Swiss snap

I continue to love the Swiss. Awhile back, I told you how the Swiss privacy watch dog was raising concerns about Google Street View cruising the streets of Switzerland and accused Google of potentially not protecting private citizens’ privacy. Well, now the skirmish is shaping up to be a huge cat fight to watch because the Swiss are hauling Google’s ass into court. Happy face

The Swiss are making demands and asking for a temporary injunction to stop the Google juggernaut. Apparently, Google did not comply with the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner’s recommendations around making Street View more palatable for the privacy-obsessed Swiss. Naughty Google. Here are the Swiss demands:

• up to one week before Google cruises into a town or city snapping images, they are to inform authorities. (Guess this would give people like me, who have an aversion to Street View, time to erect barricades around the home to stop the Google eye from peering into my backyard. But doesn’t really give one a chance to mount a legal challenge, so not sure that this demand goes anywhere really);
• remove any pictures of enclosed areas such as walled gardens and private streets;
• blur faces and car plate images. Since arriving in Switzerland earlier this year, it’s alleged photos of people and cars are identifiable and insufficiently blurred, especially around sensitive areas such as schools or hospitals.

Naturally, I’ll be watching this space. I think this is the first time Google has faced a law suit from a Government agency.

But here’s an interesting question. I conducted a webinar last weekend on Intellectual Property Rights for my students in Hong Kong. We were talking about copyright, industrial design, patents and so on. So..I wonder…let’s just say your home is designed by an architect. Even better, let’s imagine that the architect is you. So you would have drawings, plans, computer-assisted designs etc. Architects can protect their designs through copyright.  For example, in the US, Congress passed the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA), which amended the Copyright Act to specifically include “architectural works” among the list of protected works in 17 U.S.C. § 102. Let’s also say that your partner is a sculptor and has some original works – statues – in the garden.

So along comes Google’s Street View car. Snap, snap. The image of your house and the sculpture are plastered on the internet via Street View. Is this infringement of copyright?

Image credit: Wikipedia

Convert now!

A ThinkingShift reader from New Zealand sent me a link to an article that really extends Thomas Friedman’s New York Times piece. As we well know, Google is one of the most powerful entities on Earth and its shadow looms over the very future of the Internet. We Google this and that and many of us rely on the Google search engine for ‘the answer’.

We seem to be so in awe of Google that one Canadian dude has set up the Church of Google. No joke. Presumably his religion is called Googlism or Googology. The Church offers 9 proofs and I quote:

1. Google is the closest thing to an omniscient (all-knowing) entity in existence.

2. Google is everywhere at once (omnipresent).

3. Google answers prayers. (”As an example, you can quickly find information on alternative cancer treatments, or new and innovative medical discoveries, and generally anything that resembles a typical prayer.”)

4. Google is potentially immortal.

5. Google is infinite. (The internet can theoretically grow forever.)

6. Google remembers all.

7. Google can do no evil. (Google’s corporate philosophy is ”do no evil”.)

8. Google is believed. (The term ”Google” is searched for more than the terms ”God”, ”Jesus”, ”Allah”, ”Buddha”, ”Christianity” and ”Islam” combined.)

9. Evidence of Google’s existence is abundant. No faith is required.

There are even the 10 Commandments of Google. Now, once I recovered from my coughing fit and picked myself up from the floor, I checked out the Church site to see if it was all tongue-in-cheek. Could anyone actually be seriously suggesting that the Google search engine is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God?? So who is Satan then? Bing?

Clearly, this parody religion can join the ranks of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (aka Pastafarianism) and is a humorous attempt at demonstrating that Google is pretty well omniscient and remembers everything.  And the religious day is September 14, when Google was first registered as a company. Mmmmm..I must note this in my diary as a religious holiday and take the day off work!  I wonder how one can become a Minister of the Church of Google. Ah, here’s the answer.

Amusing I’m sure to hear there is a Church of Google but there’s a serious undertone to this.  Google is the window to the internet for many of us. Some of us use Google Docs, gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View. You remember the recent incident when Google was attacked and tagged the web as malware and was virtually useless ? It showed what can happen when we rely too heavily on a single vendor who provides us with nifty products and services. If Ask.com had gone down, I’m not so sure many of us would have noticed. I read somewhere that in the hour or so Google was having its hissy fit, everyone rushed over to Yahoo! But guess what? The moment Google was back up, everyone rushed back to Google.

Google is becoming a monoculture. It is getting too powerful in the search and online advertising space IMHO. I for one am very concerned over the Google book settlement (which potentially could give Google the right to create the world’s largest digital library and create issues for future scholars). I will blog on this soon.  And did you read that Google has teamed up with Hasbro to launch a Google Maps version of Monopoly?

What next: Google Water? Google mobile? Google chewing gum? Google electricity? Perhaps not such a stretch of the imagination. Google is involved in water research and they’ve already produced an electricity power meter.  What can happen in a Google-only world? Here’s a few ideas:

• innovation is stifled as search engine start-ups would find it difficult to launch themselves against the Google ediface (last statistic I read, Google had 63.1% of the search engine market. That’s a tough lead to beat).
• Google could control the rules – business and private citizens would have to use Google the way it is. Too bad if you dislike their collection of data about you or the costs of online advertising.
• Google dominates the media – there’s Google News and Google TV ads. I can imagine (as with the Google Books proposal) Google archiving and indexing every TV show ever produced – so we can sit back and one day watch Google TV online (and you’d probably have to enter your gmail account info to be able to access it).
• I remember freaking out when I read George Dyson’s piece, Turing’s Cathedral. He was talking about a visit to Google and was told by one of his hosts following a talk – “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people…We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” So imagine if you will artificial intelligence scanning humanity’s knowledge in the form of digitised media, search patterns and user behaviour. Where could this lead to?  The freaky thing is that for this year’s April Fool’s day, Google announced it had developed CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity and that CADIE had managed to create a blog by extracting patterns from the social web pages indexed by Google. Many a true word is said in jest – so perhaps Google are well down the path of AI.

Of course, Google is not holding a gun to our collective heads. We have a choice. Or do we? Who is Google’s real competitor out there? Twitter? Possibly. Because Twitter has the real-time conversation and search that Google doesn’t. But Twitter so far isn’t diversifying its base and getting into maps, web-based word processing, email, water research and so on.

What would happen if Google got its claws into the Invisible Web? I read recently that Google only indexes about 6% of the publicly available pages on the internet. I’ll do a post soon on how to navigate through the Invisible Web.

Meanwhile, I’m off for a lie down.

Switzerland kills Street View

I’m loving the Swiss. The Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commish to be exact. His name is Hans-Peter Thür and he has accused Google of not protecting the privacy of Swiss citizens. Quelle horror! I can’t believe that – Google not respecting privacy?!!

Regular readers know that I have an aversion to Google Street View. Yes, it can be very useful to look up the restaurant you’re off to for dinner or voyeuristically scan your neighbour’s backyards, but as we know, it can catch someone at an embarrassing moment and criminals are increasingly using Street View. No stretch of the imagination to think that crims can use it to scan roads in a neighbourhood, checking cars, backyards for signs of easy access, checking out whether there’s a Rottweiller in the yard that might cause problems and so on.

Greece, Japan and Germany have raised concerns about Street View and you may have read about angry citizens in Buckinghamshire, UK surrounding one of those stupid cars with intrusive 360-degree camera on the roof (police had to be called but unfortunately the Google car got away unharmed).

And the Swiss watch dog has now demanded that Google withdraw Street View from the country, one week after its launch. Thür has banned Google because he considered that faces and vehicle numbers were not sufficiently blurred. Google responded by saying that since launching in Switzerland there has been an 80% increase in maps usage, proving how popular their tool is. Well of course it is: people like to play with new stuff but once people realise how hard it is to request your face be blurred or the hoops you have to go through to get your image withdrawn from Street View – well, let’s see if people like it so much then. Clearly, any country that allows secret squirrel bank accounts like Switzerland is likely to be a country that jealously guards its privacy.

I can assure Google that if ever I spot one of those sinister looking cars with the Orwellian looking camera (or a Google Trike – yep, they get round on bikes too), the driver had better run.

Seriously, whilst we all enjoy Google this and Google that – stop for just ONE moment to think about these questions:

• does Google hold too much power and influence over the Web and more particularly its future?
• are you at all worried about the possibly that Google may have secured a virtual monopoly over literature?
• are you at all concerned that Google is helping China to censor search results and is a willing part of the Great Firewall of  China? So if someone in China searches “Tiananmen Square protests” or “Falun Gong”, they would find nothing, zippo.
• should we have anti-trust concerns about Google, particularly the close relationship between Apple and Google?
• have you thought about how much we rely on Google? if Google disappeared overnight, whoosh, what other search engine would you use, would you be at a loss without Google Maps or Street View?  If you think you’d be like a deer caught in the traffic lights – then perhaps we are allowing Google to influence and control our online experiences too much.

Google opt out feature

Just love this. For those of us concerned about Google and privacy, watch this. If you’re not concerned but just want to have a chuckle, watch it anyway.

Are you guilty Google?

After 5 years, I gave up teaching at a university in Sydney largely because I was tiring of the spoon feeding students seem to expect these days. Very few students were willing to do research beyond a quick dip into Wikipedia, with the odd citation of a book or journal article thrown in. Curiosity appeared to be lacking. The general attitude seemed to be “I’m paying a heck of a lot for my education, just give me the degree/diploma”. I often had assignments handed in with slabs of text taken from Wikipedia and students more often than not failed to examine the original source material. So I threw in the towel.

Seems I’m not an isolated case as there have been some recent articles that have caught my attention and I’d like you to explore. Google and the End of Wisdom by Bob Batchelor is an interesting piece.  Here’s some snippets:

• “I think one would be hard pressed to find a mainstream American under the age of 30 who did not feel that all their questions could be answered by Google. Today’s students, from first graders to those in graduate school, have been taught to find specific, correct answers. Google does this quickly and efficiently. For them, Google is a godsend.”
• “In general, students are willing to forfeit advanced thinking (critical thinking, in-depth research, and healthy skepticism) for the speed and quickness of Google search results. They are so programmed by standardized testing in K-12 education that finding “facts” online is deemed sufficient to meet college-level expectations. Since standardized tests rely heavily on multiple choice examinations, the search for the single, correct answer is paramount.”
• “Wisdom develops over time as a person stacks up experiences and finds measures to constantly reengage with the changing nature of the world at large. Relying on answers from a search engine, even if it produces thousands of results faster than the blink of an eye, cannot compare to the simple, beautiful act of sitting quietly for 15 minutes, disconnected from the computer—and thinking.”

From personal experience with Uni students over the last 5 years, I’m not going to disagree with the article. My blogging colleague Marc over at Creative Spark (you have to read his blog) had an interesting exchange with Bob regarding his article, so I won’t rehash the issues discussed.

It is of course so that we can tailor and change our information flow, through RSS feeds, Twitter exchanges and so on. So there’s an argument to say that we can be more enriched and curious in the digital world because we are exposed to so many different ideas and perspectives.

I get this but somehow – and I need to reflect more on this – it seems that today’s Uni students are just hovering at a very superficial level. They are not diving in and reflecting, ruminating, debating, challenging, exploring.

And then there was this article entitled Pixelated Brains and the New Media with a series of links to great articles, including Bob’s. The articles examine whether, with all the stuff out there in the digital universe, we are merely nibbling, grazing, getting sound bytes. Sort of like rushing through the Macca’s drive-in. We flit onto this piece of information like a butterfly and then flit somewhere else with it. But surely this aids cross-pollination of ideas.

Anyway, read the “pixelated brains” series of articles to find out whether humanity is doomed to being dumbed down or whether we are an evolving species.

At least I no longer have to mark essays that boast slabs of Wikipedia text and little evidence of critical thinking (not to mention grammatical and spelling errors). For my rants on the loss of critical thinking, go here and here if you’re interested.

Google respects privacy

Good to see that Google can respect privacy – Colonel Sanders’ privacy that is.

As we know, Google’s been taking a bit of a hammering lately over Google Street View.

Source: The Register

NO Google!

You know I’ve ranted and raved about Google Street View before. If not, go here for a start. Google of course has technology that will blur a face or licence plate number but the Google van still patrols streets and areas snapping away despite Privacy International lodging a complaint. Many people in the UK joined that complaint since they felt images led to identifying specific people. One woman for instance moved away from a particular area to escape a violent partner only to find she was recognisable by said partner in an image snapped by Google Street View outside her new home. And residents near Milton Keynes (UK) recently blocked the driver of a Street View car when he started taking photographs of their homes saying the service was “facilitating crime”. Street View is now in nine countries and Google wants to expand the service into Europe.

But seems Greece is saying NO to Google. The Hellenic Data Protection Authority has banned Google from expanding Street View in the country until Google can cough up satisfactory information about how long images will be stored on Google’s database and what measures Google will take to make people aware of privacy rights. Meanwhile the Japanese, who are very respectful of privacy, are also giving Google a hard time and forcing them to reshoot all images taken in that country. And it will reshoot by lowering Street View cameras by 40 cm (16 inches) following complaints of invasion of privacy because cameras were able to shoot images showing private gardens and homes.

Google will try to accommodate by blurring images or lowering camera angles but the issue to me is this – this is private exploitation of public space or a public good. And the law isn’t clear on this as yet. The argument is that what’s in public space is fair game, yet if I roam the streets of Sydney as I have done many times with my camera, I get hauled aside and asked questions about what I’m taking photos of and why. I have even been abused by a man for taking a photo of a public building (a library) and he was just on the street and came over to abuse me.

In the UK, a well-known London photographer, who was going about his business of taking photos of London life, was hauled off by the police under Section 44 (Stop & Search Powers) of the Terrorism Act 2000. So why is it okay for Google to roam city streets and country laneways snapping photos showing homeless people outside a shelter; causing embarrassment and distress between a couple when a woman caught her cheating husband out; showing a man being sick in the street; or a man entering a sex shop in London? I’m sure if I took a photo of any of these people in these situations, my ass would be hauled off by the cops or I’d be abused by the people whose private circumstances I was attempting to capture on an image.

Seems to me that the Google business model is if you’re in public, tough we are going to exploit it. I am pleased to see Greece asking questions and Japan causing Google to adapt Street View to  respect privacy concerns. Now, if the law would just catch up and redefine what can and can’t be done in public space when it comes to private citizens, I’d be very very happy.

I’ve had a facelift

Well, no, not me but the ThinkingShift blog. If you normally view this blog via RSS, come on over and check out the new look. For over 2 years, I stuck very loyally to my favourite green colour and a flock of birds for the header. But this week, my beloved Mac laptop died so I’ve been working on an old G4, which has a much larger screen. Maybe it was the larger screen that triggered off my hissy fit but I thought I’ve had enough of this green business, time to change.

So there’s a new look and a new bird in the header – a beautiful scarlet parrot I took a snap of in Hong Kong recently. The meaning of this for me is that the parrot symbolises everything TS blog stands for – watching over and reporting on what’s going on in our society; talking about endangered species; looking at what’s curious and bizarre.  But I did include my favourite colour (green) in category titles. Tell me what you think!

Meanwhile, for those of us in Australia and New Zealand, it is ANZAC Day – the day we honour members of the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps (or ANZAC) who fought in Gallipoli, Turkey during WWI.  Google has changed its icon for the day:

And I also remember my own father who slugged it out in WWII as a fighter pilot for the Royal New Zealand airforce: Flight Lieutenant James Evans Jenkins No 402670, who cut a dashing figure from the cockpit of his Spitfire. My dad told me the photo below came from a promotional film the NZ Air Force shot during WWII that featured him, but I’ve never been able to track it down. NZ newspapers of the time apparently carried photos so I must try to get hold of them.

Google world

Well, I’m back from a lightning visit to New Zealand where I gave an international address at the 7th Annual Information Management Summit in Wellington (not sure I can be classed as an international speaker when I’m an NZ’er).

I spoke about Google and privacy and Google and trusted information resources. I used a series of images rather than “death by powerpoint”, so they wouldn’t really make much sense if I showed you (especially given a photo of a rough collie was a prominent slide). But here’s the gist of what I ranted and raved about:

• a quick history of Google – original logos and original name of Google (which was BackRub. We are so used to saying “Google it” that “BackRub it” doesn’t sound quite right does it!)
• a quick look at Google apps like StreetView, Google Maps,  Google Latitude.  And even Google Electricity. What next? Google Water – don’t laugh, it’s possible. So it’s the world according to Google.
• which implies points of tension/danger – I talked about the privacy implications of Google Health. And a case study example of what can happen when we rely on Google and news aggregators for accurate information and US $1 billion gets wiped off a company’s share value in minutes. I took a quick swipe at the profession of journalism (the journalist should have checked the facts).
• along the way, I couldn’t resist carrying on about the Facebook debacle and how a company – which let’s face it is a money making venture – could conceivably turn around and say “we own your information”. And for those who’ve emailed me, nope I still don’t have enough trust in Facebook to reinstate my content.
• but…it’s not all doom and prophecies of darkness. We don’t have to see the world according to Google.
• I talked about the amazing power of social networks. When you have trusted relationships, you learn to rely on the credibility and accuracy of a given source or person. And with RSS feeds, you can toss out sources if you find them to be inaccurate or biased – you can alter the knowledge flow to suit your needs.
• I ranted a bit about the loss of critical thinking in a world dominated by Google, where we find it easier to Google it than research it. I questioned whether, in an information world that is saturated and noisy, natural curiosity has been stifled.
• I then did a quick rant about how Facebook and social networks are seductive and we perhaps give away more information about ourselves than we should. And what can happen to you if you share too much about yourself. So better to be prudent than sorry.
• I realised along the way that Michael Sampson was live-blogging me. You can check out what he said here.  Good to catch up with Michael – don’t know how he keeps up his pace given he and his wife are about to have their ninth child!

It was also good to finally meet Keith Delarue and also catch up with someone who used to work with me, Kevin O’Donnell, who has made the move from Ireland to take up a KM role at Kiwibank.

I did have a chuckle over something though. One of the speakers was talking about “the temporary knowledge organisation”. And made the comment that the concept was probably dreamed up by some pointy-headed academics. Well, one of those pointy-headed types was in the room – me!

Rui Martins, a Lecturer at University of Newcastle, and I wrote a paper in 2003 called “The Temporary Knowledge Organisation as viewed from a complexity perspective. An enrichment of the traditional organisational project management paradigm“. It was published in a book and you can also read it here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to Japan

On November 20 2007, Japan passed a law requiring all non-Japanese citizens over 16 years of age to be fingerprinted and photographed when entering Japan. The law also encompassed foreign nationals living in Japan.

I blogged about this at the time and questioned whether the Japanese had the wrong targets – the biometrics programme was supposedly being introduced to counter “the war on terror”. So the argument seemed to be foreigners equal terrorists, so let’s round ‘em up, fingerprint and photograph them. Japanese authorities seemed to conveniently forget that domestic, not foreign, terrorism is their problem (Sarin gas attack in Tokyo subway as an example). So dudes: if you really want to smoke out terrorists, fingerprint everyone, including Japanese citizens. But I reckon your country is pretty low on Al Qaeda’s list of who or what to blow up.

Criticism at the time even suggested that Japan’s new biometric system had more to do with xenophobia and racism. Of course, the real reason is that biometrics is BIG business since 9/11. The biometrics industry is predicted to be worth more than US $7 billion a year by 2012. This is why we will all be subjected in the future to being fingerprinted and photographed to death.

However, when it comes to Google StreetView, the Japanese seem to mind very much if THEY are the targets of surveillance. Forget the poor foreigners lining up in immigration to get fingerprinted and snapped! You know what I think of StreetView. If you don’t, go here and here. StreetView hit Japan in August 2008 with the insidious Google vans cruising up and down the streets of twelve Japanese cities.

But a bunch of Japanese academics, journalists and lawyers have sent a petition to Google’s Japanese subsidiary demanding that StreetView be canned because….it’s an invasion of privacy. Yeah, could have told them that. The petition in part said that the Google service “constitutes violent infringement on citizens’ privacy by photographing residential areas, including community roads, and publishing their images without the consent of communities and citizens” and that StreetView is distributing private information “more easily, widely, massively and permanently than ordinary cameras and surveillance cameras do”. Mmmmmm…..seems though they might be more sensitive about Japanese “love hotels” being captured by StreetView and showing couples walking in or out.

Well dudes, have a think about this – whilst your complaining about violation of your privacy, what about foreigners who are subjected to biometrics?  Aside from the fact that I wonder if targeting a particular group (ie non-Japanese citizens) could be legally challenged, think about the fact that fingerprints and photographs comprise unique digital records, which can be reproduced, stolen or shared with other Governments (eg the US) against the will or the knowledge of said poor foreign national. The legislation that passed into law Japan’s biometric programme specifically states that digital information collected  will be checked against international crime and terrorism databases, as well as domestic crime records and then stored for an unspecified time. So whilst Japanese citizens are fretting over distribution of private information and being caught on StreetView, foreigners have to worry about what information the Japanese will share about them with foreign governments.

Let’s not kid ourselves by naively thinking that our private information can’t or won’t be shared. Northwest airlines happily handed over passenger information to NASA, despite assuring passengers that the airline would not share confidential passenger data. JetBlue has admitted that it secretly gave  passenger records including names, addresses, phone numbers and flight information to a Defense Department contractor. I could give you many more examples.

Japanese citizens: welcome to the world of surveillance.