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Property Rights: Private Property Rights
Posted on Saturday, July 02 @ 16:45:10 EDT by samantha |
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Privacy Tidbits
You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
By JOHN MARKOFF
November 29, 2008
HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone.
Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.
Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.
The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.
Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.
But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.
Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.
In a widely read Web posting, he argued that there were significant chances that it would be misused, “This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious.”
For the last 50 years, Americans have worried about the privacy of the individual in the computer age. But new technologies have become so powerful that protecting individual privacy may no longer be the only issue. Now, with the Internet, wireless sensors, and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly.
“Some have argued that with new technology there is a diminished expectation of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. “But the opposite may also be true. New techniques may require us to expand our understanding of privacy and to address the impact that data collection has on groups of individuals and not simply a single person.”
Mr. Brown, for one, isn’t concerned about losing his privacy. The M.I.T researchers have convinced him that they have gone to great lengths to protect any information generated by the experiment that would reveal his identity.
Besides, he says, “the way I see it, we all have Facebook pages, we all have e-mail and Web sites and blogs.”
“This is a drop in the bucket in terms of privacy,” he adds.
GOOGLE and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.
The company introduced a speech-recognition service in early November, initially for the Apple iPhone, that gains its accuracy in large part from a statistical model built from several trillion search terms that its users have entered in the last decade. In the future, Google will take advantage of spoken queries to predict even more accurately the questions its users will ask.
And, a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.
The success of Google, along with the rapid spread of the wireless Internet and sensors — like location trackers in cellphones and GPS units in cars — has touched off a race to cash in on collective intelligence technologies.
In 2006, Sense Networks, based in New York, proved that there was a wealth of useful information hidden in a digital archive of GPS data generated by tens of thousands of taxi rides in San Francisco. It could see, for example, that people who worked in the city’s financial district would tend to go to work early when the market was booming, but later when it was down.
It also noticed that middle-income people — as determined by ZIP code data — tended to order cabs more often just before market downturns.
Sense has developed two applications, one for consumers to use on smartphones like the BlackBerry and the iPhone, and the other for companies interested in forecasting social trends and financial behavior. The consumer application, Citysense, identifies entertainment hot spots in a city. It connects information from Yelp and Google about nightclubs and music clubs with data generated by tracking locations of anonymous cellphone users.
The second application, Macrosense, is intended to give businesses insight into human activities. It uses a vast database that merges GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, radio frequency identification chips and other sensors.
“There is a whole new set of metrics that no one has ever measured,” said Greg Skibiski, chief executive of Sense. “We were able to look at people moving around stores” and other locations. Such travel patterns, coupled with data on incomes, can give retailers early insights into sales levels and who is shopping at competitors’ stores.
Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects.
The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab’s technologies to improve businesses’ efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization’s work than was generally believed.
Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, Dr. Pentland said. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that overhauls organizations via the researchers’ techniques.
Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.
Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.
ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.
At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, researchers are developing a Web service they call a Personal Environmental Impact Report to build a community map of air quality in Los Angeles. It is intended to let people assess how their activities affect the environment and to make decisions about their health. Users may decide to change their jogging route, or run at a different time of day, depending on air quality at the time.
“Our mantra is to make it possible to observe what was previously unobservable,” said Deborah Estrin, director of the center and a computer scientist at U.C.L.A.
But Dr. Estrin said the project still faced a host of challenges, both with the accuracy of tiny sensors and with the researchers’ ability to be certain that personal information remains private. She is skeptical about technical efforts to obscure the identity of individual contributors to databases of information collected by network sensors.
Attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capability, she said. The researchers encrypt the data to protect against identifying particular people, but that has limits.
“Even though we are protecting the information, it is still subject to subpoena and subject to bullying bosses or spouses,” she said.
She says that there may still be ways to protect privacy. “I can imagine a system where the data will disappear,” she said.
Already, activist groups have seized on the technology to improve the effectiveness of their organizing. A service called MobileActive helps nonprofit organizations around the world use mobile phones to harness the expertise and the energy of their participants, by sending out action alerts, for instance.
Pachube (pronounced “PATCH-bay”) is a Web service that lets people share real-time sensor data from anywhere in the world. With Pachube, one can combine and display sensor data, from the cost of energy in one location, to temperature and pollution monitoring, to data flowing from a buoy off the coast of Charleston, S.C., all creating an information-laden snapshot of the world.
Such a complete and constantly updated picture will undoubtedly redefine traditional notions of privacy.
DR. PENTLAND says there are ways to avoid surveillance-society pitfalls that lurk in the technology. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.
At the same time, he argued that individual privacy rights must also be weighed against the public good.
Citing the epidemic involving severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in recent years, he said technology would have helped health officials watch the movement of infected people as it happened, providing an opportunity to limit the spread of the disease.
“If I could have looked at the cellphone records, it could have been stopped that morning rather than a couple of weeks later,” he said. “I’m sorry, that trumps minute concerns about privacy.”
Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.
“The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.
“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”
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READ MORE ************* To: U. S. Congress PETITION FOR REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES We, the undersigned, consider the Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. New London, 04-108, rendered June 23, 2005, not only unacceptable, but to be in criminal violation of the Justice''s oaths to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. http://www.petitiononline.com/lp001/petition.html
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U.S. Court Of Appeals Soundly Rejects IRSPlea To Soften Ruling In Schulz v IRS July 4, 2005. On January 29, 2005, we reported under the headline, "Dramatic Development," that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had issued a decision in Schulz v. IRS. The Court held that taxpayers cannot be compelled by the IRS to turn over personal and private property to the IRS, absent a federal court order. http://www.givemeliberty.org/RTPLawsuit/Update2005-07-04.htm************* Lessons from the Kelo Decision by Congressman Ron Paul - R - TX. One week after the Kelo decision by the Supreme Court, Americans are still reeling from the shock of having our nation's highest tribunal endorse using government power to condemn private homes to benefit a property developer. Even as we celebrate our independence from England this July 4th, we find ourselves increasingly enslaved by petty bureaucrats at every level of government. The anger engendered by the Kelo case certainly resonates on this holiday based on rebellion against government. http://wwwthepriceofliberty.org/05/07/06/ronpaul.htm ************* STOP PROPERTY RIGHT VIOLATIONS
KELO VS. NEW LONDONYes, the government can now seize your property and give it to whoever they want to without regard to public use. The petition says it all. We have got to put a stop to the violations of our Property rights in America. Stop by and sign it to let Congress know that you want your rights protected. Tell as many people as you can so we can put a stop to these violations against our 5th Amendment rights. Call for Constitutional Amendment to overturn the decision of the Supreme Court in the matter of Kelo vs. New London and to protect American Citizens from future eminent domain violations http://www.etherzone.com/petition.shtml************* ************* NH: Proposal Made to Seize Souter''s Property. Following a Supreme Court ruling last week that gave local governments power to seize private property, someone has suggested taking over Justice David Souter''s New Hampshire farmhouse and turning it into a hotel. ************* Property Ruling Strikes Nerve in House
Reacting to high court decision, lawmakers pass amendment that would ban use of federal funds for some seizures of private land.By Maura Reynolds and David G. Savage, Times Staff Writers July 1, 2005 WASHINGTON - Angry over a recent Supreme Court decision, the House on Thursday began a legislative drive to roll back the power of local governments to seize homes and other private property for economic development projects. By a vote of 231 to 189, the House approved an amendment forbidding the administration from spending money on local projects that seize private property for business development. Read
************* Confiscating Land for Private Use If city officials where you live think you don''t pay enough property taxes, they can now take your home and give it to an individual or corporation who promises to pay more taxes. Looking back at the week of June 19-25, there can be little doubt that the Outrage of the Week was the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that it''s perfectly appropriate for private property to be ripped from the property owner and given to other private entities including corporations. Here''s an excerpt from our recent press release on the matter: Government agencies including city and county governments have long been allowed to condemn private property so that public buildings, roads and other infrastructure can be built. Called "eminent domain," this practice is constitutional as long as the power is exercised strictly in accordance with the Fifth Amendment''s "takings clause." The court ruled that government agencies no longer need to declare property as blighted in order to condemn it, and that property condemnation via eminent domain is now allowed even without the "It''s for public use" disclaimer. A state or local government can now seize a home or neighborhood, raze it, and allow a privately owned business to build a mall or office building or even a parking lot there -- as long as the bureaucrats in charge can claim the new project will yield higher property taxes than the land''s original use did. Calling this the Outrage of the Week may not be enough. This is now in strong contention for recognition as the Outrage of the Year. ************* As Sandra Day O''Conner noted in her dissenting opinion: "Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random," O''Connor wrote. "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."
A Newsletter Reader ************* This could be one of the most disasterous decisions ever by an activist Court. They have painted a bullseye on every private property owner and given carte blanche to every local government to take what they wish. The local TV stations in DC are already talking about how it paves the way for a new baseball stadium by taking the property of people who happen to live in the way. I can also see it threatening the private-property rights argument against smoking bans, because the Court''s ruling basically gives the government, not the owner, the right to decide how a property is to be used. Read************* As far as I''m concerned, this is the end of America. The experiment is officially over, and it has failed. Earlier this month, in the medical marijuana case, the Supremes ruled that the feds can pretty much ignore the constitution. They''re allowed to pretend it says stuff that it never said, and are not bound by it. They also eliminated states rights. Now they have abolished private property. The idea that you own your property is now, officially, complete fiction. We''ve seen that with business losing their property rights in the name of a bogus health claim, but now it''s been extended to all of us. Anyone who wants your property simply has to buy a politician (and they are reasonably priced) and you''re property is theirs. If you resist, men with guns will come to remove you. If you still resist, they will kill you. So the constitution no longer applies to the feds, and private property has been abolished. America is over, my friends. It was a great idea, but after more than 200 years of struggle, the experiment has failed. It is done. It is not only a dark day for us former Americans, it is a deeply dark day for all of humanity. RIP
America
b. July 4, 1776
d. June 23, 2005 Regards, Dave Hitt Of all the web sites in all the world, only one gets you Smartenized. Visit The Hittman Chronicle at http://www.davehitt.com/ Now with podcasts! |
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