You online: Identity, Privacy, and the Self

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YOU, ONLINE Identity, Privacy, and the Self Abhay Agarwal 1

description

In the current landscape of media and communication, our world is undergoing immense and rapid transformations in the breadth, and format of how we interconnect. At the same time, it is difficult for even the most technically adept to fully comprehend the scope of these projects. This talk is a musing on the ideas behind online identity and mass communication in the 21st century. It intends to partially unravel the mystery behind networked social identity, as well as provide the tools for even the technically-disinclined to understand the possibilities for control, surveillance, freedom, and liberated identity within this new topology. Some included topics: * Online surveillance, and how deleting your Facebook isn’t enough * Big Data analytics: why your data is worth money, and the (im)possibility of privacy * Theories and Paradoxes in a hyper-connected future * Alternative internets, (or darkness) and what they represent.

Transcript of You online: Identity, Privacy, and the Self

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YOU, ONLINEIdentity, Privacy, and the Self

Abhay Agarwal

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INTRODUCTION

• PART I: What is Online Identity?

• PART II: The Persistence of Online Identity

• PART III: Theories of the Present and the Future

• PART IV: The Internet is not Immutable

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INTRODUCTION

• The internet is an evolving experiment in ontology

• Putting reformists, revolutionaries, crypto-anarchists, techies, and ‘normies’ (excuse the language) in one room

• Scare you

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INTRODUCTION

• NOT a technical discussion or a how-to

• NOT a chronology (cause-effect fallacy)

• NOT a lecture (speak up, shout me down, talk amongst yourselves)

• NOT a pro- or anti-internet talk (but those elements will be there)

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INTRODUCTION

• UC Berkeley student during anti-cuts ‘09

• Freelance coder

• I’m building an app/platform for local exploration

• Some of the things I say might be bad for my career

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HOUSE OF MEDICI

The House of Medici is founded as a vehicle for artist-developers. An agile design, development, and investment firm, the house is dedicated to commissioning, developing and facilitating people whose designs and organizations spearhead the movement towards creative, prosperous, localized and vibrant cities.

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“The creation continues incessantly through the media of man” - Antonio Gaudi

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PART IWhat is Online Identity?

(if the medium is the message, what is the internet saying?)

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SO WHAT ARE YOU, ONLINE?

• Several basic types of identity and interaction

• Messaging (static)

• Usenet/BBS/IRC/Forums (fluid)

• Social Networking (fixed)

• Content hubs (contextual)

• App-based interactions (proprietary)

• Putting all these together

• A highly modular communications medium

• Near infinite access and storage of information

• A common interface of metaphors

• Fundamentally imbued with the presence of capital and the state

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INFRASTRUCTURE 2/5

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MONEY AND THE INTERNET

• Cables (continental, trans-atlantic & trans-pacific, specialty) • Routing • Switching • Hardware • Software • Hosting • Serving • Accessing • Spectrum ownership • These are all ‘first-world’ costs

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MONEY AND THE INTERNET

• Military (efficiency)

• Pay-to-access (first party)

• Online transactions (second-party)

• Ads (third party)

• Drum roll… data (all-party)

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ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS

• Is the internet centralized or decentralized, and where/how?

• What is the nature of a ‘free’ service/platform

• Who can see what I do online, and to what extent/form/etc. ?

• Should data be considered property, speech, or both?

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PART IIThe Persistence of Online Identity

(and why deleting your Facebook isn’t enough)13

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TRACKING• Raw communication

• Facts (wiki-fication of the internet)

• Opinion (the blogosphere)

• Self

• Real-time

• Analytics (new to the team)

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TRACKING

• The service, usually in exchange for being ‘free’ (but not always)

• Advertisers

• Social services, aggregators, and viral marketers

• Service providers

• The government

• Each other

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TRACKING

• Using explicitly volunteered information (polls, ratings, commentary)

• Reading the content we create or upload

• Tracking our use patterns (browsing, interacting, etc.) through IDs and meta-data

• Building a social graph

• Testing machine-learning algorithms on us

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TRACKING

• The paradox of consent

• Hannah Arendt’s natality, plurality, and visibility

• The internet as the new commons

• A kink in the system: the No-Network problem

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DATA 1/5

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• The result of tracking is data. So really we should be focusing on that.

• Data collection is a legal, ethical, and technological ‘No Man’s Land’

• The collection of data currently is the driving factor of market growth of internet technologies (‘big data’)

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DATA 2/5

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• In 2006, Netflix announced a $1 Million prize for a better content rating system. In order to help with the effort, they released a data-set of 100 million ratings by a 1/2 million subscribers.

• This data was ‘anonymized’

Case Study: Netflix Prize

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DATA 3/5

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• Researchers Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov were able to ‘de-anonymize’ the data, using pure math.

• By knowing as little as 2 of your movie ratings and the weeks that you rated them, they could identify 70% of the dataset.

• By knowing 8 of your movie ratings, of which 2 could be false, and the months that you rated them, they could identify 99% of the dataset.

• By cross-referencing ratings from a public service (IMDb), they could identify an individual in the dataset

• The more rare a movie, the fewer other movies they needed to know

Case Study: Netflix Prize

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DATA 4/5

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• With ‘water cooler’ knowledge of your movie interests, they could pick your data out of a set of millions of ratings/people.

• Our movie ratings often coincide with our political/social/religious beliefs. What conclusions can be learned from knowing the 100+ movies that I like?

• Cross-referencing datasets is immensely powerful

Case Study: Netflix Prize

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DATA 5/5

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• Data is a treasure trove inside a black box, and many are staking their future on this data telling an accurate story

• This is a race to the bottom: the better they get at knowing us, the less these companies will have to aggregate massive amounts of data.

• It’s also a race to the top: the better they get at knowing us, the fewer services we’ll ‘need’.

• Technology has exponential growth

• But, the data itself is closely guarded. A few specific companies are in the position to ‘know’ the most things.

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A DIFFERENT WAY?

• Connecting the dots between the ubiquity and ease of data collection, the knowledge that this data provides, and the lack of accountability paints a bleak picture

• Most, if not all people accept this as the future, including: facial recognition, identity tracking, hyper-targeted advertising, inference of beliefs.

• In part IV, we can discuss some very potent alternative structures that dismantle these tools.

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PART IIITheory

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THE FRIENDSHIP PARADOX

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THE FRIENDSHIP PARADOX

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Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do

Scott L. Feld (1991) American Journal of Sociology 96 (6): 1464–1477

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THE FRIENDSHIP PARADOX

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• Observed on almost every social network, mathematically derived, and empirically proven

• Also applies to: publishing papers, sexual partners

• Used in epidemiology for better subject choice

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THE FRIENDSHIP PARADOX

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• Amplifying our insecurity?

• Or maybe, an unfortunate fact of life?

• Can/should we build a system that avoids/solves this?

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THE RULES STILL APPLY HERE

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(The case of Diablo 3)

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THE RULES STILL APPLY HERE

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• Faucets and Sinks

• Real Money Auction House (RMAH)

• May 2012: $300/million

• Feb 2013: $0.20/million, March 2013: $0.05/million (hyper-inflation is often defined as losing 50% of value in a month)

• May 2013: $.004/million (1/100,000th in 1 year)

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THE RULES STILL APPLY HERE

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THE FUTURE

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THE FUTURE 1

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Complete autonomy of capital : a mechanistic utopia where human beings become simple accessories of an automated system, though still retaining an executive role; Mutation of the human being, or rather a change of the species : production of a perfectly programmable being which has lost all the characteristics of the species Homo sapiens. This would not require an automatized system, since this perfect human being would be made to do whatever is required; Generalized lunacy : in the place of human beings, and on the basis of their present limitations, capital realizes everything they desire (normal or abnormal), but human beings cannot find themselves and enjoyment continually lies in the future. The human being is carried off in the run-away of capital, and keeps it going.

–Jacques Camatte, The Wandering of Humanity (1973)

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THE FUTURE 1

Collapse and Post-Collapse• Catastrophe

• My opinion is that some kind of internet will eventually be re-created in a post-catastrophe

• Revolution

• The current model of the internet still centralizes power, so a revolutionary ‘decentralized’ or ‘worker-owned’ internet must be tangibly different (more on that)

• Voluntary

• Primitivism

• But not necessarily

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THE FUTURE 1

Post-Internet

• Planes of Immanence (Deleuze & Guattari)

• Merger of the self with the other

• Comfort vs. Actualization

• To record or not to record?

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THE FUTURE 1

Neo-Internet

• Internet of Things

• Metaphor of the ‘smart’ wine-rack

• Camatte’s ‘managed’ utopia

• Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality

• Vacuous pleasure vs. Jouissance

• Camatte’s ‘generalized lunacy’

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THE FUTURE 1

Distant Future

• Solar system colonization

• Ironically, the internet will hold us back

• Post-humanism vs Trans-humanism

• Camatte’s ‘species mutation’

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PART IVThe Internet is not Immutable

(i.e. alternative ‘net’s)

38 With help from: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/intro-to-tor-i2p-darknets

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ALTERNATIVE ‘NET’S

• Encryption: An alternative language

• Gesalt Theory: An alternative authority

• Mesh Networks: An alternative structure

• Tor: An alternative path

• I2P: An alternative channel

• Freenet: An alternative paradigm

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END-TO-END ENCRYPTION (E2EE)

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Symmetric Cryptography

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END-TO-END ENCRYPTION (E2EE)

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Asymmetric Cryptography

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END-TO-END ENCRYPTION (E2EE)

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• Companies will say: it hinders the user experience

• The NSA keeps your PGP traffic in case they ever obtain your private key

• The math behind cryptography is pretty complicated and it has been subverted

• Certain countries force you to decrypt your stuff!

• As in the Netflix case study, anonymizing your data is hard, so it doesn’t matter if its encrypted

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BIG DATA 1/3

• Can we design a database that:

• Collects tons of data about you (active)

• Can be used for actionable purposes like recommendation (valuable)

• But upon inspected, contains no useful information (non-authoritative)

• And when analyzed, can’t be de-anonymized (non-inferencing)

• Gesalt Theory

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BIG DATA 2/3

• The database only contains restaurants in a single form: X, Y.

• X: The first letter of the name of the restaurant

• Y: The first letter of the name of the street where it is located.

• The database contains only groups (‘sets’) of restaurants

• I ‘query’ the database by giving it a ‘set’ of restaurants I like, and the restaurant I am asking about.

• When the database receives a query, it stores the ‘set’, and successfully gives me my recommendation.

Thought Experiment: Restaurant Recommendations

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BIG DATA 3/3

Thought Experiment: Restaurant Recommendations

• Pattern Recognition is counter-intuitive

• This scheme is NOT a cipher

• Doesn’t implicate any individual, nor any restaurant

• This database can be completely public

• This example is highly simplified, but conceptually powerful.

• This technique actually makes computation faster in some situations

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MESH-NET 1/3

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MESH-NET 2/3

• Locality vs centrality

• Surveillance and censorship protection

• Community owns the tools of production

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MESH-NET 3/3

• Malicious nodes

• A mobile-phone mesh-net is harder (not impossible)

• We still use a few key services (Facebook, Google Maps) that could be (and have been) tracked

• Big-money tech companies like mesh-networking!

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TOR-NET 1/3

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TOR-NET 2/3

• Security through “onion routing”

• Internet service providers (Comcast, etc) can’t see what you’re doing

• Websites can’t see where you’re from

• Certain services can be “inside” the onion, which means they’re nearly un-blockable

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TOR-NET 3/3

• A few (on the order of 1000s) of nodes = bottleneck

• There is still a trust dependency for tor nodes i.e. correlation attacks

• Can’t use certain services, such as peer-to-peer file-sharing

• Again… metadata. Still building on top of the regular internet

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INVISIBLE INTERNET PROJECT (12P)

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INVISIBLE INTERNET PROJECT (12P)

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• Security through “garlic routing” (great metaphor, eh?)

• Somewhat of a hybrid of Mesh and Tor

• No central infrastructure! How awesome

• Can create secure, encrypted channels (friend-to-friend)

• Actually better than Tor for hidden services because it was designed for them, but also because it is self-organizing

• Can do peer-to-peer file sharing! Also, anonymous e-mail, anonymous chat, etc.

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INVISIBLE INTERNET PROJECT (12P)

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• It’s slow

• Not designed for the greater internet (and less secure for that stuff)

• Hasn’t been around as long as other services (so fewer eyes on the code and fewer papers published).

• In other words, your-mileage-may-vary

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What if I wanted to do away with the entire paradigm of the internet?

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–Anonymous

“In effect, a perfect anarchy”

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FREENET

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FREENET 1/3

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SF

Europe

AfricaOakland

• Each piece of data is a unique number (‘hash’)

• Every node contains some data, and the location of the data with the closest hashes.

• We ‘find’ data by hopping from node to node asking for our number

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FREENET 2/3

• There’s no such thing as ‘location’ on the freenet, just a way to find more and more closely matching names.

• This is NOT an internet. It’s technically a ‘distributed data-store’

• No ‘users’ or ‘servers’ in the traditional sense. The system itself ‘stores’ the data.

• It’s all encrypted: in storage, in transit, everywhere. Not even the person holding the data knows what it is.

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FREENET 3/3

• You CAN’T access the internet through the Freenet (it’s self-contained)

• It’s slow (but the more connections there are, the faster it gets)

• It’s “forgetful” (!)

• Wait a minute…the freenet is like a giant BRAIN!

• Unfortunately, the freenet doesn’t mix well with the law

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AN INTERNET THAT’S DIFFERENT™

• Monied interests are inevitable

• But WE, an intelligent, careful society, create a better future

• For certain things, centralization is good. For certain things, decentralization is good (that’s the honest truth of technology)

• Transparency is key. Trust is key.

• Is this possible? Or is this the dream that powers the engine?

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THANKS FOR LISTENING!

(now start talking)

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