refer a friend: children and viral marketing

On August 22 the Center for Digital Democracy, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and 15 other consumer and youth advocacy groups filed a series of complaints with the Federal Trade Commission alleging breaches of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The complaints call on the FTC to investigate a number of companies - including General Mills, McDonalds, Viacom and others - for unfair and deceptive marketing practices which encourage children to engage in viral marketing.  Specifically, these campaigns allegedly  induce children to 'refer-a-friend' to receive promotional material from the companies. In so doing, the children are invited to submit both their own personal information and the personal information of their friends, without parental consent, which the complainants argue is in direct violation of COPPA.

While it is the products involved which have riled up a number of the complainant groups (news coverage has focused in particular on the fact that these companies are 'selling sugar' to kids), the complaints raise the thornier issue of what's at stake in the privacy protections provided by COPPA. Of course, it seems to be fairly black and white that we want to minimise children's exposure to junk food marketing, and that if we can do this at the same time as preventing companies from exploiting technologies' ability to collect data on them it seems like a win win.

But this characterisation overlooks the very real impact COPPA - and, in particular, the parental consent provisions - actually have on children's right to privacy. If we think that children should have a meaningful right to privacy, subjecting it to parental oversight is always going to be complicated. While parents may be best placed to act in the interests of their children, they are also best placed to undermine those rights. As a result, the panopticon of surveillance enabled by the web and legislatively ennobled by legislation like COPPA is taking away the ability of children to explore their world anonymously or, at least, in private. This has both overt (the ten year old boy who gets beaten by his parents for looking at something they disapprove of) and more insidious (an entire generation growing up with a sense of being constantly monitored) consequences.

At the same time, the marketing campaigns concerned involve another angle which is particularly troubling for the relationship between children and their digital identity: the incentive to 'refer-a-friend'. In so doing, these campaigns encourage kids to commodify the identity-markers (indeed, the identities) of other kids and 'sell' them (or give them) to corporations. Underpinning this practice is the inculcation of an idea that identities (your own and other people's) are saleable, that people are commodities. I can't help but wonder how that attitude will manifest when these kids are older.

Of course, a balance needs to be struck. Protecting kids from the ever expanding reach of the consumption machine is a noble goal. But we  need to make sure that in seeking to ameliorate one incursion we don't accidentally do more harm to young people's privacy, safety and sense of themselves.

teleportraiture

Janet Bruesselbach has produced a series of portraits via various online chat platforms (google connect, skype etc). I love the way these images turn the ephemerality of digital talk into something fixed and permanent; capturing these moments that are so fleeting. At the same time, to me her work insists upon the permanence of our digital world, reminding us that 'moments' online have lives that long exceed our own, stored, searchable and retrievable in an historically unprecedented way. As such, these images can be understood not only as images of people, but as portraits of the ghosts in the machine.

google effects: augmenting the reality of your face

Image source: http://criticsunknown.com/slideshow/google/

In March, google released a range of aps intended to 'enhance' the experience of its online chat forum, Hangouts. According to a recent article in Slate, the most popular of these aps is 'google effects', an application which enhances your experience of Hangouts by enhancing your appearance: it allows you to adorn your chatting visage with a range of masks which are digitally mapped to your face, moving when you move and "retaining proper size and orientation as you lean forward and back or sway side to side" so as to give the appearance that you are wearing them in real life.

As you can see from the image above, the masks are cartoony and over the top: they do not so much enhance your appearance (in the sense of making you foxier) as they do hide it. Seth Stevenson argues that it is this very disruption of the reality of your face that makes google effects so popular (and useful): it obscures the visibility of your facial expressions and takes the pressure off the need to look a particular way while interacting online. This, for Stevenson, ironically allows users to interact with less emphasis on visibility, rendering Hangouts more like traditional orality oriented forms of communication like the telephone.

While I agree that google effects may well lessen the pressure of online chatting (and possibly increase its utilisation)(who hasn't been put off skyping sometimes as a consequence of a bad hair day/desire to have the conversation on the toilet/etc), I think there is something else going on that is not just about reducing visibility and rendering Hangouts more like the traditional invisible talkiness of the telephone. Rather, google effects allow us to use masks as a graphical shorthand to communicate complex emotions - turning us into the fleshy manifestation of emoticons.

In this way, google effects foregrounds the prismatic nature of online identity: by adding an additional layer of artifice to the digital visage, it forces us to think twice about who we are, and implicitly evokes the fact that identity itself is artifice; that the layers of selfhood are unendingly constructed, that we are masks all the way down to the bone. In this way, google effects insists on a narrative of digital identity in which the emotion/emoticon is a simulacrum, dissimulating (in the baudrillardian sense) that there is nothing beneath the sign.

And just as a geographical map interprets (and imagines) territorial space, so to does the mask of google effects precede (and configure) online identity, replacing the parody of a real world mask with the pastiche of a prismatic digital self. This evolution of the performance of identity for the digital realm recalls Jameson's insistence that one of the defining features of postmodernism is the replacement of parody by pastiche. What, then, are the implications for digital identity of what I'm sure will be increasingly complex and 'realistic' (hyperrealistic?) augmentations of self? Is it simply empowering us to self satirise (or go to the bathroom while we chat) or will the avatarisation of self online have real implications for the way in which we understand and perform our identities in the webisphere (and beyond?)

And what of the content of the mask? At what point is an obama mask an obama mask, and when does it turn into an obama face? (yes, that is a true blood reference, with a little touch of point break thrown in for good measure). Will we see an explosion of efforts to trademark our face to prevent our online impersonation? At what point do the things that you say while wearing my face defame me?

i tweet therefore i am ... a psychopath?

Next week at DEFCON, the good people of the Online Privacy Foundation will be giving a talk on their research regarding what a person's twitter usage reveals about their personality. Specifically, they are examining the (dark triad) psychological traits of narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellianism with a view to answering the question "Can twitter really help expose psychopath killer's traits?"

In particular, they propose to address:

1. Public understanding of psychopathy;

2. General public focus on whether we can spot psychopaths and therefore predict crime; and

3. Public perception that detecting personality from social media is infallible.

Of course, given that this is a talk by the Online Privacy Foundation, I would expect that they will touch on the troubling privacy implications of their research. The participants in the study were volunteers (cheered on by Stephen Fry, which could be said to be under the duress of awesome); participants in any sort of real world application of the research would not be, and we would find ourselves stuck in a bind between privacy and security. While its always difficult to know which way public policy is going to turn on these questions, something (PATRIOT Act) gives me a clue... 

In any event, I imagine that this is a talk that will touch a few raw nerves this week. In fact, I would be worried that current events might overwhelmingly colour reactions to the topic.

Apparently the paper is going to be published a month-ish after DEFCON, so watch this space.

digital dualism vs augmented reality

In his recent piece in The New Inquiry, Nathan Jurgenson discusses the fetishization of 'real life' (as opposed to web life) in contemporary culture.

He argues that the discursive valorisation of 'the real' can be understood as a reaction to the proliferation of mobile technology. Indeed, he argues that the constancy of our interconnection/-nectedness has left us longing for a more pure or authentic pre-digital self, manifesting in the celebration of tropes of the homemade, the offline, the rustic.

However, Jurgenson takes the view that the romanticization of the meat world is based on a false assumption that there is dualism between our online and offline worlds. Rather, he argues that we are living in an age of augmented reality, where the online and offline are interconnected, mutually constituting and reinforcing, and that there is artificiality at play in suggestions that we have 'collectively lost the offline experience'. Instead, he claims that we are now able to appreciate offline life in a way we were never able to before.

It strikes me as cynical to suggest that we appreciate something more because it has been compromised, and i don't think that Jurgenson pays enough attention to the way that the online physically (and psychologically) disrupts and coopts our experience of the offline (doesn't he care that his friends are on their phones during dinner?), but I do think he makes a good point regarding the dissolution of the divide between offline and online life when he says that "the clear distinction between on and offline, between human and technology, is queered beyond tenability."

And maybe, as Jurgenson alleges, this isn't a bad thing. Perhaps, the more comfortable we get with our augmented reality, the better we will be able to manage the new rules of the game - and the less we will be bothered by our friends tweeting through dinner.

But for me - and you can call me old fashioned - there will always be room for a twitter free zone, for conversation that is not mediated by a character limit and for loose talk, muddled up, spontaneous opinions that aren't edited to most flatter the opiner. Does that mean I reject the augmentation of our reality? Do I think we have to switch off to plug into the 'real world'? No. But I do think it's important that we keep discussing the way that the various modes of 'real life' both online and off intersect, bounce off and shape each other, and the way that senses of self are profoundly informed by the way that that self is performed and communicated. 


What do you think? Is it a zero sum game? Or can it be both and neither?

multiple selves

It has become almost redundant to refer to the web as the technological apparatus for the emergence of multiple selves. Sherry Turkle talks about the way that web allows us to “recast identity in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives” and explore multiple aspects of self in parallel. Laura Robinson notes that “these technologies present self-ing opportunities for an ephemeral self, without commitment to a masterself that becomes an ‘I’ or ‘me’.” 

Clearly, the theoretical paradigm of multiple selves reflects the postmodern critique of the narrative of the essential self with its attendant rejection of the ‘myth of wholeness’. And it is the desire to preserve this revolutionary potential of multiple selves - the choose your own identity riff that Chris Poole lionises - that has led to so much uproar around ideas like google passport.

But how much are we actually walking the walk of all this prismatic identity talk? More and more the read-write-webverse seems to be trending towards an interconnectedness of self that forces us to be one person online. 

In fact, an emerging consequence of the collapsed contexts of the web seems to be that we are perhaps more our selves online than in the real world - I am me in ways I didn't have to be me before, I am the same me to my mum and my boss and my friends, even when once I would have preferred to keep those versions of my self separate and distinct.

Is this leading to a situation - like a certain social network founder would have it - where privacy itself is no longer a relevant ambition? Is the web finally going to catch up to the Australian legal system? Or are we going to find new ways to carve out private spaces in the share-everything landscape of the web? 

Of course, it's still early days in the evolution of the web and it's hard to predict what it will look like five years (or even a year) from now. But I worry that the longer we allow things to continue as they are - where we rely on the privacy settings of corporations with absolutely no interest in protecting our privacy - the more we will disenfranchise ourselves from the conversation and handover control of a big part of our identities to 'the man'.

What do you think? Can we still have private places in open spaces? Or do we need locked wall garden internet communities to keep our secrets for us?

Connected, but alone

In Sherry Turkle's recent TED talk, the Life on the Screen author turns her analytical gaze on the paradox of why she loves to receive texts even as she worries that too many texts may be a problem. In essence, she is interested in exploring the way in which the increasing ubiquity of technology may be changing the way we relate to each other - and the way we relate to ourselves. For Turkle, the central difference between the excitement she felt 15 years ago with regard to technology and the concern she feels now is the fact that 15 years ago we would go online, hang out - and then turn off. 


It is the absence of turning off that gives Turkle the sense that technology may be taking us places we don't want to go. She cites what she refers to as the 'Goldilocks effect' of technology - the ability it gives us to moderate our self-presentation, interactions and relationships in such a way as to keep other people 'not too close, not too far, just right'. In so doing, she argues, we have lost the ability to have a real conversation, and we have lost the ability to be alone, with the result that "we expect more from technology and less from each other". Sadly, a lot of the examples she gave of the increasing alone/togetherness of our social lives rang true for me. 


What do you think? Are we trying so hard to be constantly connected that we can't be by ourselves? Are we editing and retouching ourselves so much that we are no longer able to experience authentic intimacy? Is the way that we communicate online inauthentic, or just a new kind of authenticity?

authenticity

This week Rhode Island repealed a law which criminalised lying online (maximum penalty: a year in prison). Apparently, the law was enacted to fight online fraud, but the breadth of the drafting meant that it could conceivably apply to all sorts of online communications. It's interesting that this law was ever passed, but what I think is particularly interesting is that in the coverage of its repeal the standard line has been "well... everybody lies online". Of course, it's persuasive that criminalising lying in one communicative context while it is simply frowned upon elsewhere is problematic and chilling on free speech and for these (and other) reasons it's great that the law was repealed; but the framing of online dishonesty as something everybody does got me thinking about authenticity online and the way that we think about 'the truth' in networked publics.

Would we be so quick to say that "everybody lies" in the meatverse? Do we conceive of everyone as fundamentally untrustworthy in our day to day lives, or is there something specific to the digital realm that encourages this view?

Of course, evaluations of 'authenticity' online lack the situatedness, the physical and verbal cues of a similar assessment in the real world, and I'm sure that informed the development of a view that online identities were merely masks that could not be trusted as you couldn't 'reach' the person behind them (to verify, or to shame; to regulate); no doubt this is why things like the friendster 'fakester' scandal reverberated so far.

However, part of me wonders whether the vision of the online self as a slippery, untrustworthy, un-pin-downable fiction is becoming outdated these days. We are entering the web 2.0-verse of multi-sited, transferable online identities, with online histories and online reputations - we are fleshing ourselves out online. People are more truly fixed as themselves in more places online than they have ever been. Surely at some point this new version of online citizenship will overtake the shadowy who's who of the irc-verse?

Indeed, even now we seem to be seeing less of a discourse around the need to secure identity and more of a resistance to corporate/legal solutions to identity authenticity (eg debates about online passports or real name policies). To me, the discourse around truth and authenticity vs performativity and play seems to be increasingly pregnant with the desire to hold on to a notion of the web as a 'lawless frontier'; increasingly pregnant just as this view seems, for good or ill, to be  becoming increasingly untenable in the corporatised web we live in now.

So where does that leave us? Worryingly, I feel like Rhode Island is repealing its law at a time when the law is becoming redundant anyway; that the challenge is no longer a matter of finding ways to insist upon authenticity but rather a question of how to find room for any kind of multiplicity...

Yes I am, but who am I really?

Just when you decide to stop talking about Facebook and privacy...

So Facebook went ahead and changed my email address; in fact, they changed everyone's email address - switched us all over to our 'Facebook' emails (mine is kate.willcox.52@facebook.com, apparently - catchy) in an effort to gain users for their mail service and capture more market share.

Of course, they let you change it back, and apparently for new users there is going to be an opt in/opt out option, but yet again we see Facebook monkeying with our personal data for their own gain. 

Now I'm sure that lots of people take the view that we have signed up for this in choosing to use Facebook - after all, it's their network, we just live in it. But there is something particularly troubling about a social networking site changing facts about us, and it is compounded in circumstances where the changes made are to further their commercial objectives (not only does it increase use of Facebook mail & decrease use of competitor mail programs, it also turns us all into advertisements for Facebook mail). What is to stop them changing my photos or facts about my life to make them more Facebook friendly? (Here I am in my Facebook tshirt. Here I am posting how cute Mark Zuckerberg is. Except, wait, it wasn't me posting those things!)

There is something almost Orwellian about these erasures - about which we weren't even informed (or if we were I missed the memo) - and they strike at important identifiers about our online identity.

This seems especially ironic to me given that earlier today I was reading twitter's policy on use of the brand (I'm sure Facebook has something similar), and there was a great deal of "thou shalt not" mess around with the trademark - no putting the bird in a cage. Meanwhile, Facebook is messing around with aspects of our trademarks, not to mention our user experience, and apparently there is little we can do about it.

What do you think? Is it a reasonable step for Facebook to take? Should we accept these little incursions into our autonomy - and identity - as the cost of using the network?

it's not what you're like, it's what you like

According to Business Insider, new company Likester's Adcenter is revealing "surprising and depressing" trends in what people like on Facebook. 

Putting aside the obvious privacy concerns (because who really needs to talk about privacy on facebook AGAIN), what struck me about this latest iteration of behavioural advertising is how close it is coming to creating an entire composite of a person through their preferences - my identity is getting fleshed out on line in direct proportion to the extent to which I choose to support brands.

In a lot of ways, this isn't that different from the meatworld. I have strong memories of my ninth grade back pack (army surplus baby), which was marked up with all of my favourite bands in thick black and blue permanent marker (sonic youth; nirvana; bikini kill) - and true, I did spend money on their albums and tshirts and shows, and this communicated those aspects of my identity to other kids. It also communicated other things about my consumer (and no doubt also moral) choices: in that sense "sonic youth" was a complex signifier for converse sneakers, thrift store shopping, coen brothers movies appreciating etc etc. 

But I guess the main point of difference now is that online you have to write yourself into existence, there is no you outside of that (although for kids coming up today I imagine they can't imagine a time when they didn't exist online - I'd be interested to know how that impacts on the sense of self). So the entirety of the communication of self is what you can write on your hyperlinked backpack (or facebook wall) - so what does it mean if that information is being used by advertisers to set up a marketing profile for you (and, importantly, others 'like' you) and communicated to corporations so they can better sell to you?

It seems fairly sinister to me (especially as Facebook toys with lowering the age of its users) - and I also can't quite get my head around how to think about the fact that we opt in to this system. I like things on my Facebook (bruce campbell, julia kristeva, slate magazine, etc); and likester itself appears to have a social networking function wherein their likester affinities program tells you what ELSE you might like based on your Facebook profile (could be useful in a video store. Oh, wait). So why are we choosing to commodify our identities in this way? Are we so keen for a better shopping experience that we want to make it easier for stores to target us? Or is there something more complicated going on when we merge our articulation of identity with commericialism?

High Court Appeal Google Adwords

The High Court has given Google leave to appeal April's Federal Court decision in the Adwords case that held Google liable for the misleading and deceptive conduct of their advertisers. The case addresses circumstances where the advertisers concerned used the names of competitors as keywords to trigger their own ads appearing, which meant that the  advertisements purported to be for a company which the account holders did not actually represent. The Federal Court held that Google was also liable for the misleading representations because in publishing the advertisement Google made a representation that the content of the sponsored link responded to the user’s keyword search. 

In finding Google liable for the conduct of the advertisers, the decision obviously has much broader implications for search engine liability for the content of advertisements and the outcome of the appeal to the High Court will be key in shaping the future of online advertising protocols in Australia.

I think there will also have interesting implications for behavioural advertising (or as Google would prefer that we think of it, "internet-based advertising") on the web. After all, the case looks at a fairly clear cut fact pattern: the advertisers concerned misleadingly linked their ad to searches for competitors. However, since Google's search results are tweaked by the personalised search algorithm - and now the social networking algorithm of "Search Plus Your World", we are looking at a rich tapestry of publishers and sources of both consumer deception and risks to privacy - and a search engine which is not afraid to litigate out of liability (and responsibility) for what we are being told.

Nike tweetvertising ban

The UK Advertising Standards Authority has banned a Nike twitter celebrity endorsement campaign on the basis that the footballers concerned did not make it clear that the endorsement tweets were advertisements. Nike argued that consumers would not be misled as it was well known that the players were sponsored by the brand. However, the advertising watchdog determined that this was insufficient - in order to be acceptable it was necessary that the sponsored nature of the tweets be "obviously identifiable", "obvious" and "prominent" (such as #ad) to ensure that they would not be missed by a twitter user scrolling through hundreds of messages a day.

As this is the first ban of a celebrity endorsement by the Authority, it is a very revealing elaboration of exactly how strictly the regulations will be applied to endorsement speech - and, at first glance, apparently quite strictly. It is interesting to note that the tweets themselves did not mention Nike. Rather, they were a reference to the player's 'goals for the year' which simply linked to Nike (implying that it was through Nike that they would achieve these goals) and, according to Nike, both players were free to post the tweets "at their own discretion".

Accordingly, it seems to be the case that a sponsored celebrity cannot even link to one of their sponsors without the linking being regarded as an ad. I wonder whether this would be applied in the same way to bloggers - if I accept an advertisement on my blog, am I no longer able to speak about the advertiser in any way without it being regarded as an ad? And without having to characterise the post as an advertisement? Given the number of bloggers blogging about companies with whom they have a financial relationship, I wonder about the chilling implications of the decision for speech in the blogosphere. What do you think? Is this an advertisement? Is it misleading? Is it good for the watchdog to be extra cautious?

famous for fifteen people

Casting aside Andy Warhol's obsession with time, Momus said that on the web everyone would be famous for fifteen people. The celebritisation of life made possible by the social networks, instant communication and interactivity of web 2.0 has altered the way that we think about ourselves, our friends and our relationship to public spaces. As danah boyd has said, digital natives are the first generation to grow up living in celebrity-style publics.

Thinking about the web and the celebritisation of identity online reminds me of the shift from privacy rights to publicity rights. Publicity rights - a kind of IPR over aspects of your identity - developed out of privacy rights to allow the famous (and infamous) to determine how and by who profits could be derived from their celebrity. While, like other IPRs, they were generally justified by the invocation of Lockean labour theory (you invest time and energy in building a marketable celebrity identity, therefore you should be economically rewarded with a quasi monopoly), they also function as a trade off: celebrities, in pursuing fame, were considered to have traded away their rights of privacy for the more limited (but far more financially rewarding) right of publicity. 

Reflecting on this history in the context of networked publics is complicated. We see, again, users choosing to sacrifice personal privacy for the more financially (or socially) rewarding trope of publicity; and monetizing that publicity in various ways: mommy bloggers, publicising their family lives in exchange for sponsors; twitterers with high klout scores using their fame to endorse product to their legion of followers.

So what does this mean? Are we evolving out of privacy, as Mark Zuckerberg alleges? Are we all trading away our privacy rights for publicity, and, if so, how should the law respond? Currently, many jurisdictions only provide publicity rights to celebrities. In Australia, where the 'right' is protected through passing off (which adds the additional hurdle of consumer deception) it is difficult to see how the everyday netizen could access the protection. And even if law reform was realistic (the ALRC has been recommending various reforms in this arena since 1984), I can't help but wonder whether 'evolving' our law to more actively support and protect the commodification of all Australians is necessarily a good thing. Is trading away our (as yet unelaborated) privacy rights a reasonable bargain?

Identity 2.0

This talk by Dick Hardt is a great intro to some of the technological issues I am going to look at in my thesis. In this talk Dick defines identity as who we are to ourselves and who we are to others. Since he is looking at practical (technical) solutions to the challenge of finding solutions to proving who we are online this approach makes sense; but I think he doesn't really get into the problem of multiplicitous identity online (although arguably his push for user-centric identity is a direct response to that). What do you think? Will a digital driver's licence still allow the liberatory freedom of anonymity and pseudonomity? Do we still think about the web in those terms or is it becoming more of a mirror of the meatworld?

Who am I (online)?

I have started this blog as a place to collect thoughts/ideas/material for my PhD thesis, "Unbound Selves". I am writing on the way that web 2.0 is (maybe) changing the way that we experience/practice/perform our identities. In particular - as I am looking at these questions from a legal standpoint - I am thinking through the creation/allocation/maintenance/&enforcement of rights in the online self.

This is me. My mum hates it when I have bangs.