 So as you know, we're here to hear talk from Jeff Jarvis and to engage with him in a lively fashion, I'm sure. Before introducing, Jeff, let me remind people of the house rules and norms. So the rules are very simple. This is being webcast. It is being recorded forever. So if you say something that you don't want made public, yes, I'm aware of the irony, Jeff. Then stifle yourself. Also, there are copies of Jeff's book on sale in the back of the room afterwards. There it is. Jeff, I'm going to obligate Jeff to sign. Other than that, I think we're pretty much ready. So it's just a treat for me to be able to introduce Jeff Jarvis, who I both admire and like as a friend. I hear him on the radio all the time. My wife calls me in when she hears him on the radio and says, Jeff's on, Jeff's on. And every time I'm just so happy that Jeff is one of the people who speaks for an open internet and for fresh thinking about old media. And now with his new book, but expressing an interest he's had for a long time, is somebody who speaks openly and clearly and forcefully about a really difficult and important issue, which is what's happening to privacy and public. So Jeff teaches at the City University of New York, entrepreneurial journalism, I believe, which is actually a wonderful title for what Jeff does. Not all of you know that he was a founder of Entertainment Weekly, that he was a TV critic for TV Guide, that he has very serious old media, traditional media cred. I mean, he's been there. Ruin by working at TV Guide, but that's... And has become, as you know, one of the most important and clearest voices as our culture tries to figure out what's going on with media and with privacy and the other issues that Jeff deals with. So without anything else, here's Jeff. Thank you, David. I love being at Berkman. I'll take any excuse I can to hang out here and breathe the smart air. And that's a hint. I'd like to hang out more. We were reminiscing about the first blogger con that Dave Weiner organized here. And this is an amazing institution of Harvard itself, that Berkman itself is, that's a great thing. So it really is an honor to be here. I'll talk for a little while, but then I'm eager to have the conversation, especially with you. And what I really want to talk about, not that I can decree that, but what I really want to talk about is preserving the tools of publicness, that is to say the net, and get there. And that's why I wrote the book, is some measure of fear about that. But I had to get there through a path of looking at privacy. And I want to emphasize that private, because Dana Boyd would shoot me if I didn't do this. David and I agreed today that everything we've learned, we've learned from Dana Boyd. That these are not in opposition, privacy and publicness. That is a continuum, as a CBC host said, it's like wet and dry, hot and cold. Privacy and publicness depend upon each other. We all have private lives, I have a private life, believe it or not. Privacy matters, privacy needs protectors. But my fear is that we're concentrating so much on protecting privacy in this digital age, that we might lose sight of the benefits of publicness. And then lose sight of the necessity to protect those tools and what they can bring us. So that's why I wrote a book about publicness. And by the way, also while I'm doing caveats, yes I know publicness is a terrible word, but the proper word publicity is just too freighted with marketing meaning. The book was just translated in French and to my amazement, there is no word for privacy or publicness in French, they said. So they had to use privacy in English and they made up a French word publicity. It's about as bad as publicness, I think. So, let me just talk for a minute about the history of privacy. And in this Auguste Hall, I'm not going to act as if you don't know who Louis Brandeis is, as I do elsewhere. But I didn't realize that the first serious discussion of illegal right to privacy didn't come until 1890 with Brandeis and Warren writing their historic Harvard Law Review piece. And as you know, I bet, the cause of their nerves was the invention of the Kodak camera. And a cannon. Well, they Kodak rest in peace and Rochester with it. This is the town that digital killed. My son went to the University of Rochester first term, the first year. There were great clips I found in the New York Times of the time, talking about fiendish Kodakers lying in wait. And Teddy Roosevelt banned Kodaking in public parks in Washington for a time for fear that he would have a picture taken and his children would have a picture taken. And of course now we all die to say hi. And we all die to get our pictures taken. So what I saw is the connection between fear of privacy and technology, that new technologies come in and they cause change, they cause disruption, they cause fear, they cause an effort to try to hold off the change. And I think that's part of what we're seeing now. I don't mean to diminish privacy to just that by any means, but I think that's part of the reason that we concentrate so much on it. And you know, you go through other technologies through time, even back to the Gutenberg press. Pardon me. When Gutenberg created the press, as authors we were amazed that anybody, some authors didn't want their names associated with their thoughts set down permanently and distributed widely. It freaked them. Jonathan Swift has a great quote of the time, I'll get almost right, that a book of verses seldom read and kept in a drawer is like a virgin much sought after. But once published as a book, it's like a common whore anyone can buy for two crowns. You know, you go through other technologies, little microphones and video cameras and these days RFID chips and so on and each causes some concern. And what we're really trying to do as a society I think is find new norms and new structures of how we deal with this. And the response, though, is to try to legislate and regulate to maintain the old definitions of where we are. And of course we always look at the future in the definition of the past. Printing, when it was established, was called automated writing. The car was the horse's carriage. And that's the way we're looking at the internet now. So it's somewhat of a history of privacy. On the side of publicness, you know, the obvious is that you go back, let me go back to privacy for a second more, that some say the privacy was invented in England with the invention of technologies in a sense of the whole way in the back stairs. Before that you walked through rooms and you walked through everybody's business. Obviously in villages it's said we knew each other's business. No one ever knew what was going through our head. But again, we're trying to figure out norms as we go. So publicness, I'm going to make the risk here of quoting Habermas and some will get mad at me for not doing it right. But we all know that Habermas says that the public sphere began in the 18th century with the rise of rational critical debate in coffee houses and salons as a counterweight to the power of government. There were some researchers and academics in Canada and the US brought together by a professor of Shakespeare at McGill in Toronto over the last five years who did a project called the Making Publix Project. And it was like men from heaven for me in the book because it was a wonderful bit of work that they did. And they all came together in a room like this when they started the project and Paul Yakin in the head said that they wanted to look at the tools of making publics in the early modern period. And one of the academics put his hand up and said, well, of course you know none of us believe that because Habermas says it started in the 18th century. So it didn't happen. And indeed they had to grapple with this idea for quite some time. But they came to the idea that people did have the tools of making publics in the early modern period well before the 18th century. Yakin, as a Shakespeare scholar, just thought under his nose when he realized that 3,000 people went to the Globe Theatre to watch Richard III, they were gathered around an idea of what do you do with an incompetent ruler. And those are people who didn't know each other but created a public around an idea. Printed sermons, printed music, art, markets. All these things enabled the creation of publics. That when people's portraits were painted, you could get an idea of that's what a Dutchman looks like and when that Dutch person is in Venice, you could say, aha, that's them and this is us. You start to get an idea of a public. So they argued this I think very eloquently, far better than I just did. But I'll come back to that idea of the tools of making publics and I think that's what the internet really is and that's where we are. Well in fact, I'll go back to Habermas. He says of course that what ruined this golden age of the making of the public sphere was mass media. And my thought is that we've reached a time when we can tear back down what mass media did to us. It made us into a mass, first of all. Raymond Williams, a sociologist says there are no masses, only ways to see people as masses. Mass media talked to us one way. Mass media pretended to speak for us, pretended to be the device of the public voice. And now we have the opportunity online with the internet to each of us make a public. And perhaps one of the best examples of that is Occupy Wall Street. And obviously before that the air was spraying and before that the indignatoes of Spain. And let me tell you a little story about this as a tool of publicness. I have a rule in the book that's the Cabernet rule. It says one should not blog, tweet or do anything else public which I violate regularly as you can tell. And so one night in the midst of the so-called debt crisis of negotiations in Washington I was pissed off and I added a few too many glasses of refined Pinot Noir which I can say in a law school was a loophole around the Cabernet rule. So I go to my keyboard and I go to Twitter and I'm just pissed so I just say fuck you Washington. It's our money, it's our economy, you're messing with it. And people encouraged me which was the wrong thing to do. And so I kept going and I laughed and they said well we should start a chant here on Twitter and somebody came in and said you idiot that's called a hashtag. Fuck you Washington. Now some men got mad at me because I was falling into the Tea Party view of just being a great government. There were a few people who lived in Washington who took up a bridge which of course was just stupid. Some said I should have gotten mad at the GOP or this particular politician or that particular politician. But when I learned something in the next 110,000 fuck you Washington tweets that followed which I'm so proud. I just hope that doesn't end up on my gravestone. It could say you know fuck you world, yeah. People used it as a platform. They finished the sentence. F.U. Washington for making my parents nervous about whether they can pay their bills. F.U. Washington for not being able to negotiate as well as a three year old. F.U. Washington for not letting me marry who I want to and so on and so on. And so I realized learning from that that it was a platform and people imbued in this empty vessel what they wanted to in terms of their anger and their frustration and their hopes for that matter. And Reuters later did a look back at the use of Occupy Wall Street as a hashtag and the first English language reference I'm proud to say was in a tweet that I did not do someone else did that said nothing but hashtag fuck you Washington hashtag Occupy Wall Street separated at birth. And so that's what I learned. I think it taught me about how to judge Occupy Wall Street that what frustrates the institutions of course is that it's not an institution. It has no leadership. It has no spokesman. It has no creed. It has no message. What the hell is it? It's something that people can convene around. It is a tool to make a public. True words never spoken. And that public is now trying to discern what the meaning is and to negotiate it in ways to figure out what are we pissed about and what is it we want. And it happens in a new and messy way. It happens as a network to play to my friend Dr. Weinberger here who's wonderful new book coming out in January. I just finished. It really really is very, very good. But the network is the public. And that's a different way to judge this idea when we had institutions as publics. I went off my script here. So, right. We're going through a huge transition and trying to figure out what that means obviously as a society. And some of the, I also got some more mana from heaven thanks to Berkman because I watched the video probably on the Gutenberg parenthesis. Were any of you at that here? No, well. For getting suddenly, damn, the name of the professor who was here who did it. But it's a bunch of academics from the University of Southern Denmark. And they talked about this notion. I love the poetry of the Gutenberg parenthesis. And they argue that before Gutenberg knowledge was passed around, described mouth to mouth, changed along the way. It had very little sense of ownership or authorship. Remember the authors didn't necessarily want to be associated. It was meant to honor and preserve ancient knowledge more than current knowledge. And then in the parenthesis, once after Gutenberg they argue, knowledge became linear. McLuhan says the line, this sentence is an example, is that organizing principle. There's a beginning and an end if there are boxes around things. It's about a product more than a process. There's a clear sense of authorship and ownership witnessed the problems we have now with copyright. It honored current knowledge and authors who created this knowledge. Then we come in their argument to the other side of the Gutenberg parenthesis. And on this side, it doesn't really necessarily return us to what's before, but there are similarities. Knowledge is now passed around, link to link and click to click. It's remixed along the way. There's less of a sense of ownership and authorship to the consternation of copyright holders. It's, here I quote Professor Weinberger, Dr. Weinberger, that the knowledge we revere starts to become the network. And so our notion of knowledge, our notion of the world, our cognition of the world changes. When America was discovered, it freaked people out alone because that's not the world we know. It changes other things in the world and that's what we're going through now. The CTO of the Veterans Administration calls the Internet the Eighth Continent. And it's kind of the same. It's the creation of a new space. I think there's some danger about calling it a space. Well, actually, here's the man who taught me. I used to think that the Internet was a medium because we in media look at the world of God like in our own image. And we think that the world is what we wanted to do. But Doc yelled at me nicely as the way only Doc can and said, no, no, no, no. That brings a lot of baggage, Jeff, that it's a place. And there are some people now who say, well, a place metaphor has a problem, too. All metaphors are wrong. All metaphors are wrong. Absolutely. Yeah, yes, yeah. Well, I was at the EG-8 in Paris and I'll get to Sarkozy in a minute, but I mentioned the Eighth Continent and he quite liked it, which is what scared me because I think he had a vision of putting his flag in it, right? Right, so the Gutenberg parenthesis. So these academics argue that what was happening in our culture was that it was a very hard transition into the parenthesis, and we're going through an equally hard transition out of it. And that we went into it, you know, we still looked at things in the analog of the old. Again, the Gutenberg press was seen as automated writing. The fonts mimic Scribe's handwriting. Elizabeth Eisenstein, the key scholar of Gutenberg, says that the book did not come into its own form until 50 years after its creation and its impact on society wasn't really truly recognized for 100 years after its creation. Indeed, if you look today at how Newspapers' magazines and books treat the computer online and the iPad, they're still recognizable as Newspapers' books and magazines. We haven't really rethought and reinvented what information and knowledge can be. We're still looking in the coarseless carriage, the automated writing way. We're still looking in our analog of the past. All right, let me come back to this. Sorry. I changed my order because of where I am, and so it throws me. So, again, I dealt a lot with publicness, but I still had to get through kind of the gauntlet of privacy. I had to understand privacy somewhat. And so I looked not only at the history, but I tried to look at definitions. I tried to find a good definition of privacy. And my incoming definition was that it was about control. That seemed pretty clear and pretty sensible. But one that Mark Zuckerberg uses a lot. But I think it's a very inadequate definition. And I found that privacy is very much an empty vessel word itself, that one scholar of privacy said it means everything and nothing. It involves all kinds of different things thrown in there. I couldn't find a good legal definition that satisfied me. And I came to believe that privacy should be seen as an ethic. That there's an ethic of privacy, and that is an ethic of knowing someone else's information. So, if I tell David something, that information is now public to that extent. And what happens to it now lies with David. The responsibility is on his shoulder. And he has to make decisions, ethical decisions, one would hope, about the context in which it was shared. Is this something I wanted shared beyond that? Would that hurt me if he shared it? Would he want to hurt me if he shares it? As an individual, if David were a company, there fall other responsibilities that one should secure this information. And, Sony, you shouldn't let it all be stolen, or bank, right? I think there are further ethics for this age that say that we should have, who's information it started with should have some access to it. We should know who knows our stuff and what they're doing with it and why. I also think it should be portable that if, you know, my Amazon purchases, I would love to export from Amazon and use otherwise, because they're my purchases. And the fact that I can't, Dockstrolls will fix with VRM. So, if privacy is an ethic, then I think publicness is also an ethic. And publicness, I argue then, if privacy is an ethic of knowing, publicness, I think, is an ethic of sharing one's information. And I do not argue for a moment that everything we do should be shared. When you do sound checks for radio and they ask you to say what you had for breakfast, I now refuse saying that we Twitter users are accused of talking about nothing else. So, you will never catch me saying that I had a bagel breakfast. So, we shouldn't share everything, but there are reasons to share a thing. There's a generosity to sharing that can help other people. And so, as an ethical nature, we have to ask ourselves why not share that? At a personal level, I shared my prostate cancer online when I got it, which means that I was sharing for the whole world my malfunctioning penis. Not necessarily easy to do. And why the hell would I do that? That seems like the height of insanity. There's nothing more private, nothing would protect more than health, right? And this is, you know, private information about private parts, for that matter. Why would I do that? Well, I got great value out of it. I got support from friends. In fact, indeed, there were friends. Well, I didn't know it had the operation. And the only way that they knew and could share help with me that I was going to have the operation was because I was public about it. One friend, Andrew Tindall, who's an analyst of TV news, sent me an email in which he listed in incredible detail of what was going to occur. So, I just knew. I didn't make clear here. When I got the diagnosis of prostate cancer, my doctor said, if you're going to get cancer, this is the one to get. You know, it's cancer life. So, I don't mean for a second to act as if this is anything heroic at all. You know, they fix it. It's fine. But Andrew came in and told me all the stuff the doctors, you're not going to tell you about love making and things like that. And then he came onto my blog, because I've written about it on the blog, and I said I was doing that for people who followed on Google, for people who were going to search on prostate cancer on Google. I said, OK, if you're doing it, I will too. He listed that and more. Another guy came in and listed a whole bunch of stuff that he wanted to tell us about. He did it under a pseudonym, which I understood. But he came back the next day and said, hell, if you guys are doing it with your name, why shouldn't I? A woman came in and told about her husband. She lost prostate cancer. They met about the time. They fell in love about the time that he had the diagnosis, and he refused to get treated because he wanted to be, in his words, a full husband to her. She said nonsense. No, but he waited too long and she lost him. And you tell that story. That story has motivated people to get tested for prostate cancer. And I think that's really important. Jenny Jardin, the magnificent Boing Boing blogger, decided to tweet her first mammogram. Two friends of hers have been diagnosed with breast cancer. That motivated her to go and do it. She did it in public. She did it far, far braver than I, because I waited until after I had the diagnosis. She went in and tweeted the process, including the diagnosis of cancer. But the outpouring of support she's gotten, and I firmly believe she will inspire more women to get tested, and that Jenny will well save lives because of it. So there's a generosity to sharing. That's why I see it as an ethic. Talking about this, though, I think it's important to try to underline the benefits of publicness. If we're going to talk about the fear of privacy, if we're going to talk about everything goes wrong, we should also talk about what could go right. Now, some might accuse me, some have accused me of being a utopian. I'm not, because I'm not predicting a better world. But I think that we must imagine the edges of possibility about this world and all the changes we have. So yes, we're imagining the worst that can happen. We're trying to guard against the worst that can happen legislatively and in regulation. But we also must imagine the best that can happen so we can protect that. And Berkman is a key actor in doing that. There are many benefits to publicness. They include making and improving relationships. It includes bringing trust. I think we'll come to the point where if you're hiding things, we'll wonder why you're hiding things. Certainly as corporations and governments, not as individuals. Publicness enables collaboration. Once you are open, once you put out a beta in a product, then that enables the collaboration that can then occur around that. Publicness disarms the notion of a stranger. And publicness also, I think, disarms stigma. I believe that gays and lesbians use publicness as their best weapon against the bigots who had forced them into closets. And I don't say for a second that anyone should be forced out of a closet. It should be dragged out. That anything private in your head should be dragged out. But those who had the bravery to stand outside those closets and dare those bigots and say, you got a problem with this, as you say in New Jersey, used publicness, I think, to great end to fight down those stigmas. Publicness, in my view, has many benefits. I think we have to look at those benefits separately for individuals, companies and government because they are very different. In government, I think that we are too often now secret by default and open by force. Whether that force is WikiLeaks or a FOIA or a reporter, it should be the opposite. Government should be transparent by default and secret by necessity. And there are necessary secrets. If I'm mistaken about that. I would never say the same thing about an individual. I don't think we should be public by default or private by default. I think the default is that we always have choice. We preserve that choice to do what we want to do when we want to do it. Recognizing, however, the benefits to ourselves and to society in sharing. I think that we've gotten to this strange view of Facebook that it's a place to put secrets. Let's make it clear that the Internet is a shitty place to put secrets. It is the last place you should ever put a secret. People go to Facebook to share. Now, of course, Facebook made mistakes around privacy. They made mistakes by making you think that you were talking to these people and then finding out that you were actually talking to those people. It's like that nightmare in high school where you imagine you tell the girl you love right next to the microphone for the PA system or something, right? So Facebook has made mistakes in that way. But 800 million people have joined not because they're insane and not because they're drunk, but because they want to share. When I interviewed Zuckerberg, he believes that he is not changing human nature but that he's enabling human nature. And I think he's right. I think that we are social by nature. We want to share, and this is a new tool that enable us to do that. But I do believe that we need the choice at that level to decide. And it's our own choice. After blogging about my prostate cancer, one person who didn't like me anyway, there are a few of those, accused me of over-sharing, which is a very odd word, very odd concept, over-sharing. What it really means is that he was telling me to shut up, right? He was telling me he didn't want to hear what I had to say. But the beauty of our social architecture today is there's many cures for that. He can unfollow me. He can befriend me. He can not click on me. Instead, so he told me to shut up. And the problem, thus, I think, was not that I was over-sharing, but instead that he was over-listening. It's a need. So we need those choices. You can make mistakes. We do need to train young people and learn from young people, as Dana Boyd would say, how to control meaning and how to control what we want to control and use these tools to our own ends. Companies, I think, would be well to share a lot more because it opens up the notion of the ability to collaborate. There's a company called Local Motors. In my last book, what would Google do out in paperback now? Sorry. I speculated about the idea of a collaboratively designed car, and people made fun of me, and they said, Jarvis, that would be the Homer. For those of you who may remember, the Homer was the car of Homer Simpson design that had two bubbles, one for the kids, sealed so you couldn't hear them, with, as I remember, leg irons and shag carpeting and as many cup holders as you could imagine. And it bankrupted its cousin's car company. So, however, I found this company called Local Motors that is designing cars collaboratively and is making cars collaboratively, and the way it can do that is by doing contests for the design. They're making their first car in Arizona right now called the Rally Fighter. It's actually a Boston-based company. And they have to make the design open so that people can design elements of it. So the community came along, and, for example, once someone designed a new taillight for it and the community fell in love and said, oh, we want to have this beautiful. And Jay Rogers, the CEO, who was still in charge of making safe and economical cars, said, okay, I've priced out what it would take to tool up to make that unique part, and it would add $1,000 to the price of every car. And the community responded as one, never mind. And they went in and looked at other parts and they picked a $75 Honda taillight lens that was designed in the car in a way I never would have known. That amazes me because that's a case where the community is making both design and economic decisions collaboratively with the company. Because the company is giving the tools and means and respect to do so. This is VRM brought to life, where there is, in fact, a community of customers. It really can exist. And the company benefits from dealing with them. So I think companies have to become a lot more open. Governments, as I said, need to become more transparent. And I could talk about all of that, but I want to skip to the end right now and talk about the real point of why I wrote this. I fear, as people are fearing about privacy, I fear, again, that we could lose some of the power of these tools of publicness if we do not protect them from both companies and especially governments that would want to team them for us. And when Google pulled out of China, I think they did the right thing and I think they stood up to their principle at last. But can we expect companies to protect the internet? Can we expect Google to protect the internet? I wrote what would Google do in paperback now. And I'm a certified Google fanboy, but even I don't think that Google is the protector of the net, that any company will protect it. Google turned around and it did a deal with Verizon on the net neutrality, making the wired net neutral and the wireless knot, which I think was the creation of the internet and the Schmitternet. So Google did a doubles deal. Even as much as I'm a Google fanboy, no, they can't protect it. Can governments protect the internet? No. Governments fancy themselves the best protectors of our privacy, but they are the greatest threat to our privacy. Governments, they don't understand that if you give the power to one to do something because you think they're good, then all governments can use the same tools and means to do things. I went to the EG8, as I've said earlier, in Paris and I had the temerity to stand up in the crowd and ask Sarkozy to take a Hippocratic oath for the net. First, do no harm. And he dismissed it in a very French way. And said, ah, is it harm to protect your children and your copyright and your privacy? Is it harm? Well, yeah, it could be. Because there's so many unintended consequences to what we're doing these days. As Dana Boyd has shown, usually I say, David and I agree, there's a lot of statutes that says we people in the net have to quote Clay Shurkey once a day. But I think three Dana's equals one Clay. So Dana just, as you may know, released a great study of the effect of COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and the unintended consequences thereof. And she found that in her survey, a majority of, COPPA, as you know, basically says to oversimplify it that companies may not use information unless they have the parental consent, and the parental consent involves leaping through hula hoops set on fire. Parents can't even do it by email. In the new regulations, they would have to print out a sign and scan or fax, if you know what a fax machine is, things back to the company or go to a video conference to prove their parents. Well, so Dana found that in her sample, more than half of the 12-year-olds had Facebook pages. But what was amazing was the 76% or 78% of those pages had been created with the help of parents. The unintended consequence of COPPA is that we teach our children to lie. And as the old New Yorker cartoon says to amend it, no one knows you're a dog on the internet, but on the internet, everyone's 14. And there's other unintended consequences, I believe, that one of the first sites I started on the internet was the yuckiest site on the net about goo and cockroaches and things if you weren't going to do a site. And my company, after COPPA came out, said, don't do that again. Don't start a company for kids, because the liability is too great. The risk is too great. I believe that COPPA has resulted in young people being the worst-served sector of society on the internet. And that's a tragedy. We have to look at what we think are well-meaning, what are indeed our well-meaning regulations to try to protect someone from this internet thing that's a stranger danger and so on, but it's having an effect that is not predicted and that is dangerous. We have to protect the net from well-meaning people, but also from tyrants, obviously. So what do we do if it's not going to be government-protecting it, and I don't want that, and I don't want a governance of the net. If it's not going to be companies, which of course wouldn't work, who these protect the net? We do. We need the people of the net. Now, how do we do that? I thought back to Leon Sullivan's principles, the Sullivan principles that he wrote to battle apartheid, and I make very clear here that I'm not equating apartheid and its horrors with cutting out YouTube videos in the country. But as you know with Sullivan's principles, he wrote that companies that were doing business in South Africa had to match these principles of human rights, and if they didn't, they were required to pull out, and if they didn't do that, then hell would come as demonstrations on campuses and so on and boycotts and such would occur, and it had an impact on apartheid. And indeed, Sullivan's principles are still the key principles of corporate responsibility today. So I think we need a discussion about principles of an open and public society and net. And I emphasize the word discussion because we will never come to an agreement, we will never ratify it as a whole, nor should we, it's impossible on the net. But by having the discussion, I think we start to discern things that start to matter to many of us, and that when a government or when a company violates one of these principles, we have something to point to. Look how angry people are about this. So I propose some principles, they are wrong, I'll say that up front, they're absolutely wrong, but I'll throw mine into the ring, and there are other efforts to come up with a bill of rights here, but I just make it principle. And they are the first that we have a right to connect. That doesn't mean that we necessarily pay attention, but if your connection is cut off, then can we agree that that's a violation of your human rights, this mubarak, or Mr. Sarkozy cutting off a connection for three strikes and you're out on copyright. That is a necessary preamble to our first amendment and a right to speak. And the third right follows out of that, of course, which is a right to assemble and act, see Occupy Wall Street. Next, I think we have to look personally at privacy as an ethic of knowing and publicness as an ethic of sharing. We have to have discussions about and understand what we want to protect in those areas, but let's discuss them before we jump to regulation. I may sound like a libertarian, but I'm not, I'm a Democrat. And next is that what public is a public good. In Germany, when the head of consumer protection, Ilse Agner, urged Germans to get Google to pixelate their homes in Google Street View. 244,000 Germans went along and did that and they exercised, the Germans being the Germans, they made up a word for this. It is the pixelungsrecht, the right to be pixelated. And when Street View came out, I thought, okay, this is funny, right? I laughed too. But you saw it and you saw, suddenly you go across a lovely German landscape and there is suddenly this horrible fog of pixels. And it was a desecration of the digital landscape. And what principles are at work there? Google was being pressured to not take a picture from a public place of a public view. And that leads to a whole bunch of issues about this notion that you can have a presumption of privacy in public. I find that frightening. Right now, as you know, there's discussion of such a right for police officers in regards to audio recording in Illinois. I find that offensive, that investors are too. I want to go out and record them right now. I figured anybody who you'd know, we will come to that. Right, so that notion of a presumption of privacy in public, I think risks reducing the public, what's public and thus the value of it to us the public. Also, just in the case of for pixelungsrecht, who, if you need permission to take a picture of a building from the outside, from the street, who grants permission? The resident, the owner, the builder, the architect maybe is the most likely to do it. Who owns that image? People say in Germany, well, Google's making money off my building. If I come along and I am an artist and I take a beautiful picture of that building and I make money, is that bad? What are the principles at work here? So, what's public and public good, our institution's information, not our individual, but our institution's information should become public by default and private by necessity. The last two are that all bits are created equal, obviously net neutrality. And it took me a while to come to that and understand that if a bit is detoured or stopped, whether that's by Mubarak shutting off the internet or Iran shutting off services or China stopping searches or Comcast forcing me to go to this application instead of that application. If any bit is not free, then no bits can be presumed to be free. And finally, the last one is that the internet must remain open and distributed because that's what makes it the net. The fact that no one can have sovereignty over the net makes the net the net. And that's what confounds, confuses and frightens institutions in power because it is necessarily disruptive, but that's our net. And it's a tool of publicness that we all have to be able to change society. Now, last point. I am not a techno-determinist. I don't believe that technology is necessarily going to turn out for the good. Technology is going to be used for good or bad and that's just the point. We are at a point of choice and we need to be able to maintain those choices and have those choices. And if we don't protect them, I fear that companies and well-meaning and ill-meaning governments will take away that power of that choice that we have to build our future society. And I know of no other institution, and I mean this anywhere, in a better position to start that protection, to be part of that protection, because it's already happening right here at Berkman. Berkman is the leading institution of understanding the power of the net for all of us. And back to Sarkozy at his EG-8. I don't blame him. I was there with Lawrence Lussig, who said to the assembled bakers that the future of the internet is not here because it didn't know how to get invited. And it was right. And Susan Crawford and Yochai Benkler, and we were there, but we were kind of saying we're not really here. We don't really agree, but we wanted to let them know that not everyone agrees. But I don't blame Sarkozy for holding the event and inviting us to his table. What I blame is us, the people of the net, for not having our own event, our EG-8 and inviting Sarkozy to the table because it's our table. The internet is ours, not theirs. But if we let them have it, then if we have ourselves to blame, so that's what I have to say. And I'm eager for a conversation and I will play Oprah and run around like a fool. So surely this crowd is not one where I have to wait for someone to argue with me. Ah, good. Real names. First, Annenin that he has, it's an important place. I'd actually like to do it. I'm Oprah. I'm Phil. I look like Phil, don't I? The hair. It's for the webcast, so that's why. Even so, it's not on. So the question was, what about Google Plus' real names, kerfuffle? First, anonymity has its place online. It necessarily protects the vulnerable in society and especially in tyrannies. It protects whistleblowers and so on. And pseudonyms have their place online. But I also understand the desire to have, to follow the key insight of Facebook, which is that real people and real relationships are good and improve the discourse. And Google wants to have real people. So I get that. I get the motivation, but they screwed it up because they were far too literal in the notion of what a person's identity is. So Dr. Kiki, the podcaster, that's how I know her and that's how I find her and if I can't find her on that pseudonym, I don't know who she is. And so there are reasons to have other structures. I think Google knows it now and what they're struggling with is a principle and a system for how to enable people to be themselves, whatever that definition of themselves is. And when I talked to them about this, when I was out there for the book tour, one of them said, yeah, we want real people and real relationships. That was the point. They kind of know this is not the root, so they don't know how to get there. But I also understand not having the place overrun by fake identities in spam because it's happening now, right? I see all these identities coming in there and they use it for spam and they ruin the community. So the host of the community has some role in trying to improve what the community is. I get all that, but they've got to come up with a better system. I'm glad I don't have to. I want to talk about Google's street view of the Germans. I think there's an underlying principle there that you're not quite getting at. Don't speak up because that's not a good idea. It's another dimension of scale. It's one thing for somebody to come by and take a picture for their own purposes of your house. It's another thing for Google to send a car by every street in the country, take pictures and put it up for the world. And somewhere in there, Google's ethic of privacy kicks in or at least for some people. Talking about it as a desecration of the digital landscape, all metaphors are wrong, but I don't think this one works. There isn't a digital landscape to desecrate. The other way to phrase this is people opting out of street view and we all have choices. Why isn't that about the choice? But if they own the building, do they own the view of it? That's the problem. This is a public view. The principle is that if you tell me that I cannot take a picture from a public place, of a public view, will you also tell journalists that? Will they have a pattern of freedom? Will you also tell citizens that? That's the problem here is we have to deal with principles. You're right about scale. Scale in terms of the size of databases, data coming together, that is different. I stipulate that. But I still think we have to protect the principle here and to me, the principle of this is that what's public is a public good. And if you diminish that, you diminish what the public owns. And I think it's out of an emotional response. So I have a follow-on to this. It's not working. No, it's for the webcast. Oh, okay. All right. It's for the world to hear you. Very important. Anyway, so I have a real-world example of what the unintended consequence of Google Street View is. So we have a vacation rental. And so the website that says you put up a calendar for the days that it's rented and the days that it's not rented. So any bad guy can come and find out what your house looks like and know when it's not going to be occupied. We actually had a rash of thefts where they, you know, do a BB gun into your glass door and get in and steal the TVs or whatever. So it's the unintended consequences. And I'm not saying that we should have government say you can't do it. I think then it's like the challenge is then how do you figure, okay, like how I figured it out was basically you just always have your house occupied even, you know, like three days out you know it's not rented, you have it occupied. So I mean there's things that people can do, but I think it's stuff like that. It gets people very nervous. Let me give you another example here. Riverhead, I think, Long Island had used Google Earth to look for pools and backyards that had not been, did not have permits for them, right? And there was of course an outcry. Oh my God, what are you doing? Well, but let's think about that if they stopped. But children die in pools. If that neighbor doesn't have a fence around the pool I want to know that and I want it to get fixed by the town and if there's a better way to find that out I'm okay with that. But it seems like a big brother stupid from the sky. Part of this again is coming to new norms and new ways to adjust to this as a society. So, you know, you're right it's also just reality. The truth is that anybody can sit in front of a house and find this out, right? Does it go to scale? Yes. But are people in Munich going to come over and rob your house? No. Probably your schmucky neighbors anyway are doing it. Right? So it's not a question of scale in this case it's a question of trying to figure out you know they're just being clever like spammers to figure out new ways. Could you talk a little bit about two terms that you use almost interchangeably which are norms and ethics. So we have privacy in your definition as an ethic of knowing but I know you're also very interested in how norms play out across the web and those two terms norms and ethics are not the same. No they're not. So to what extent is privacy a norm or should it be a norm to what extent is it an ethic? I think privacy as an ethic should inform the norms that we come up with. Right? Publicness as an ethic should inform the norms. The norms are just simply what's normal, what we do. Right? Would that be a fair definition of a norm? Right? So it could be bad it could be unethical it could be wrong it could be something that we want to change that the norm of certain people is to go break into houses you know whatever. So the norm is not necessarily ethical but as we are trying to re-figure how society operates we were talking, David and I had the privilege of having a lunch breakfast with David this morning and we're talking about email and contact and I'm wishing for the return of the busy signal. Right? Because there's no way people always assume that you are always there and you have no way around it. Right? So now people send me a lot of email and my lie my norm to deal with this was oh my email got broken but nobody believes that anymore because I have Google. So then the next lie was oh it got caught in the spam filter. Right? And the next thing people do Fred Wilson the venture capitalist says that unless Google puts you up in priority inbox he won't answer you he won't see it. Which is the next the next line is oh Google didn't think you were important. Right? I know somebody else who is trying to deal with email by saying basically unless he recognizes it personally is important he's got to wait until the second or third time that you email because you got to care enough to get through. So these are new norms we're trying to figure out about what is clearly an overload of contact contact. There's no ethic involved there. Well there is there is kind of how do we treat people are we rude what's considered rude and so on but so I'm not suggesting that they're the same I do use them a little interchangeably. Hey there how are you? So could you talk a little bit about sort of having things shared for you when you talked about the prostate cancer thing it reminded me of one time I was picking my child up from camp and I couldn't find the mother's phone number of this kid he was on a play date for so I but I knew her name I found her online and found this whole memoir she wrote about the prostate issues around her ex-husband's operation which was something much more than actually I had wanted to know even though I know it's over listening now really great phrase you did listen didn't you you read it didn't you it was mesmerizing and I felt really bad for reading it but I don't think he actually wanted that shared but I think also in the more futuristic sense there's the issues around people posting photos of each other and increasingly as face recognition starts to replace uses of names there'll be enormous amounts of information shared about us so I was wondering what you had to say Right again we're trying to adjust to this as a society and figure out what's proper Facebook you know now if David takes a picture of me and posts it and tags me Facebook tells me and gives me the opportunity to say no don't tag me which is better than you'd find on Flickr or blogs or anywhere else right so Facebook's trying to cope with some ways that reach this is any control complete now not at all the problem of having your information I think there's a few lines here the information is tricked it tricks you to get the information out of you that's what's wrong if someone violates what is a presumed confidence right there was a context here where the ex-wife is getting back to the ex-husband I think saying questioning his abilities then you know whether that happens via online or any other means it's the same sin right it could happen with a whisper as well I'll give you a harder example is Tyler Clemente the young student at Rutgers whose picture was allegedly taken by his roommate as he was in embrace of another man and then he committed suicide off the George Washington bridge a terrible horrible thing and I went at the time I was summoned to go to the CBSED news with Katie Couric to say admit this is a teachable moment for the internet I'm fine it is but the truth is that sin could have been committed by someone called a whisper yes it goes more scale and it's faster online but the sin what we should regulate there is the human fail here not necessarily the technology we're jumping into the technology's fault when I still think it's a human fault the ex-wife did something wrong here she used technology to do so but she could have also put out a newsletter with a mimeograph machine slight difference in terms of scale absolutely but the sin the frailty is the same but let's also do something else here though I think part of what we do talking about health earlier and yeah nobody necessarily wants to hear about my penis but I told the world for a reason and I have no regrets for doing so why don't we share all of our health it would be a better world if we did if we all shared all of our health and all of our sickness then we would have more opportunity to get support from people we would have to get data that could lead to correlations that in turn could lead to cures or prevention we could do amazing things if we were all why aren't we well number one is because of health insurance though the truth is they can already get your information anyway because they require you to hand it over number two is jobs we can legislate that we can say that you can't discriminate on the basis of sickness the real reason in the end is stigma and that's the problem with the society is that in this day and age for anyone to be ashamed of being sick is pathetic for anyone to be able to use a sickness against someone else says more about society I think than it says about the sickness itself the element itself and so in this age of publicness and the ability to be public I think we've got to examine ourselves in new and different ways to go beyond that kind of individual case and say and I think a piece of it is that a large part of your message is that public publicness is our best weapon in the fight against stigma part of it, yeah but I think just a quick follow up is that I think a lot of those issues on sharing the example I gave was pertinent but not the best one are very well meaning you know there's we can certainly say vicious oversharing to hurt someone is a bad thing but there's sort of ubiquitous sharing of information with unintended consequence sort of like the photographs of Google street view that pick up someone's party or something so I guess that was the intent of the question I'll let someone else I'm Norwegian and in Norway the government makes public what everybody makes your tax return is public information some newspapers have created Facebook applications which will take all your Facebook friends map out how much money they make whether they are and make that available and there is no way you can opt out of that because this requirement to publish how much you make was made in a day of when you actually had to go down to the city hall to take a look at it and people wouldn't do it for not being seen as snoops now everybody can so you know I'd like you to talk a little bit about this this notion of two things that are very central to the debate in Europe one is information being collected but being used for another the second big issue in Europe which is to be debated now is the so called data storage directive which says that the government will store what email you sent what IP addresses you used all your telephone conversations I mean the metadata not the content for a period varying between six months and two years in case you do something bad and the reason they do it is that the telephone companies no longer store that information to the same extent because more and more clouds are being fixed sort of the notion information being used for something else that it's collected for and this notion of storing things just in case right so Helen Nissenbaum at New York University argues her key principle of definition of privacy is context and I think she's right necessarily enforce that to figure out what the context is know what the context is in a million different cases if the information is being again tricked out of you but in the case of the Norwegian income is not being tricked out of you as you say it just has a new use I've heard from friends in Norway that there's now reconsideration of doing this because of all this but I still have to think that there was a cultural benefit to doing it and to lose there was an openness that seemed to be a good part of the culture and so on I lost the second half I lost the end half data storage right Google I mean Google and Germany are not a match made in heaven right and but Google threatened to pull Gmail out of Germany because they were putting such data storage requirements on Google that it went over Google's limit we this goes to the notion of of security in general right how much do we care about security how much are we willing to go is it security if we get past the security theater question to say is there a legitimate reason for a government to know things to keep us safe and do crime or not I think that we come back to principles and to me email has less protection in this country correctly if I'm wrong attorney than mail right why is that to me the principle here is that our communication that is intended to be private is private and that it should be protected and that if you want to get a wiretap on our phones the next layer of this was you had to go through these steps and of course we know in this country that's being watered down a bit but at some level society still grapples with this notion of security right so the overhead pictures of the pools what's more important creepy notions of the pools or saving kids lives well we've got to have that discussion and figure that out so data retention to me is dangerous from government indeed and government fancies itself it's best protector of us but government isn't the best position to use our information against us so personally I don't like that I don't like that kind of that kind of data retention requirement but I think that we still have things like wiretaps we still have other means to get that people's information and so we're necessarily just moving the line and saying where that line is and the line's never going to be pure what sort of gets my goat and I'm a member of a group pursuing the Norwegian government for to test the constitutionality of that requirement against my goat is every time you introduce something new like that you also say yes this will help in the fight against crime and making people but nobody ever sets targets right so you can tell whoever the police whoever it is say you know we expect a 20% down you know if you haven't achieved that within five years well we'll stop doing this because it simply isn't working yeah so that might be one way out of it so hi I'm intrigued by your premise of public by default and private by necessity for institutions which I think is a great one and I'm really watching with interest the open government movement and the release of big data and how that's enabled you know third party developers to create great apps like catch that bus I'm wondering where do you see the low-hanging fruit for universities and being public by default and private by necessity ah good point let me first give another plug to Larry Lesson here because he argues that if we only use government information to get the bastards then government will treat transparency as an enemy and so we need to use government information to be collaborative and to build society and these are examples where it encourages government to do that and Beth Novik ran the peer-to-patent system to try to improve our fucked up patent structure by being more open so I think that that's where we have to move with government transparency universities I believe will be in the next wave of disruption from the net right and because the cost is ridiculous the structure just doesn't work it's not efficient look at this example around the world how many instructors in a given year write a lecture about capillary action and how many of them are crap right and so the fact that you have open course where I started with MIT and Stanford and now other universities allows you to find the best lectures in the world far more efficient you can then encourage the best or the best is there still a role for local education yes, more like tutoring so it's more like an Oxford model of lecture and tutor but it happens at a distance what does that do to the size of the institution and the way the institution operates carried to his logical extension it utterly disrupts it because why should I be stuck with the instructors of one institution I should be able to take instruction from any institution right why should I be stuck why should the instructor be stuck with the students who were accepted to that college they should be able to learn from anywhere why should we waste all this effort and this money when we supposedly want to educate more people I'm reading Anya Kavanaugh's book DIYU right now finally I'm way late on that but it's wonderful trying to go through this question of why do we want to educate people in society and what do we need to get and also I believe we get to a point where the disruption to every industry in society is going to need a huge requirement of reeducation of people for new skills if we're lucky we're not set up to do that we're set up for this certification project of turning out people exactly the same so I think universities will be changed not because of some ethic that I talk about that's actually rather irrelevant to them I think it's more going to be changed because of the economics of education I was pretty interested about your idea about we the people it came a couple of time in your talk I thought it was interesting because you were really involved in all this and it's a view from the insiders the people from the net see themselves as the people from the net like we so I thought it was interesting I thought it was interesting also from a social scientist perspective how would you look at it if you are a social scientist or something also like we the people it's what's the scale of analysis for us that would be the interaction the interaction between the people and I know that that's the thing like people in Bergmann here are thinking a lot maybe we're still on the social interaction but what it is with the internet like stigma so ring the bell of Govman for me Irving Govman was saying actually you were saying that control and power for information is always using the term mostly management of information in public spaces I think the book is very old but I think there's a lot up there especially you didn't really address the idea of fame who's famous and who's not on the web I think it was very interesting for your own example about the cancer if I say all I mean and I'm not really famous at all and so I think that it's interesting because Govman is actually using a lot of idea about famous how people that are famous or research by police put them on the same scale management personal information I think that's basically just to weave the people with big brother the big brother idea I think it comes a lot with what you said earlier is that we weave the people it's not the state who's looking what your house look like on Google street daily basis and stuff and your personal information that you're managing I'm always amazed about Facebook and all the stuff because it's real different from public spaces in the term of Govman where you go there everyone see what's going on and you I've know you cannot manage some information and that's where the stigma is on Facebook you choose what you put there new kind of but at the same time with Govman you can choose to stay at home and you can choose not go on the web I guess I think you're going around here in various ways is the notion of what a public is and I think that we we got a skewed a corrupted view of a public in the sense that it was a mass that it was everyone so fame means that everyone knows you being public means you're talking yet but what the tools of publicness that Ava lost to do is to create publics create limited publics around things so on Facebook a better example perhaps is Google Plus so Google Plus you can create a circle and share with that circle now once again the problem here is I think people are assuming that's a way to be private it's not because if I tell it to David and he's a horrible gossip it'll still get around the world I didn't protect it in any way the internet again being a shitty place with secrets the reason I use a circle is because I don't want to bore everyone outside the circle it's about relevance so it allows me to create a circle of journal geeks and I have my boring journalism things just to them or my German friends and if it's in German all my Americans hate that so I'm trying to create relevance Facebook enabled you to create your private public kind of your closed group I think what Facebook made the mistake of doing was mixing the idea of A public that when you went into Facebook you were creating A public your public and then when Facebook changed the defaults so suddenly you were talking to the public they're not the same sense of public right talking to A public to your public is still public it's public to that extent right so whether you're using a public in the sense of revealing things or a public in the sense of organizing core interest right that's not in the media sense when we come to government at some point I believe that besides universities being disrupted the notion of a nation gets disrupted at some point we're at a point now where you know the the Indignados the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street probably have more in common more sense of loyalty among themselves than they do to their own nations you can have a nation of vegetarians I'm sure there's many members here in Cambridge you know you can have a nation of various interests and do we still you know it was after Gutenberg that the notion of the nations and other things that the notion of the nation changed and came in right the notion of what the public is do we have one public well we have to at certain times we vote but otherwise I'm not part of the same public as everybody here we're part of different publics and we have the ability now to each of us organize those publics I want to come back to the ethics versus norms issue you're not not entirely because ethics sounds as if they should be trans-cultural and norms by their nature are community based they're much smaller things and norms we think of as being it doesn't matter lots of different norms are equally acceptable whereas ethics there's sort of one ethics so one of the things about norms though is that they define the publics that you're talking about fairly modestly here in Cambridge even when it's warm out that's something that we do another culture has different sense of modesty one group is more or less free talking about their sex lives or their how much money they make those norms define help to define what a public is so do you lose are you arguing for a single set of privacy where the best thing would be for the norm to be naked I mean literally naked and you cover up your necessity or are you what's driving what's sort of the universal and trans norm features of publicness that we should adopt so that you can argue with somebody no your norms are wrong your norms about privacy in Germany they're mistaken they have bad effects what's the substrate that we are is it really just just the wrong word is it that publicness is better than privacy unless there are exceptional circumstances and that's where we that's our starting position though I argue for default publicness when it comes to government institutions I do not argue it for the individual neither do I argue for default privacy the head of data protection in Germany wants to have default to privacy well I don't like that very much either because it says that you know take it to its full extent we all become the unabomber right for the public so you've got right the individual has choice because we're good liberal but for the entity that has the norms the norms are you know community-based one way or another they are definitive public is there is there the same degree of choice of norms for communities and publics as there is for individuals in your view well don't we have societal norms now and don't we have American societal norms that cut across America for example I use with Germany as they go into the saunas and they're naked and we would consider that to be horrible here right so you have societal norms that cut most of society and that are accepted and if you're an exception to that you know you're an exception to it no I'm not saying it's right or wrong I'm not trying to say it's ethical or unethical no I'm not trying to say that at all the norm that I want is that we respect choice at an individual level right but there are buts to that right but what's public what's already public is public right right right I'm answering a question because I'm no no no no part of the answer is I don't know right part of the answer is that we're trying to grapple with this now the other question is do you end up with universal norms because the internet is universal when I talked about privacy with a bunch of Germany editors at the site one of them said okay yeah we're a little bit passionate about privacy here in Germany but he said my daughters aren't that way citizens of the net that are Germany is there a single society and norm of the internet I don't think so because I don't I don't that's a mask on mad right and I don't think we end up with that and that's a tyranny of a mask on mad I want choice I want to protect choice but my argument is I also want to protect the choice of publicness because what we're doing to the tools is we're making the default of the tools more and more and we do do not track for example in advertising we're affecting media and the economics of media in a way that I think could hurt media because we're defaulting to privacy but we also need to consider other means this will continue online out or out yeah it actually comes right off the coat of what you just said in terms of internet tracking and advertisement I know that you said the government is because they're in the biggest position to abuse that power but do you see any solution to that that data aggregation that could really threaten our personal privacy and our right to keeping our information private and our right to keep our information anonymous in terms of tracking aggregation do you see that any other solution other than government regulation great question when people say that they're buying time for an answer I think that whether it comes from self-regulation there is a need for transparency about what information people get from you what they do with it and your rights to be able to get to it right I think for example in media and advertising we have done a horrible horrible job of telling people what we do why we're doing it what they could get out of it and so they brought on to themselves the regulation that's occurring the regulation still I think has unintended consequences just today the privacy commissioner in Canada required that sites give you an easy opt-out to tracking well that would mean the New York Times could not operate the way it operates because the New York Times requires you to have cookies to be in the site so that has an impact on their business so I think that it starts with the need for transparency if they're not transparent do we need regulation we might is that it oh that's it thank you thank you