US Government Enables Web Tracking on Federal Websites

The second YouTube video for IST618, "Survey of Telecommunications and Information Policy", Privacy and Security.

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The video is a FOX news program (Miller, 2009) discussing the US government's plan to change its policy to allow federal websites to track user behaviors to “bring the federal government into the 21st century” (Kundra & Fitzpatrick, 2009b).

Since 2000, the establishment of Memorandum M-00-13 prohibited the use of any tracking objects on federal websites and the ban was enacted for privacy protection. However, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) decided to change the policy “to enhance citizen participation in government” (Kundra & Fitzpatrick, 2009a). The Obama administration wanted to know the public better by tracking their visits to government websites.

According to security expert Robert Siciliano, cookie’s closest cousin was spy ware, and a serious concern was that now the government enabled cookies on their websites, “will the cookies merge to spy ware and maliciously tracks everything we do?”

The video also included a short clip of President Obama supporting the act that requesting “fishy” information from supporters on health reform.

Another interviewer, Judge Andrew Napolitano compared the policy change to former President Nixon’s surveillance on war protesters. The Supreme Court said Nixon’s surveillance was “unconstitutional” and the Privacy Act was enacted in 1974 after Nixon left the office. The Privacy Act prohibited the government to gather and store information of people who disagreed with the President. The judge also mentioned that he was against the USA PATRIOT ACT which gave the government rights to gather and search telephone, e-mail, medical and other information within the United States(Anonymous, n.d).

However, even if the government isn’t tracking user behavior, information is still tracked by companies like Google (Hsu & Kang, 2009). What I concern most is how the companies react to the government’s requirement of offering user sensitive data. Google has long been famous for its slogan “Don’t be evil.” But Google is still tracking YouTube viewing data on WhiteHouse.gov while the company claims that they don’t store it anywhere (Kafka, 2009). The question is, if Google does not store such information, then why flash code of YouTube video still sends the information to Google? Back in 2006, when US Department of Justice demanded the major search engine companies for a random list of one million web addresses with no user navigation information, Yahoo! and MSN both complied and Google refused. Since the user information on Internet has increased tremendously and the government now “wants a piece” of information of public online behavior. What if the government requires more user-specific data from the data aggregate companies and the companies comply? 

References:

Anonymous. (n.d.) USA Patriot Act. Electronic Privacy Information Center. Retrieved from: http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/usapatriot/

Hsu, S.S., & Kang, C. U.S. (2009, August 11). Web-tracking plan stirs privacy fears. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article /2009/08/10/AR2009081002743.html

Kafka, P. (2009, June 22). Google’s YouTube White House privacy policy: “Trust us”. All Things Digital. Retrieved from: http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090622/googles- youtube-white-house-policy-trust-us/

Kundra, V., & Fitzpatrick, M. (2009a, July 24). Federal websites: Cookie policy. White House. Retrieved from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Federal-Websites-Cookie-Policy/

Kundra, V., & Fitzpatrick, M. (2009b, August 11). On cookies. White House. Retrieved from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/On-Cookies

Miller, J.R. (2009, August 12). Feds consider adding 'cookies' to web sites; Will privacy crumble? Fox News. Retrieved from: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/12/feds-consider-adding-cookies-web-sites-privacy-crumble/

Sullivan, D. (2006, January 19) Bush administration demands search data; Google says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo said yes. Search Engine Watch. Retrieved from: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/060119-060352

Copyright Violation Versus Fair Use

In IST618, "Survey of Telecommunications and Information Policy", we are required to find relevant YouTube videos of the two topics we choose and submit a short description for the video.

Here is what I found for "Intellectual Property Rights"(IPR).

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The video is a clip from a live discussion of the emerging remix culture and the complete video of the discussion could be found here.

The discussion were given by Steven Johnson, Shepard Fairey, the street artist, famous for his "HOPE" poster of Barack Obama, and Lawrance Lessig, founder of Creative Commons.

Steven Johnson asked Shepard how he defined the boundary of creative remix and copyright violation. Shepard said it was a case-by-case basis. Shepard preferred to allow people to use his image transformative or even not transformative but not used for commercial profit. Shepard encouraged inspirations from his work and he had lots of images on his website for free download, he would only go after the real straight bootlegging.

Lawrance agreed that it was an important line to draw and emphasized the line should draw the distinction between people who inspired and celebrated that inspiration and the people who simply "rip you off" instead of the distinction between profit and non-profit. Lawrance took Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube as an example. Viacom said they would take the video down within 24 hours after the user uploaded the video clip from a show. But if the user remixed the clip with creativity, Viacom would consider it as a celebration of their original work. Lawrance believed that before coming to any conclusion of "violation of copyright", the question “Does it really help our business or hurt our business that people are creatively remixing and spreading our creativity?” should be asked.

In IST511, we were introduced a very interesting comic about copyright. It was about a filmmaker who need to use materials in her film but had no idea about which materials were copyrighted and how to clear the right. The comic introduced several lawsuits. For example, filmmaker Jon Else Ran needed to cut and replace 4.5 seconds from "The Simpsons" from his film. If every artist runs into such copyright clearance, it surely will infringe remix and hinder artist's creativity.

Copyright law protects intellectual property rights and encourages original ideas and innovations. But what must be recognized is that remix work also present innovations and celebrate the inspirations from the original work. Fair use should be encouraged and that is the reason we have "Creative Commons". While straight bootlegging must be punished, anyone who "fair use" the materials should not find themselves falling in complicated licensing agreements and lawsuits and thus impede their creations.

Picasa Storage Price Drops

I just read the news piece from CNET: Google cuts Picasa Storage price. Users only need to pay $5 for 20 GB storage per year. The price is really cheap and attractive, in 2007, it cost $20 a year for 6GB.

Google's new policy can be seen as trying to match the dropping cost of hardware devices and it will gradually become a more attracting place to backup and share photos.

What I'm interested is, with such appealing price, if I "put all my memories online for a year", what will happen if I don't renew the service? According to Google current policy, "any photos or messages over the free storage quota will still be accessible, however you will not be able to add new content until your storage balance falls below the free storage limit."

Internationalized Domain Names

After several years of discussion, ICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has just approved the IDN ccTLD (country code Top Level International Domain Names) Fast Track Process in the recent meeting in Korea last month. International domain names could contain localized characters instead of Latin-only representations of current domain names. According to ICANN, the act is a significant milestone in the development of Internet and “brings the first of billions more people online -- people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives", said Rod Beckstrom , ICANN CEO and President.

The movement will have great impact on the worldwide Internet. Non-English speakers, which are more than 60% of global Internet users can access Internet more easily with their recognizable URLs in local language.

A major concern (Suarez, 2009) of IDNs is that it may create potential security threats because of the inconsistency of domain names. The term homoglyph is referred to several characters or glyphs, with shapes that cannot be differentiated by quick visual inspection. Homoglyph is often used in fishing scams. A fishing website is usually created with homoglyphs to let the users believe it is the original website and to steal their credential information, such as credit card number, passwords, etc. It will be more difficult to tell if a website is fishing with multi-language domain names. For example, maybe you can recognize the difference between Paypal.com and Paypa1.com, would you think it might be the official website of Paypal France when you see the domain name Pàypàl.com?

IDNs will also make the Internet separated with unrecognizable domain names. Consider you are interested in a foreign website that you find in a handout and you need to input the domain name manually in the address bar, you may find it very difficult to input the domain name if it is not Latin letter-based, such as Chinese and Japanese. Translation tools can help you to know what the website is if it is written in a foreign language but they could not help you to access it if the domain name is “localized”. In such situation, the localized domain name is actually building a barrier to non-native speakers if no English domain name is offered. That is, if a website with local domain name has no English domain name accordingly, it seems like the website welcomes no outside visitors. Another problem is, although the domain name is using local language, Internet users still need to use Latin-based keyboards to input the localized domain names.

I’ve been mostly discussing the cons of IDNs because I see no advantage IDNs could bring to me but I have some concerns of security issues. After discussed the issue with several friends, they tell me that they feel the same way. The result draws my attention to the research principle of “triangulation”. If the research of requirement for IDNs is only conducted in US, or with people who have sufficient knowledge of English, the proposal of IDNs could never be approved because the people have no such requirement. But what about other people? If the language is the barrier for people to access Internet and the barrier to create digital divide, then methods or alternatives should be taken to bridge the gap. ICANN’s approval of IDN Fast Track Process is the first step and should be encouraged. However, the implementation of IDNs must be observed and improved through the implementing process.

Privacy Concern of Windows Live

I just noticed that my activity of Windows Live is public, and it is really horrible to let everyone to see what I am doing with my network. So I go to "Permissions" page of Windows Live to see how to set limitations on who have access to my activities. It is really absurd that there is NO such option!

You will have the idea that you have full control of your information when you access the "Permission" page, because you see a bunch of items for you to set access control for each of them and they are listed in four major categories: Profile details, Invitations and Communication preferences, Your stuff, What's new. Wait, there is a option labeled "What's new". Let's see what we can do.

Choose which of your activities (like posting photos or adding people to your network) that you want others to see. You can remove individual items and/or remove all future items for each type of activity.

See where the problem is? I can only choose what type of information I want to share, I CANNOT choose whom to share with. And if I choose not to share my activities, then people in my network cannot see my activities neither. Share with the public, or don't share anything.

Since I need to interact with my friends, I will share my activities and it is indeed a violation of privacy of putting all the information in public. I will inquire the software company for such ABSURD policy.

In Building Collections

I talked about "serve the community" in the last post, and there is another issue regarding it as a core value: collection development.

I see myself has a good taste in Chinese books and will feel sad when seeing the books in a bookstore or library are books which don't deserve to be read. As I can imagine, the selection of library resources is a hard phase, who should decide which books to buy? In such economic downturn, shall the library place more strict regulation ensuring only books with certain quality will be purchased?

The answer is no. The idea behind the word "quality" is biased. Quality of the books is not the criteria in building library collection, instead, the need of the community. The book with high quality or great significance, but no reader in the community makes no sense. "Books are for use." is the very first law of Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science. The library collection must meet the requirement of local community. If the community has interest in reading a book, then the library probably should add the book into its collection.

The people who can influence the policy of the library are board trustees. I asked Nicole who can be on the "board of trustees", she said for public library, maybe everyone in the community can volunteer to be a member of the board trustees.

Will do some research on following issues:

1. The constitution of board trustees.

2. Library assessment, how to decide the effectiveness of library service and the satisfaction of the patrons.

3. The regular procedure of library's collection development. How to know if the local patrons will be interested in the book?

Policy Making and Serve the Community

In my hometown, a city named Wuhan in mid China, there has been a lot of public transportation constructions in the last few years. The general principle behind all the projects should be "better serve the citizens", unfortunately, that is not always the case.

A bus stop had been removed because the government thought it caused traffic jam. But the fact was, less than 5 bus routes were allowed to stop there while other buses(more than 20) could only pass by while on the same way. At the same time, a new tunnel had been built and only cars were allowed to take the tunnel. Remember most citizens did not have a car. Buses were the major choice for the citizens to get around the city.

The removal of the bus stop forced some citizens who lived in a certain area to walk 30 minutes from another nearest bus stop to their homes.

For most of the time, before a big decision of public transportation was made, there would be notifications telling "welcome any suggestions" from the government. But the truth was, when a citizen really proposed suggestion or opinion, what he/she would probably receive from the government would be something like "you are not a professional, so you don't understand why our scheme is the best."

Do you think it would be the best solution if you need to walk 60 minutes everyday?

What I saw in the case was that, the policy makers were the ones who sat in cars. Their perspectives of public transportation were limited by their own experiences and they didn't see the real need of a larger population and they didn't have the desire to know. They may have encountered traffic jam in that certain point and they thought it would be a solution to remove it and the tunnel was an alternative if the traffic jam still existed. I agreed that the idea of the tunnel to split the traffic stream was good. I just see no reason of the removal of the bus stop.

Does the above discussion has anything to do with Library and Information Science? Yes, it does. One of the core values of librarianship is to serve the local community, to serve the patrons' needs. All the things librarians do is to bridge the patrons and the information they need. Do not take it for granted to assume you always know what the patron is looking for. Listen to them. Get to know them and understand their requirement. The principle lies in library collection, cataloging, reference service, resource allocation, etc, all aspects of librarianship.