Privacy: Dead and Gone?

The world is small and has become even smaller with the introduction of social networks. I look at my Facebook’s friend list and see names that I do not even recognize. These people have complete access to my educational background, my favorite movies and can see where I ate last night. It seems I have no privacy. The definition of privacy is the state or condition of being free from being observed by other people. By definition, if you have a social networking page you do not have privacy. The so called “privacy” that people want is the ability to control who views their private information, yet people can’t even control that. A person can block an unwanted friend from their Facebook, but that is nothing compared to the number of people who are able to view your Facebook on a daily basis. The article by Susan B. Barnes, “A Privacy Paradox”, discusses how marketers are able to target their products to teens based off information those teens put onto social networking sites. This is not why teens use social networking sites. Yet, there seems no way to stop them, except maybe this way:

Though the video is overdramatic, it brings to attention that we are constantly being viewed. Saying that makes me sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but it doesn’t make it less true. The article, “A Privacy Paradox” also discusses privacy solutions. How our lack of privacy can be solved by social, technical and legal solutions. I don’t think this is the case. Our social networking sites are a social convention. We post our thoughts and feelings for the world to see and it is socially acceptable, and I feel there is no easy way to fix that. Our social networking pages, be that Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram are constantly being viewed. Hashtags even makes it easier for people to find our pages. All I have to do is type in #dexterfinale and low and behold there is someone’s rant about the disappointing finale to Dexter. I have never met this person, but I know that one of their favorite TV shows is Dexter, well at least it was. No matter how many blocks or privacy settings you have, this invasion of privacy seems unstoppable. Isn’t that terrifying? Or is it? I honestly find it all very disturbing and honestly creepy, yet should I? Maybe this lack of privacy is just a norm that we will all come to except one day. Right now, it seems strange that someone you have never met before, who lives half way across the world can read your most intimate thoughts. Or that a marketer can learn that people your age really don’t like a certain product based of your Facebook. Maybe privacy is nothing more than a distant memory. Is privacy a lost norm or can it be achieved once again, and if so by what means?

Online Privacy

In A privacy paradox: Social Networking in the United States, Barnes focuses on what she refers to as the 'privacy paradox': the contrast between teenagers willing to share intimate information online and government agencies and companies collecting data. Throughout the article, Barnes holds a specific interest in teenagers and their usages of these social networking websites. The following infographic provides an aesthetic overview of what teenagers share online and with whom:

As a teenager, I can relate to this privacy paradox. Admittedly, my Facebook profile contains a lot of personal information, such as where I live and what school I attend. I also own blogs on Tumblr, where I keep journal-like entries that catalog my inner thoughts and daily excursions. While I am willing to share this information online, my father is constantly surprised with the amount of his personal information he finds online. As a public school teacher, my father is considered an employee of the state. The state government keeps an online database that stores the salary of every state education employee, and my father was appalled to find that his salary was on the Internet for the whole world to see without his consent. In a frenzy, my father Googled himself and found even more of his personal information online, such as his address, previous locations of residency, the value of his home, and the individuals he lives with. While my father is an avid Internet user, his online activity is mainly constituted of checking email and consuming any content related to Jeremy Lin - he does not own any social media accounts. For my father, he is taken aback by the disparity between the amount of his personal information that he uploads onto the Internet and the amount that can be found on the Internet.

I am hesitant to believe that teenagers are unaware of the public nature of the internet, which is what Barnes argues. I believe that this may be due to the fact that this article was written in 2006 - almost 7 years ago. When I first began using the Internet more frequently, I remember many reminders about ‘cyber safety’, such as campaigns at school and NBC's To Catch A Predator. These efforts are examples of social solutions that Barnes proposes near the end of the article. Personally, I feel that these efforts have reduced the amount of information teenagers willingly provide online; I grew up knowing that I shouldn't post my home address or social security number on the Internet. I feel that teenagers nowadays are aware of how public the internet is but have these erroneous assumptions about the social platforms and their default privacy settings, which leads to more personal information exposure than intended. That is, teenagers don't think that the Internet is private; they think the platforms they use are private by default - which is not true amongst popular platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

Even if teenagers were more careful about the personal information put online, can we even be sure that their personal information won't find its way online somehow? Barnes also brings up this interesting point in her article and asks "In an age of digital media, do we really have any privacy?"

I believe that as the role technology plays in our lives becomes larger, our privacy diminishes. Because digital media overlaps so many sectors of our lives, I believe that everything we do leaves a footprint somewhere - both intentionally and unintentionally. Consider the anecdote I gave earlier involving my father.  Something like his salary ends up on the Internet because the usage of the Internet has extended into organizing state information. Something as simple as using a credit card to pay for groceries catalogs where you were at a given time and what you purchased in a database somewhere. If you go somewhere with a friend and he or she decides to tweet about what you two are doing and where, where you were at a given time and who you were with is now recorded on a database somewhere. Essentially, everything - what you do, who you’re with, where you are - has the potential to become public. That begs the question: is privacy even attainable?

The following video ponders a similar question: 

Copyright and Fair Use Today

Urs Gasser and Silke Ersnt’s essay From Shakespeare to DJ Danger Mouse: A Quick Look at Copyright and User Creativity in the Digital Age explores the recently problematic and ever-evolving relationship between long established Copyright and Fair Use laws and the Internet as we know it today, an endless source of user-created content. As digital technologies and the Internet continue to grow and foster an environment of “participatory culture” among its countless users, more and more often creative works, new and old, are being are being integrated into practices such as fan fiction, remix, sampling, and mashups. The way that Copyright and Fair Use laws stand today, many users who are simply looking for a creative outlet are subject to lawsuits, fines, and in some cases even jail time for violating laws that are simply outdated today. The origin of Copyright Law was based upon print material of the last millennium, a time before it was quick and easy to find content on the Internet, modify/remix/sample it (ie. a “derivative work”), and make it your own in no time at all. Gasser and Ernst argue, and I agree, there there is great potential for reform of these laws that will bring them up to speed with the current state of our new digitized world. The old guard of Copyright and Fair Use advocates would argue that allowing our new participatory culture to pick and choose from any media that is available and make it something new disincentivizes the creative process by possibly decreasing the monetary value of an original creative work. However, some specific changes to the structure of Copyright and Fair Use laws would inherently dissolve the problem. Legislation that would ensure that derivative works would not interfere with the monetary value of the original work and/or be non-commercial works themselves would certainly lessen the tensions between original creators and active receivers/remixers because in the end, creators get to make their money and everyone else gets a change to create derivative works. This “Top-Down” approach, and many of their other suggestions would require a vast overhaul of the entirety of Copyright and Fair Use laws, and with the pace at which Congress typical works, this could take years to finalize and cost many people and companies on both sides of the issue a lot more money. On the other hand, a “Bottom-Up” approach in which content creators authorize that their work be shareable (such as the idea of the creative commons license) would avoid governmental interference from the start. The problem here is that large corporations that like to make large amounts of money would worry that their revenue streams would diminish. This approach is much more practical for independent creators/companies. So my question is, where is the middle ground? How do we make creators, active receivers, remixers, samplers, the government, and the money counters all happy? Or, can we at all?

Related Links:

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-online-video

This is a guide to acceptable practices of Fair Use in creating online video.

http://www.remixinstitute.net

A collection of remix videos that constitute Fair Use.

Remix Culture and Copyright Law in the Digital Age

In Lessig’s Remix: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law, he dismisses the traditional view that various forms of technological communication would inevitably usurp the oral tradition. He asserts that the difference in how copyright law treats text and non-text based media is ultimately detrimental to the development of new and original, non-text based media. This is obvious when one considers the multitude of publishing platforms available in the current technological age. The internet has substantially compressed the time and space in which we live–things are no longer bought, sold, and traded as mandated by the first sale doctrine, but rather downloaded, copied, and shared as quickly as our browsers can deliver. Nowadays, anyone can upload an image to Imgur, share it on Reddit, and before the hour is out, (if it was popular enough) someone will have likely copied, modified, or redistributed the image for their own purposes. In the process, no one (not the authors or the sites hosting the images themselves) is bothering to cite the work of previous creators/contributors. This is evident in the phenomena of internet memes, particularly the creation of image macros. The fact that macros consist of merely a modified phrase or saying applied to a static image, which, through repetition of use, has established a certain context in which the text is to be placed, along with their relative ease of replication makes it particular successful in generating user participation on the consumer’s end. Lessig brings up the idea of commercial versus sharing economies, and continues to point out that the internet has essentially become a hybrid of both. Where it encourages shared-user involvement for all the aforementioned reasons (availability, accessibility, and relative association of produced texts), it has also become a battle ground for digital commerce, with many companies leveraging sharing platforms to encourage repeat users and establish a continued customer base. Amazon would not be what is today without its rating and review system, allowing its users to review items and vendors alike, creating a dependable level of trust between shoppers and veritable vendors. Without this sharing platform being implemented into its overall design, Amazon’s commercial platform may not have become the success that it is today. I would therefore agree in Lessig’s argument that copyright law needs to shift focus from the act of copying alone, and rather, towards the intended and inevitable uses of the copy. This will help to distinguish the defining differences between a copy and a remix, and provide the resources to demystify the methods by which these ‘remixes’ are made legitimate or legally acceptable. He likens the entire situation to the prohibition era, where we have essentially made criminals of our entire civilization by imposing rules which simply cannot and will not be adhered to by a generation of individuals living in the digital age. With this in mind, how might we consider our own roles in balancing the focus of copyright laws between protecting existing creators and encouraging new creators? How should we suppress or embrace activities that are the direct a result of immersion in a digital realm?

Relevant links:

https://soundcloud.com/hoodinternet - The HoodInternet is a Musical duo which “mashes” popular songs together. Is this an example of a remix, transformation, or just the equivalence of copying?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58249-2004Apr7.html - Lessig digresses on the more intricate complexities of the relationship between creators and consumers, and how to balance both of their needs and desires within the digital realm.

In Response to: "How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law" by Lawrence Lessig

A nice summary of the ideas in article in speech form by the author itself here.

In this article, Lessig explores the relationship between copyright laws & creativity and urges for copyright reform. Lessig compares remixing to writing in his argument, stating that the protocol for legally “remixing” in writing - citing other sources - is not replicated for legally remixing digital media. I believe that his argument is sound. With new developments in technology, remixing is getting easier and easier. Just as a person with pen and paper can write, a person with access to the Internet can remix. Consider the song “The Fox” by Ylvis released two weeks ago. The search query “what does the fox say” on Youtube returns over three million results - many of which are remixes of the original song and music video in some form. However, the current state of copyright laws makes it so that a person can not produce content using existing content as easily as he or she can write something that incorporates other written works.

We can not expect laws that were written in the absence of the technologies that dominate our lives today to swiftly transfer over. Copyright laws provide producers legal security in the ownership of their intellectual property. They fit seamlessly into a read-only culture, in which there is a fine division between content consumers and producers. However, the Internet is blurring this line and slowly rediscovering a read-write culture, one in which individuals are not only consumers but also producers. Changes in copyright laws have to be made in order to accommodate for our new culture, but the how isn’t so obvious. In order to begin thinking about the how, we should consider a few questions: Are remixed works considered original? Are remixers considered producers?

The discrepancy between remix culture and copyright laws is analogous to developments in technology. Consider the new iOS7 software upgrade. If an app developer decides to not upgrade his or her application so that it is compatible with the new operating system, that application will lose its following. Users could still use this application if they chose to stick with an older operating system. However, many users will choose to upgrade if they find it to be more exciting and beneficial than the usage of that single, stubborn application. I feel that, currently, copyright law is the stubborn single application and remix culture its fun, exciting counterpart. This extinction timeline infographic predicts that copyright will become extinct in 2020. Lessig raises this concern in his article, suggesting that, without change, copyright law will create a culture of criminals. Such a culture could be detrimental to our law-governing society; if breaking laws becomes commonplace, how can we be sure that people won’t break laws more severe than copyright laws?

The remix culture of our present is not a creature that can be tamed by the copyright laws of the past. 

Power of Fan Made Media

Fan, a word that stems from fanatic. When we think of the word fan, most peoples’ minds go to a person sitting in a basement reenacting Star Wars scenes with his custom made light saber. While some fan maybe doing this, this is a far cry from what is actually going on in the fandom. Fans are what keep a franchise going. Not by just buying tickets, but by talking about it, writing about it and creating media around it. Fan made media is something that has existed for a very long time and it stems from many different things. A franchise is only capable of producing so much media. While fan produced media is endless. These fans create a continuation of the story that they love so much, or for some they create a different path for the characters that they have grown attached to. When, I was a little girl I read the American Girl books.  One of the books ended in a way that I didn’t like. I was distraught.  My mother, to ease my pain, told me to write my own ending. This idea had never occurred to me before. I never thought I could control the characters that I loved so much. By writing my own ending , I was able to still enjoy a book series that I was more than willing to forget purely because I didn’t like the ending. Because I had the power to rewrite the story I was still able to love this series even more. So why is Hollywood so afraid of fan made media. They bury it down or take it down as if it is something to fear. I understand they made a universe and the creators of that universe made it that way for a reason, but art has always been expanded on and explored. Fan made media can give stagnant franchise or series new life. The creators of these fictional universes have fantastic imaginations that allowed them to create an infinite world, and their fans should be able to explore it as much as possible.