IMHO In My Humble Opinion

I have argued in the past, that at least in the US, Google isn't technically invading privacy with Google Street View.

This is dependent on the assertion that "privacy" is defined by what the law says, which I will readily agree is a sort of silly assertion: clearly the generally accepted definition of "privacy" isn't really captured by our legal framework. (I believe that some online lawyers assert that storing information based on someone's IP address isn't necessarily "private" because IP addresses aren't guaranteed to be unique identifiers. Never mind that they sometimes are unique identifiers.)

Something that I've meant to imply in some of my earlier conversations about this issue is that if the law doesn't cover our conception of privacy, it's the law that ought to change (and then, hopefully, Google and other data providers will fall in line.) Solving the problem in the specific case of Google doesn't actually solve the problem: they're not the only perpetrator of these alleged privacy invasions, they're simply the highest profile.

I believe this posting of an open letter to Google about street view in Japan is probably the best presentation of this argument that I've seen. Rather than try to make some sort of argument based on privacy law, it's an appeal that Google is violating Japanese customs by making this information easily available. The letter's author says in a couple of places that maybe it's different in the US, but based on much of the press I've read, I think I disagree: it's also against American custom to make this information overly public. Perhaps it's not as deep of a custom, but given the gut reaction of some people who discover these images of their houses online, I'd hesitate to say the Japanese have a monopoly on outrage over Street View.

I just finished watching the Daily Show, and noticed in the credits:

Shoes provided by Salvatore Ferragamo

Now, I will admit that I like Ferragamo shoes, but does Jon Stewart even show his shoes on that show?

Wow. Those wacky Russians.

How would the human race continue without rampant sexual harassment? I mean, without coercion, I'm sure no woman would ever want to get pregnant. It reminds me of those who oppose same-sex marriage claiming that gay couples don't need nearly as much enticement to get into long-term committed relationships as heterosexual couples because men and women are fundamentally incompatible. (This really was one of their arguments in the California marriage ruling.)

I'm glad my parents raised me to believe that people want to get together in long term relationships as equal partners and of their own volition, and that forcing people to do things against their will was wrong.

McCain recently aired an ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton, saying basically that he's a big celebrity, but "is he ready to lead?" I'm not entirely sure that's a great slogan for McCain, because every time I hear it, I think about what a horrible leader McCain would make.

Paris Hilton has a different view:

I honestly tried to avoid Paris Hilton before, but this was a good one.

Although I also wonder if she's misrepresenting Obama's energy policy. As far as I understand it, he's against off-shore drilling in places that are currently environmentally protected. The energy policy that the Democratic leadership is pushing (so, at least Nancy Pelosi's energy policy) is that there is plenty of off-shore drilling is okay: there are many places where drilling has already been approved that the oil companies aren't exploring. I don't know that Obama has signed on to this, but it strikes me as unlikely.

McCain and the rest of the Republicans, however, seem to think that opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling will somehow reduce current prices substantially even though the oil won't be available for 10 years. Now, there's some economic sense to the idea that current prices are dependent on oil futures, but most of what I've been seeing suggests that the volumes of oil coming out of the ANWR would reduce prices by at most 10 cents a gallon (probably significantly less.)

So those signs I'm seeing saying $4.50 a gallon will go down to $4.40? I can get 2% of off gas just by switching to the right credit card! But there are other things one can do to save, on average, even more than this right now: inflate your tires properly (average savings at current gas prices: 12 cents a gallon). And this method has the advantage of working right now, while actually reducing the amount of petrochemicals consumed, which means that the oil we're consuming will last longer.

Evidence that I'm still new to this whole blogging thing: I thought I had enabled sending e-mail to myself whenever I got a comment posted. Unfortunately, I hadn't configured it correctly, so I've managed to ignore any comments posted up to this point.

I've managed to configure it properly now, so hopefully I'll be a bit more responsive in the future.

The number one reason we should have invaded Iraq? According to Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, "Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD."

Excuse me? Did I read that right?

We were justified in invading Iraq a few years ago because we would still have the false belief that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? This seems ridiculous for a couple of reasons... For one thing, the UN had weapons inspectors in Iraq around the time of our invasion. I know that there are some that wouldn't believe the experts that were sent in (for example, this administration has a horrible history of making decisions based on solid evidence). There are people who currently still believe that Iraq somehow still has or was at least hiding weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded. But if we're going to argue about reality, let's try and use some facts and reason, shall we?

I like to think that the intelligence agencies would have been able to separate fact from fiction. I mean, there's evidence that even back at the beginning of the invasion, there were at least some elements of the intelligence community that were arguing against the existence of weapons of mass destruction. And that they were the ones that our policy-makers should have been paying attention to. Then again, maybe Mr. Stephens is correct, and by now they'd be concentrating more on spying on the American people than looking overseas.

There are some justifications for the war that are based on truth. Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator. It wasn't clear that economic sanctions were going to work (or that the sanctions were doing more than punishing the people of Iraq more than Iraq's government). But it also seems that we ought to have, say, gotten the rest of the world to agree that we were justified before storming off and bombing. And maybe had a plan for the end-game. That's one of the things that really bothers me about this: the Bush administration was so eager to get into a war that they only planned out how to start it. Maybe if they had actually stopped and thought about it they would have realized what a mess they were about to get into.

Although I suppose I could say that about a lot of government policies these days.

Oh well, at least I can hope that by November that more of the US has come to its senses, and we might eventually have a government that responds a bit more rationally...

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Mary Peters (the secretary of transportation), wrote about allowing airports to charge whatever they want for slots to use the runways.

I'm skeptical whenever I hear the current administration suggest any sort of deregulation... We had deregulation in California and Texas in the energy markets. California's problems caused enough turmoil to get the governor replaced, and Texas now has some of the biggest price increases in the country.

Moving to an auction-based system of charging more for high-traffic times makes some theoretical sense. But rather than giving airports an incentive to increase the number of flights going out and make things happen smoothly, it gives a perverse incentive to constrain supply to drive the prices up. When one aspect of the air traffic problem is that much of the air traffic control system is antiquated and unable to handle the load, what we really need is a solution that incentivizes upgrading that system. If I honestly believed that such an auction system for runway slots would reduce any prices, I might be in favor, but I suspect that it's only going to cause ticket prices to increase.

I fly a lot. The fact that so many of the flights I've been on in the last couple of years due to air traffic control delays is mind-boggling to me. And the fact that such delays, in many cases, only get announced when the flight was originally scheduled to take off, is yet another aspect of air travel that makes it even worse today.

A few years ago, I signed up for a service from United Airlines to send me messages when a flight I was on wasn't on time. I got a few messages that actually told me, far enough in advance that I wasn't already headed to the airport, that my flight was delayed and I could delay my trip to the airport and still make my flight. Shouldn't our air traffic control system give this a degree of predictability?

The Sacramento Bee just published an article on a recent Field Poll showing that a majority of Californians favor marriage equality, opposing proposition 8. I'm glad that my home state is showing signs of being sensible on this issue: giving same-sex couples the right to enter into a marriage will only strengthen the protections that California families have.

But I have to question something:

The highest percentage of respondents who opposed Proposition 8 in the poll were 18- to 29-year-olds (55 percent) and 50- to 64-year-olds (57 percent).

The latter demographic, [Field poll director Mark] DiCamillo said, "are people who grew up in the '60s and early '70s and they may be a little more tolerant to differences in lifestyles."

This "latter demographic" contains 19- to 29-year-olds. Meaning that they were born, at the earliest, in late 1978. Meaning that these people certainly didn't grow up in the '60s and early '70s...

As much as I hate to question the math skills of someone whose poll is showing a result in favor of my viewpoint, that just seems ridiculous. And the fact that the reporter simply reports it without, say, calling attention to the fact to the pollster he's quoting so he can correct himself?

I'm not even sure what to say.

correction: I'm the one who was dumb here. Somehow I missed the "and 50- to 64-year-olds" in that sentence when I was reading, which makes the article suddenly make sense.

I just came across a blog post about why Google is the biggest threat to Americans' privacy today, describing some testimony that Scott Cleland gave to the House of Representatives recently. It is disappointing to me that among the very real privacy concerns, there are some concerns he raises that aren't even privacy concerns, and some which are misleading.

I'm probably a bit more knowledgeable on the topic than most... After all, I actually worked there for a while, and had a job that potentially had me invading people's privacy: I was in charge of the Google log analysis and storage system. One of the things that frustrated me at the time was Google's data retention policy (at the time I worked at Google, there really wasn't one), and the sheer amount of data that Google collects is probably the single biggest theoretical threat to privacy out there.

But here, let's present some of the claims from the testimony:

The fact that Google’s web “crawlers” are the world’s most pervasive and invasive, Google indiscriminately searches websites for whatever it can find, and automatically assumes if their crawlers can find it, it must be “public” information. This indiscriminate web crawling has resulted in Google exposing private information like social security numbers, as Google did in making hundreds of California university students’ social security numbers public -- as reported by the Sacramento Bee (3-7-07.)

I don't know that Google's web crawlers are the world's most pervasive or invasive. As a matter of fact, publishers of information have a mechanism to prevent Google's crawler from accessing content they don't want to publish: it's called the Robot Exclusion Protocol, and I believe was a standard back in the days of Altavista.

If "indiscriminate web crawling" ends up with the dissemination of private information, such as the case of student social security numbers, isn't the major breach of privacy the one that was caused by the original publication of that data? There were other cases in the past where credit card numbers were exposed, and Google explicitly added code to the search engine to try and prevent people from finding lists of credit card numbers. This isn't something that gets a lot of press when Google gets slammed for privacy concerns, but it's a sign of how Google actually takes this sort of thing seriously: shortly after realizing that people were using the search engine for finding credit cards, those searches were rendered ineffective.

So this is perhaps one way in which Google can cause privacy problems, but not by creating those problems in the first place. This example only shows how Google can intensify existing privacy problems. And the good news about this is that once news gets out about such a breach, the original privacy breach is usually patched, preventing some other party from illicitly doing it. (Those social security numbers were up there before Google found them, and might still be up there if someone hadn't discovered them on Google.) So while this is an example of how privacy breaches can (and will) get magnified by Google, it's also an example of how privacy breaches get stopped by Google. And once the story got publicity, many other organizations that had similar information examined their web servers to try and prevent similar data breaches.

Let me illustrate this cultural disdain for privacy with three high-profile examples of Google proceeding full-speed-ahead with “beta” releases -- without regard to privacy implications of their actions.

• Google introduced gmail, which enables Google to automatically read the content of users’ private gmail messages in order to send them “relevant” advertising – without meaningful internal privacy review. This caused a widely reported public uproar over users’ privacy being abused.
• Google introduced Google Earth, which exposed the roof tops of the White House, public buildings and military installations, without meaningful internal review of the privacy, safety, or national security implications. The uproar that ensued over this suggests Google learned little from the gmail incident about the importance of internal review to address external concerns like privacy.
• Google then introduced StreetView, which is video of people’s homes, apartments and neighborhoods, without meaningful internal review of the privacy or safety concerns involved. The uproar over this invasion of privacy is so significant that Google is very secretive about where and when Google’s “spycars” will be videoing a particular neighborhood in order to protect the safety of the Google drivers from irate residents.
  • The inescapable conclusion from this pattern of behavior is that Google’s culture exhibits a fundamental and sustained disdain for privacy.

Here, Cleland is discussing Google's culture of disdain for privacy. This is a characterization that I find very interesting, because I think a more accurate characterization is much more complicated, but I don't think the examples he gives are very good ones.

Regarding Gmail, it's interesting that Cleland states that there was no "meaningful internal privacy review." Gmail got a lot of internal discussion, including a lot of it about the serving of ads with e-mail. At the very least there was plenty of meaningful internal review, so the question remains of whether or not Gmail's advertising is really a privacy breach.

Much of the internal review was done by engineers. I used the internal Gmail server exclusively for my work e-mail for months before Gmail's launch. And as an engineer, I understand that current e-mail systems, especially of the scale Google was trying to design, scan through e-mails to try and detect viruses and spam. Web based mail servers parse messages and reformat them to make them more suitable for display through a browser. Google's Gmail ad server is a similar sort of software-based scan, using technology similar to what a spam detector might use, but instead of identifying topics that are likely to be spam, identifies topics that are likely to have advertising potential and pushes out those ads.

Now, there's major potential for something that would be a horrible invasion of privacy: storing data about the subject of people's e-mails to build up a profile on what sorts of topics they're receiving e-mail on (and therefore likely interested in.) But Google doesn't do that. So this isn't a privacy breach, although we do have to trust Google not to collect this sort of data in the future.

Google Earth and Google Street View are interesting examples of potential breaches of privacy, but all of these photos were taken from publicly accessible areas. As far as I understand it, the law doesn't consider that an invasion of privacy. From where I'm sitting right now, I can take a picture of the San Francisco city skyline, and even though I might inadvertently include someone's open window in my shot, it shouldn't be considered a breach of privacy, because by leaving your window open, you're losing your reasonable expectation of privacy.

And exposing the roof tops of government buildings a "privacy" issue? Not at all. Perhaps it's relevant to call it a national security issue, but I fail to see how it affects people's privacy.

All of the pictures that Google uses for Google Earth are commercially available. Are the companies selling these pictures to Google not guilty of breach of privacy because they're charging Google for it? Or is the fact that Google makes it so widely available at no cost the thing that turns it into a privacy breach? If there's any breach at all, it's being committed by Google's suppliers, not Google.

You can get similar pictures to Google's Street View by driving around and shooting them yourself on public property. It seems unreasonable to call this an invasion of privacy.

Another trust undermining aspect of Google’s business is the rampancy of fraud in Google’s model.

• Most people are not aware that click-search is one of the most fraud-prone industries in America. Click Forensics, which is the leading industry tracker of web fraud, estimates that 28% of all Internet clicks are fraudulent.
• The dirty little secret here is that the gross-revenue business model for search, which was pioneered by Google, makes money off of fraudulent clicks. In other words, Google’s gross revenue model does not have a financial incentive to be honest.
• It is hard to imagine another legal industry in America that would tolerate a 28% gross fraud rate!

This is a bit misleading. First, notice the "28% of all Internet clicks are fraudulent" claim. (Does this mean Internet advertising clicks? I'll give that the benefit of the doubt, but it's a bit vague.) There's no real investigation of what this means, and Google is pretty aggressive in identifying fraudulent clicks.

Does this mean that 28% of what Google is charging for is fraudulent? Well, for one thing, that number is for the Internet as a whole, not just Google, but we can even give that the benefit of the doubt. Google's business is not as dependent on fraud as this line of reasoning might have you believe. The simple explanation? Google doesn't charge for all of those clicks.

Many of those clicks are "invalid" in the sense that it's easy to detect that they're not coming from a valid user. And even many of the ones that do get through get detected as fraud; a statistic calculated in December 2006 estimated it was as low as 0.2%.

There's also a market-based explanation that the amount of money Google makes is independent of the amount of fraud in the system that I've heard quite a few of Google engineers explain. I don't think it's all that worth going into the argument here, and given that I don't know how much of Google's auction system is publicly disclosed, I'm not sure how much detail I can give is public knowledge. But suffice it to say that if that argument is correct (or even if it's incorrect, but Google management believes it), there's no benefit to Google to encouraging fraud, and there actually is the good-customer-service good-PR benefit to discouraging fraud. While the gross revenue model might not incentivize honesty, it's not clear that it discourages it, and there are other factors encouraging honesty.

Google runs its not-for-profit Google.org as a for-profit division of Google, when every other corporation in America abides by the clear separation of for-profit and not-for-profit entities to avoid even the appearance of tax evasion or impropriety.

This one really mystifies me, because it seems to be mixing up a couple of things, some of which might be relevant, and some of which definitely aren't. For one thing, there's certainly no tax evasion going on, because Google.org explicitly didn't incorporate as a 501(c)3 to try a model of charity that wasn't compatible with the IRS's definition of it. So they pay taxes. Even the implication that some of this might involve some tax shenanigans seems a bit off-base to me.

Given that the usual reasons of separating out a non-taxed entity from a taxed entity aren't even present here, since there is no exempt entity, it's not entirely clear to me what "improprieties" might exist. There certainly are other corporations out there that think that some aspect of what they're doing is a social good, in spite of the fact that the tax code doesn't agree by allowing tax-exempt status.

I've probably rambled on far enough... And I do agree with the main point Cleland was making in his post: Google is a big threat to our privacy (at least potentially). I'm not sure I think it's the biggest threat, because I think that government programs to automate spying on the citizenry might be a bigger threat, and it appears that Bush administration is trying to engage in such things, so I think there's a convincing argument that Google's got a competitor when it comes to claims of who's the biggest potential threat...

But if you're going to make an argument about Google's privacy breaches, you don't need to resort to non sequiturs and exaggerations. Stick to the truth: they have a history of being secretive about the data they keep and how long they keep it, and they keep more data (and more different types of data, and more data that is theoretically linkable into a user profile) than any other corporation in the history of the world.

I went out to dinner this evening at my favorite restaurant, and ran into a couple of friends of mine who were also eating there. I was blindsided by the fact that this week's New Yorker cover depicts Barack Obama as a terrorist, fist-bumping his wife Michelle with what some Right-Wing commentators called a terrorist signal.

Now, clearly, this is actually not something that the New Yorker people considered as possibly perpetuating the ideas that Barack Obama is a Muslim (because he's not) and that Michelle Obama is a terrorist (because she's not) or that they support flag-burning or Osama bin Laden (because, as far as I have heard, they don't). The editor, Hendrik Hertzberg, said as much in an interview.

The fact that people believe that something that is so obviously satire might be taken seriously is something that concerns me. Especially because this is something that, if it arrived in my mailbox, would be something I'd react to by thinking, "Oh, that New Yorker. There they go overreacting again." Which I would have if I had come home this evening without the advance warning of what was waiting for me (after all, I am one of their extra-liberal subscribers...)

Are there really people who will take this cover as confirmation that the Obamas are out to undermine the United States? Are these people that anybody considers rational? I have serious doubts about that. And if you actually have a conversation with someone like that, I implore you, please talk some sense into them. Because honestly, Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and Michelle Obama is not a terrorist, and neither one of them support Osama bin Laden. All of these are factual matters of the public record, and anybody who believes otherwise needs to take a look at the truth.

I understand that there are people who believe that the truth needs to take the back seat to ideological beliefs or faith or whatever, but there are some things that are observable fact. The sooner our public discourse gets to the point that we can point out people's lies about things like this the better.

I believe that there may be reasons not to support Barack Obama. Fewer than the reasons to support McCain, but that's beside the point. Too many people are using reasons not to support Obama that are simply not based on fact, and that is the point this magazine cover is intended to make. None of what it depicts is objectively true (and that is something that is so obviously part of the public record that even though I'd like to point to proof, I don't even know where to begin.)