. Perhaps the transaction costs for policing bad behavior online could improve. Just as we see online vendors relying on “seller reviews” and other indications of reputation, we might likewise capture the benefits of information by increasing information and decreasing the barriers to accessing information.

Solove, in choosing examples that are highly sympathetic because they invoke the concern about society’s claims to ownership of reputation, forfeits some of his grounding to argue for strong protections. His approach, rather than supporting a default norm of strong protections, leaves room to argue that the problems he identifies as a result of increasing information will diminish with more information and technology’s continued march forward. His view, therefore, is not one of a future of reputation that relies on timeless principles of rights, but on the capacity of technology to serve the collective ownership of reputation.

 

Google, Google, Google

All three of the authors we have read so far have touched on the effects of Google search on our lives.  Namely, they all seem to contend that the widespread availability of quick, in-depth Google search will result in us losing our identities.  I outline the authors’ various arguments on how Google search causes such a loss.  Then I note the inherent contentions and contradictions in the authors’ arguments about this Google-based loss.  Finally, I argue that some coherency to these contentions may be found through the mechanism of giving Google enough information that it could form access policies on the fly, such that access to information would be restricted depending upon the context—the user seeking the information and the situation in which it is sought.

All Three Agree

Jeanneney argued that Google’s digitization of books and other library materials would result in a search that would cause people (especially minority cultures) to lose control over their cultural identities.  Google would spread American cultural imperialism but maybe more perniciously would exclude certain non-American works from its databases or from high page ranks.  In any case, this system would eventually cause the loss—or at least the severe warping—of cultural identities of various peoples, all outside their control.

Carr is even more straightforward: “The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing.  It will become our memory.  Then it will become our identity.” (Carr, p.226)  While the “megacomputer” he references is not specifically Google but rather some World Wide Computer that represents utility computing in general, Carr does start his “iGod” chapter by discussing what Google has done and what its goals are.  He notes that Google is run in similar fashion to this megacomputer that he envisions.  The Google system involves us feeding our intelligence into it such that the system can “systematically exploit[] human knowledge and decisions about what is significant.” (Carr, p.219)  Eventually, the Google system will assume responsibility for our knowing such that it would tell us what we should be typing—the questions we should be posing instead of the answers we are searching for.  (Carr, p.225)  To Carr, that would entail us losing control over our identities, because such systems represent a “threat to our integrity as freethinking individuals.”  (Carr, p.215)

Finally, the theme throughout Solove’s first part of his book is that Google allows anyone to find much information about anyone else at any time freely and easily.  It creates an unforgiving history of everyone from the dog poop girl to the Numa Numa dancing kid.  Solove notes that details about one’s private life on the Internet can become permanent digital baggage.  (Solove, p.10)  One can never escape the misdeeds of one’s past.  Google search can limit the ability of someone who has been shamed for wrongdoing—violating social norm—from reentering the community due to the availability of all that past information on Google search.  We are unable to control our identities because all this information governing our identities is available on Google for anyone to see.  According to Solove, one of the major tragedies here is that we are unable to fully develop our identities because we are unable to experiment, afraid that such experimentation will leave marks on our permanent records.

All Three Disagree

            The three arguments above noting the various ways in which Google will cause us to lose our identities—or at least lose control over our identities—contain inherent contradictions.  For example, Carr argues that one of the more pernicious effects of private information about people being available is that, even if the information is true, it lacks context.  The information can be misleading to the casual observer, especially since the Internet does not provide that close-knit community where people know much more about any particular individual, thus allowing them to weigh any rumor or fact in light of all the other information.  While I am not sure what he will argue in the second half of the book, his argument here seems to suggest that Google should collect and disseminate more information about individuals.  If Google could provide all information about people, then we would not be faced with such problems of context.  As Judge Posner would say, if the information is true, then it is useful to society.  If it is false, then it can be easily discredited.  Google would be especially adept at discrediting falsities as it could quickly make the truth available to anyone who sought it.  Additionally, as noted above, Solove cautions that Google makes available forever information about past misdeeds and shaming.  But if all information about a person were available, then such past information could be put in context.  It would be helpful for anyone evaluating the person’s reputation but would not be dispositive, since much more other information would be also available.

            Providing as much information as possible—in fact all the information in the world—would not only resolve some of Solove’s concerns about identity loss.  It would also address Jeanneney’s concerns about cultural identity.  One of Jeanneney’s concerns is that Google is only digitizing certain libraries, but of course, this can easily be remedied over time if Google were to contain all of the world’s information.  His other concern seems to be that even if Google contains all the books ever printed, the non-American books would get lost in the shuffle.  The demand would be mostly for American media, which would get placed at the top of search results, and knowledge about other cultures would be simply forgotten.  That seems plausible but if Google really contained all of the world’s information then it would know when we were looking for some obscure piece of literature.  As Carr argues, the Google megacomputer could eventually have enough information that it would know what we want before we know it.  It would know the question we wanted to ask before we could ask it.  More importantly, it may know what is better for us even though we may not—which would resolve Jeanneney’s concerns about society discounting the value of obscure literature or non-American films.  After all, humans work under all sorts of biases and heuristics due to our limited ability to deal with all the information we receive.  These biases and heuristics lead to poor, irrational decisions that may discount future benefit.  The Google system would not face such constraints.

            This notion of giving Google all possible information runs up against the essential argument of Carr regarding our loss of freedom and identity.  As noted above, Carr’s view of identity is one of our integrity as freethinking individuals, which may disappear under this Google megacomputer.

            Of course, if we limit the amount of information available on Google, as Carr seems to suggest, then this runs up against the concerns of the other two authors.  Limiting information about individuals would prohibit placing it in context and lead to the situations noted by Solove where individuals are unable to fully exercise their identities for fear of this digital baggage.  Additionally, it may implicate Jeanneney’s concerns about cultural imperialism.   Selective information may mean certain books are not digitized or are not quickly available.

Finally, Solove and Jeanneney are not harmonious either.  Jeanneney seems to worry that some parts of our identities—our cultural heritage—will not make it online or will be lost in the shuffle.  He wants to ensure that these identities should be available online.  Solove worries that parts of our identities will make it online.  Of course, Jeanneney is talking about cultural identity while Solove about private identity, but I would venture that often times it is very difficult to distinguish between the two.  Where one’s personal identity stops and cultural identity begins is a blurry line.  Therefore, all the authors seem to agree that Google will causes losses to identities but disagree on why and how.

Towards Some Coherency

            These inherent contentions seem to stem from the fact that the same information can be helpful to some and hurtful to others.  For example, as Solove notes, a friend may want to tell the wife about a cheating husband but probably should not tell the employer or others.  Or the same information can be at some time helpful and at other times hurtful.  For example, information about a person’s arrest may be helpful immediately after the arrest but may be less relevant decades after.  Information, then, is context dependent.  Solove notes that our identities are context dependent.  We have different identities for the public and private arenas.  Our identities are some limited collection of information we provide within various arenas.  In some contexts, we may want to provide information that is hidden in other contexts.  If the wife searches for information about her husband on Google, it may be helpful to find out information about his infidelity.  But if a future employer searches the same name, he should not find such information.  The method seems to be to make Google smarter.  Currently, Google already collects information to place a user’s search in the context of other recent searches.  Presumably, if Brin and Page’s vision survives, Google would have enough knowledge to always provide appropriate context.  This is similar to Google automatically forming user policies.  In networked computing, certain files or drives have restricted access based on user policies.  To the low-level user, these files may be completely hidden from view.  To a mid-level user, the files may only be accessible.  To a high-level user, the files may be accessible and modifiable.  Google, then, would have to formulate such user policies on the fly.  To do this accurately, of course, it would need a collection of the world’s entire information.

            There are two concerns about this approach based on limitations.  First is freedom of speech, which is being restricted here.  I will hold off on commenting about this until I have finished reading the second part of Solove’s book, which I imagine addresses this concern.  The second concern, of course, is the original one that Carr brought up about too much information leading to a loss of identity.  I am not sure how to address this except to say that I think restricting access to information for everyone, including the concerned individual and Google itself, could mitigate concerns about any one entity having too much information.  I would be interested in hearing what others have to say (if anything).

Problems with no real solutions

The first part of the Future of Reputation is filled with many anecdotal stories that revolve around the same themes. The book does raise interesting issues, but rather than delving deeply into any one of them, Solove reinforces his points with even more anecdotal stories that add little value to his overall themes. Solove hints that he will analyze the issues and potential solutions to some of problems in more depth in the second part, and I hope he does so in an informative and novel way that does not rely on extreme stories of how people’s lives were ruined as a result of private/localized information being posted on the internet. The author could have tackled the issues much sooner and with fewer stories, particularly given the fact that all of us have heard at least one horrible story of how the internet can make a private/localized occurrence public to the entire world.

Solove does identify new issues in privacy norms/rules that the online world raises. Three issues stood out for me. The first is underlying comparison between the small village and the global village. The second is the disproportionality between a violator of social norms and the potentially inalienable shaming that can result from exposing that violation on the internet. And the third is the problem of vigilantism and reliable sources.

Small Village vs. Global Village

In the old days, people abided by social norms in part because there would be a reputational or legal sanction against people refusing to abide by various rules/norms. Everyone knows everybody in the small village, and everyone depends on everyone else. Thus, if you failed to fulfill the end of a bargain, people in the small village would eventually know about it. The result would be that people in the small village would begin to distrust you and would likely refuse to deal with you in the future. Yet in the small village people are also likely to know more details and both sides of a story, so that any reputational harm is likely to be balanced. If both parties to an agreement, for example, had more or less equal blame in the non-enforcement of an agreement, the gossip blaming A would be counteracted by the gossip blaming B so that any reputational harm is restrained from getting out of hand on either side.

In the Global village, this is not the case. People could avoid any previous reputational sanctions by merely moving to a different city. Over time, previous reputational harm “would fade from memories over time” as there was no easy way to make that harm permanent and easily accessible in new settings. The internet changed this. Now gossip or reputation linked to an individual is permanent. By Googling someone’s name, once can find various pieces of information about any individual. In this and other respects, it may seem that the internet is making the Global village similar to the small village.

As Solove points out, however, there are important differences. Whereas in the small village people tend to know the overall character of an individual, the global village only provides bits and pieces of information. The rest of a person’s identity is filled according to people’s bias or assumptions about character, which may not reflect an individual’s true character. The problem is reinforced because people are more likely to publish the negative; such information is more interesting or newsworthy than positive aspects in one’s life. Friends and family, for example, usually do not go online to publish how good or reliable a person may be. Yet, even an individual’s otherwise implacable reputation may be tarnished forever by an online publication of a minor or private transgression that is posted on a popular blog. In the online world, unlike the small village, one negative remark may outweigh a person’s entire character, even if that person’s character, when viewed as whole, is far better than people with whom we deal on a regular basis. This disproportionality creates a problem, as Solove points out, but one that he may be overemphasizing.

Disproportionate Issues

Solove is right in saying that we should be able to control our reputation to some extent, but I think that he underestimates our ability to do so. If I do not want a video of me posted on internet, I should be more careful of where I leave videos of myself after I record them.  People know or should know that with today’s technology anyone can capture anything one does in public and expose it to everyone else in the world. Keeping this in mind, people can modify their behavior accordingly. Yes, the reputational harm done to the star wars kid or the dog poop girl was excessive, but anyone that heard about the dog incident will think twice about doing what the girl did, and people in general will be more careful about leaving embarrassing videos of the themselves where others can access and upload them to a video cite like youtube. The internet does makes us more guarded about our actions in public, but its utility also increases our freedom in other areas such as our ability to communicate, express ourselves, and gather more information than was ever possible.

Privacy laws can be adapted to new environments.

It seems that the law can provide or be adapted to provide remedies to the issues that Solove has raised thus far. Public disclosure of private facts that are highly offensive and of no legitimate concern to the public, intrusion upon seclusion, false light, appropriation, and infliction of emotional distress are just a few of the causes of action that can be used to protect one’s reputation or privacy. Solove may talk about these in the second half of the book, but I have trouble seeing why existing causes of action are not well suited to the online world. I would be interested in knowing if people think that new rules are needed to address issues related to how the internet affects reputation or whether modern ones may suffice. In other words, how does privacy in the online context differ from privacy in the physical context besides the obvious fact that the former can disseminate information much more quickly and to a broader audience?

Problem of vigilantism and Inaccurate Information

The problem of vigilantism is also a troublesome one. When “private citizens engage in their own form of vigilante justice” there is no correcting or verifying mechanism that ensures that the use online shaming as mean to reprimand violators of social norms - whether these norms are “society’s norms” or particular group norms - are in fact based on reliable and accurate information (100). When a person’s name is placed on a vigilante site (e.g. HOV violators) there should be mechanisms and controls to insure that the reporting is accurate (e.g., that a person is not incorrectly identified as an HOV violator when  in fact there was a two year old kid , not visible to other vehicles, strapped to the backseat of a car). The reputational harm in a cased of incorrect reporting would be unwarranted, whereas the reputational harm of an actual violator is more warranted.

Solove seems to have a problem with proportionality of online shaming to the gravity of the transgression. According to Solove, someone who fails to pick his thrash does not deserve a reputational backlash from the entire world. But it is pointless to try to restrain the proportionality of a social transgression in a digital world without chilling free speech or setting up a process that reviews every post for appropriateness. These options are undesirable to a democracy and it is less costly to have everyone realize that any public action may be recorded and placed online for everyone to see. The alternative seems unfeasible.

But as Solove mentions, there is a public interest in restraining the posting of information that may threaten people’s lives. Solove gives the example of the threats doctors received after information was posted in a website naming them as facilitators of abortion. In these cases, there is a stronger case for shutting down websites and sanctioning the people who run them. But besides these extreme cases, it is still quite difficult to determine the balance between someone’s privacy and restricting other people’s free speech in the online context. Hopefully Solove will provide better ways to find the right balance in the second half of his book.

Like Setting Monkeys Loose on a Space Station

Commenting on the first half only of Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation is difficult - the first four chapters lay out the problem, mostly through anecdotes, while the latter half deals with possible solutions. Responding to the first half only is like responding to just the facts of a case. Whatever I say is likely to have already been said in the unread half, or be superseded in importance by it. For example, I would have enjoyed posting here as a free speech absolutist, channeling Eugene Volokh and trying to prove that Solove's cure is worse than the disease. However, Solove appears to have an entire chapter devoted to this later in the book, so it would be both silly and unfair to criticize him at this point.

Instead of arguing for or against Solove's solutions, therefore, I'll focus on the problems he identifies in the first half of his book. Basically, my point is this - technology matters far less than human nature.

Solove identifies a wide range of internet-related events that seem cruel, vindictive, exploitative, manipulative, or simply unfair. With "dog poop girl," "Michael," whose juvenile arrest affected his chances for jobs and dates, the semi-literate "Peoria Crack House" vigilante site, and the cruel exploitation of "Star Wars Kid" (among many such events) Solove makes out a case for the Internet as a vehicle for social oppression. Rapid spread of information, permanent storage, and easy access, he argues, are the source of these evils. Even where the Internet enables spread of information with arguably positive results, as with Volokh's exposure of bad Dell customer service or the "Don't Date Him Girl" site, Solove (sagely) worries about when such shaming will go too far.

Solove further notes that these behaviors are not entirely new - discussing the history of shaming (scarlet letters, etc.) in particular detail. In fact, all of the "bad" behavior Solove cites is as old as humanity itself. People have always gossiped about each other. People have always used shaming penalties, often to excess. People have always been cliquish, vindictive, cruel, exploitative, and selfish. People have always been irrational, overvaluing negative or salacious information and using heuristics to judge others that, while they may have once been useful, cannot in any sense be called fair or reasonable. The Internet vigilantes that relentlessly (and, one suspects, gleefully) attacked the reputations of Laura the plagiarist and Danny the cell-phone thief are not at all surprising - they are us. We all more or less and from time to time suffer from the same biases and temptations to overreact. While we might criticize their behavior from our position of sober hindsight, we cannot honestly say that we are surprised. Punishing social deviance publicly while gossiping and undermining others privately are part of our most basic instincts. They appear in literature throughout history, as the building blocks of both tragedy and farce. Gossip and a desire for revenge started the Trojan War, and Solove himself points to Iago of Othello as a vindictive destroyer of reputations. These traits are not necessarily bad - they probably helped humanity survive, and still to some extent solidify communities and social bonds, even if we realize they are a poor fit for the modern world in many ways.

It is certainly true that the Internet magnifies many of these bad habits - but this is only because it reflects human nature itself, both "good" and "bad." Social networks are made up of people. Memes travel faster over the Web, but they are still at home only in human minds. Memes are like mental viruses (as a side note, Solove and others in this area would do well to look at work in memetics) - and the invention of the internet can be analogized to a mutation that allows a virus to spread through the air. It can infect many more people, but its ultimate effects will be the same. The solution cannot be to get rid of the air - it must be to attack the virus itself, by vaccine or cure. The vaccine and cure for man's inhumanity to man are, as Lincoln put it, the "better angels of our nature." Mercy, skepticism towards gossip, and above all reason and patience are - and always have been - the solutions to these problems.

The Internet does not change that - it makes them more important. These virtues are their own memes. They, admittedly, do not spread as quickly as salacious gossip, but they are more permanent.
The battle between slow-spreading positive memes and fast-spreading negative ones is, in a certain sense, the story of civilization. That basic framework will not, has not changed due to the Internet - though the Internet might be seen to tip the scales, upsetting a balance of power between the two. Still, there are powerful forces that counteract the dangers Solove warns about. For example, even the market works in favor of our better virtues. If others are overvaluing negative information (as human nature suggests they will), this presents an opportunity. Hiring an employee? Look for someone with a slightly questionable Google history - you'll probably get a better worker for less. Being more rational, reasonable, and forgiving than human instinct tempts us to be is not just praiseworthy, it can also be profitable. This as true online as it is in daily life.

This post is not meant to be an amateur ethics lesson, but rather to make the case that Solove (and his readers) should not be surprised about bad behavior and violations of privacy on the Internet. We also need not be overly worried about them, or at least not any more than we are already worried about society in general. Letting humans use the internet is like setting monkeys loose on a space station - there's going to be a mess. In neither case is technology the problem, and in neither case is it the solution. Fix the monkey, and you fix the mess.