 Our first session is going to be moderated by Jonathan Zitrain. And the theme is delineating the public and private. And a lot of the idea behind this session is to bring people from different fields together to talk about how in their areas of expertise, the public and private are delineated and what kind of distinctions and definitions and concepts they bring to this area. So welcome to Jonathan. Jonathan is a professor of law here at Harvard Law School. He's one of the co-founders of the Berkman Center, along with Charlie up there. And he served as its first executive director. He's the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. And so welcome, Jonathan. And I'd like the panelists for the first session to come up. Thanks so much, Judith. Welcome to our panelists. Do I get a hug? Oh, you get a hug. It's the morning. Why not? Thank you. So good morning. And welcome to what I call yet another privacy conference. But this one is different. This one is different not because of the issues we're going to talk about, because at yet another privacy conference, what defines it is that we're always talking about these issues, but more because of the people in the room. This conference is a mashup. We have people from different disciplines and people who think about this kind of stuff full time mixed with people who don't think about it so much, or perhaps maybe this is peripheral to what they're doing, but also touches us all. And in having this mashup, I think the hope is we may be able to come to some new insights during the day and the kind of insights that may creep up on you and club you later. It's not necessarily what business people call when they go to their conferences, actionable items, which, of course, to lawyers, actionable items are things you can sue over. So again, you have some difference in opinion. So our first panel is sort of meant to represent that mashup spirit. This is almost like a lawyer, a computer scientist, and an architect walk into a bar. And here they are. And we're going to figure out what the punchline is. And I guess just one note on my mind before we start is to realize that when you have a mashup situation, when you have people who have been studying and breathing this stuff as part of their life's work, you can, if they are indeed expert, end up having them be very much marinating in a particular vernacular or a particular way of thinking about things. And in trying to cross from one vernacular to another may be where there are lessons to learn. I think if we had, I don't know, quantum theorists or string theorists, physicists, hard scientists at the front of the room, we would expect not to understand a word they were saying. If we understood what they were saying, we would want our money back kind of thing. Here we want to understand what people are saying. And the people who are saying it want to be able to speak at the level of subtlety for which specialized vernacular and such may be required. But anyway, this is sort of to give myself license as I'm kind of the clueless man for Mars on behalf of the clueless people among us. And you know who you are to be able to ask questions as we hear from the experts among us. So that said, I wonder if we should start with Paul Dourish from UC Irvine. Paul, you've got a few opening remarks to share. And before you deliver them, tell us how you found your way to privacy as a field or subfield. Let's see. So I've been working on areas connected to this stuff for a long time. Ever since my, actually my first job was a research center in Cambridge and England, Ranks Rock Zero Park, which was made up roughly one third of computer scientists, psychologists, and sociologists. And we were doing a lot of work around the use of multimedia communication technologies. And many of the, and immediately running into all sorts of questions about privacy access and the forms of sort of the kind of participative statuses that people could have through those sort of early multimedia and ubiquitous computing applications. And it has turned out to be this topic that I can't get away from. So you just gave in and started to love the bomb. It's just, that's right, it's there. You can't really pretend that it's not. Although many people manage to. And I can't help but ask too, among privacy scholars, there are those who, their medium is their message, they are extremely private personally. And among privacy scholars, there are those who are extremely public. They're constantly blogging about how much they care about privacy kind of thing. I'm just curious, where you fall along the spectrum and the link between the personal and the professional? Well, let's see, probably more towards the private. But on the other hand, in the midst, might be something we end up talking about. I'm not necessarily sure that blogging is a public activity. It's a very carefully crafted activity. It's not that I'm not on Twitter. Old people always complain I'm only on Twitter at conferences. And not that I'm not on Facebook, but then those are crafted. The right question there might be which you is on Twitter and the choice of which you could define public and private. And again, I suppose it's a spectrum, not necessarily a binary choice. With that, hit us. OK, it's a black jester. All right, let's see. There's a couple of things that I wanted to try to throw out as starting points for some of the conversation, both in this session and later on today, coming out to some work, a couple of projects that I've been doing over several years. And the first thing I want to try and talk about that's been important in a lot of the work that I've undertaken is thinking about privacy not so much as something that people have, but something that people do. So this is partly because I work a great deal with anthropologists and sociologists, and we're trying to focus on the detailed cultural practices by which privacy gets done. What is it that people are doing when they're doing private? What is it that they're doing when they're doing public? On the plane from Los Angeles yesterday, I was reading Christina Nippard-Ang's relatively new book, Islands of Privacy, and she gives this fabulous section where she has a list of all the things that people do as ways of keeping things public or making things public or keeping them private. My favorite one was tidying up before the cleaning lady comes, and before a dinner party, reorganizing your pile of magazines to put the Oprah Magazine on the bottom and Gourmet Magazine on the top. So looking at those sort of mundane everyday practices by which privacy actually happens. But more importantly, I think there's this notion that in doing privacy, in being private, in orienting towards information is potentially public or private. These are some of the ways in which we do social relations. These are some of the ways in which social life plays out. Being in an intimate relationship, being in a family means having a certain kind of orientation towards information is being potentially public within that group, right? It's not that I, although computer scientists often take this sort of economic model of a cost-benefit trade-off or value I get back for giving information out, that's not what's going on when people share the details of their day when they get home. So privacy as practice is the first thing I sort of wanted to focus on. And then the second one sort of related to that, thinking about public, is to point towards some of Michael Warner's work, as a media theorist and queer theorist, on publics and counter-publics. And I found Warner's work very useful. Warner's focused not so much on a notion of public, but on the many different kinds of publics that are formed and that emerge, and emerge for him as a media theorist in forms of address and encounter with media objects. Publics, for him, is what happens in that notion of recognition of this is aimed at people like me. And as soon as I have that notion of people like me, I have a sense of myself being connected to these other sort of publicly addressed strangers that gives me a sense of myself and gives me a sense of identity that bands me together with other people. So it's a form of recognition and also a form of connection that perhaps lies, that it's much smaller than what we talk about as the public. I'm obviously a member of many different publics simultaneously, but that arises out of an encounter with media objects or with other people, with events and with places. So the notion of publics here is something that begins to speak to a pattern of sort of complicated sameness and difference, ways that I can distinguish between different kinds of publics, ways that I recognize myself as being in some ways the same as other people. And that's a very resonant notion for me as a computer scientist because it links into the ways in which we think about infrastructure. And as a computer scientist, a lot of what we do is build infrastructure. We build technologies, we build networks, we build these things that provide new ways of connecting people. And those infrastructures, and I think of infrastructure fairly broadly here to include practices, organizational schemes, relational databases and all the rest of it, as think of infrastructure as things that create patterns of sameness and difference. The power infrastructure is about making sure that power is exactly the same at all the places you can plug into it, that those places where you can't plug into it become very notionally different. And so those patterns of sameness and difference are what sort of go through all of my thinking about these questions of public and private. But in a way that I think speaks to a much greater sort of fragmentation and separation than just a standard notion of this is private and this is public. So let me just quickly, I wasn't keeping track of the time, give a couple of examples from some of the recent projects. Skip that one and go on to the others. So one of the movie I've been doing for a couple of years was looking at the case of parole sex offenders in California who were being tracked with GPS. And one of our interests in the context of mobile computing and mobile technologies is how do the GPS units function as a means to re-encounter everyday space? How do you think about space if you have to move through it without, for instance, coming within 2,000 feet of a public park or playground, a swimming pool, a library, a school and so forth? Certainly not something that I could have done when walking here from the hotel this morning since I just don't know where I am. And one of the things that becomes interesting for the sex offenders and relevant, I think perhaps for this conversation, is first, a reconfiguration of the scale at which public space is encountered. Even though the parole regulations say that you can't come within 2,000 feet of one of these places, it's impossible to navigate the everyday world at that level, it's impossible to navigate at the level of 2,000 feet. What becomes relevant for people tagged in this way is what are safe towns to be in? The sorts of towns that don't have schools, playgrounds, public parks. What are safe places to go where you can wander around without necessarily or potentially violating your parole conditions? So scale becomes reconfigured. I think that's something that's probably very familiar to many of us in a sort of online electronics or web 2.0 kind of context. The scales at which we are connected to others become radically different than those of the sort of encounters of everyday life in a non-electronically mediated world. And the second sort of thing just quickly out of those, out of that project is to think in more complicated terms about the kinds of social relations that are enacted by notions of public and private. What does it mean to be connected to people in these different kinds of publics? We actually found the word privacy to be remarkably problematic for thinking about the sex offender case, not least because the Supreme Court of many states have ruled that privacy is not an issue here, just by fiat. But instead, thinking in terms of people's accountabilities to each other. Again, I think something that we encounter a lot in a sort of web 2.0 online world that is that participation in different kinds of systems renders me accountable to different kinds of other groups in different ways. This takes on a very different kind of notion for the parole officers who suddenly find themselves accountable for the very complicated and extremely detailed log that they have of everywhere that all of their cases go. And who suddenly find that anytime that a GPS bounce causes their parolee to suddenly momentarily electronically appear to be in Nevada rather than California that has to be accounted for, that has to be lodged, that has to, there's a process that has to go on organizationally. So I think in these sort of terms of accountabilities of responsibilities, of different kinds of visibilities of the kinds of commitments that we have to each other, we can see within this framework of many different kinds of publics, and many different kinds of practices of privacy, a much richer way of thinking about the social relations that get enacted through these kinds of systems. So Paul, thank you for putting on the table two, and maybe more, but I at least got two interesting concepts floating around one privacy as practice, not just as rule set or something. And the second, the concept of multiple publics. And the examples are extremely provocative. I was waiting to hear, given your computer scientists, that maybe you did the iPhone app. I mean, in CompSci, there's the traveling salesman problem. You solved the traveling sex offender problem, which would try to calculate how to get from here to there, it's like shortest route, less highways, you're a sex offender. And you click on that, it gives you the kind of Byzantine route, which just says you can't get from here to there, like sorry, there are too many parts. There would actually be a fascinating app to write, and to actually imagine people don't have to be sex offenders to download it. You'd learn a lot actually about the implications of that law, to try to actually live your day according to those terms of parole, and see how long it would have taken you to get here from the hotel across the street. I mean, how easy it would be to write that app? Well, I see. There's actually one of the things I'm reminded of is an application called IC that Tad Hersch and other people did, which was attempting to navigate your way across Manhattan without coming in within view of a surveillance camera. And there's producing some very complicated routes. And there's the cheat switch and just put a bag over your head. That's right, there's various strategies. Well, actually, I mean, ironically, one of the reasons we got into it was sort of thinking that there's no way to ask Google Maps what your route is from A to B without coming within 2,000 feet of one of those places, although it rapidly turned, rapidly proved moot ennui as we discovered that many of the subjects in our initial pool were also as part of their parole conditions not allowed to be online, which we need to think about it, okay. So those were not conditions. My concern as a computer scientist, I'm not, I have to say, I'm an unusual computer scientist and I'm not that sort of computer scientist, unfortunately, anymore, who spends a lot of their time building these things, although a lot of products do come out of my group. I thought that's what computer scientists and graduate students were for. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, most of the graduate students we're working with on this project were criminology graduate students. No, but I think one of the things that is important for us is not necessarily to, first, not necessarily to see sex offenders as a design population, but the other one was to try to think about how it is this notion of privacy gets enshrined within the kinds of technologies that we build, in particular if privacy does become a rule set and if it is sort of based on a predicated upon a notion of trade-off and economic trade-off between sort of disclosure and value delivered, then a whole bunch of other kinds of things are neglected about the forms of participatory status that are enacted. So at the first conference where I presented this stuff and was focusing particularly on this notion of accountability as perhaps a better kind of term than privacy for much of what was going on, a person stood up right after me and then gave a paper which was one of these standard systems, these sort of buddy type systems where it helps you understand where your friends are when they're out for a drink of an evening. This was in Glasgow, so an evening of drinking, that's quite a long time. And one of the things that they commented was, oh, well, as we found that people really didn't care about privacy very much here, and in fact, did you then relate a story where somebody was getting a lot of hassle from his mates for not having said where he was out the night before, like, why, who were you out with that you're not telling us this? And it was a great example of this notion of accountability as perhaps a more useful lever than privacy here. What kinds of accountability did this person suddenly find himself subject to by his participation in a system that made it possible for people to keep track of these things? And that's more my concern in terms of design implications, not so much what would it be to build an iPhone app here, but what kind of notions of privacy are being enshrined in technology and how is it that they then become the basis for any of us to think about what privacy might be? Well, that nicely brings also to bear your notion of multiple publics, that the experience of this workshop right now for people in this room could be very different because for some people, there's a bunch of old friends here, it's like, these are my people, this is my public, is very different from somebody who may have just turned up, doesn't really know anybody, it's a totally different experience that might even be captured by public and private, and I suppose also puts on the table the notion of identity, that a public, it sounds like by your vernacular, is a group with whom you identify, and the story you told about Foursquare, Govalla, these check-in apps is they let you identify who your public is and exclude everyone else, these are the people with whom I identify, at which point they're like, hey, you should be in our public all the time, what, did you stop being us? Why did you not check in? Right, and it gives us another way of thinking perhaps about the ways of being private and public, and the ways of being public and private as well, through one's participation. Very good, thank you.