 Good morning everyone. Hello and welcome to hyperpublic symposium on designing privacy and public space in the connected world. My name is Urs Gasser. I'm the executive director of the Birken Center and serve today as the co-host of this event together with my colleagues Judith Donoth and Jeff Wong. So a warm welcome. It's fantastic to see so many friends and colleagues, old friends and new friends, also from the other side of the Atlantic. So this is very exciting for me. Let me introduce some of the core themes and issues of this symposium by reporting about an April 2011 court decision of the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland, which is my home country. And I will stick closely to my notes because I try to be very concise and brief this morning. So forgive me for that. In the April ruling, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court required Google Switzerland to take extra measures in the context of its street view service to be compliant with Swiss data protection law. The court required that Google not only uses automatic blurring technology to obscure people's faces and number plates of vehicles, but manually blurs other identifying features, such as skin color and clothing, from people photographed in front of so-called sensitive establishments, such as, and listen to the order of the words, women shelters, retirement homes, prisons, schools, courts and hospitals. Also Google is not allowed to provide views into gardens, backyards and the like, that a normal pedestrian pedestrian wouldn't see when walking by. This ruling here only used as a placeholder, so apologies to our colleagues from Google in the room. Nicely illustrates, I think, some of the core themes and topics of this conference and the topics that we seek to address today. First, the ruling illustrates the complexity of the phenomenon under investigation, the delineation between of the private and the public in the digitally networked environment. The street view case not only serves as a proxy for the ways in which digital technology shift the line, the boundaries between private and public, but I think it also demonstrates the need for a much more nuanced granular and context-sensitive definition of what privacy means, including privacy in the public space, such as streets or libraries, to refer to David Weinberger's excellent blog post. Second, the Swiss street view ruling against which Google, by the way, has appealed reminds us of the power of and responsibility for design choices. The power of design choices, in this case, concerns the ways in which Google is built from the design of the underlying code to the ways in which pictures are taken. A number of power effects, if you will, can be isolated. Design choices can have enabling effects. In the case of street view Switzerland, over a thousand companies, small and large, have used street view to build on top of it innovative services and provide products. Design choices may have leveling effects. Street view allows, for instance, disabled users to explore cities in a way that would only be available to people without handicap. But of course, design choices also have a constraining effect. They determine what we can do with technology, how we use it, and for what purpose. From a cyber law perspective, this constraints, perspective has gained much attention. Professor Lessig has popularized it with the equation code is law. But as with law, I would argue, it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on this particular aspect designed as a constraint on behavior. I think it's one aspect, but nothing more. Finally, design choices can have unintended consequences and spill over effects. Again, street view is a good example, where in fact, privacy of people pictured in and included in Google's product can be compromised. One of the interesting questions is, what are the corrective mechanisms available to balance this power of design choices, both ex ante, for instance, before a new application is introduced and launched and exposed? Questions of accountability of designers seem largely unresolved. Third observation from this ruling, the street view ruling raises the question, what role social norms play vis-à-vis technological innovations? How do we think about the design? How do we evaluate the design of products and services that are bolstered by social norms? For instance, in this Swiss case, we have seen a significant percentage of Swiss inhabitants actually using street view and seeming to support the underlying choices that have been made when the product, the service, was designed. And then, of course, perhaps even more importantly, how well equipped are we to respond to instances where certain design choices clash with social norms? Our public apologies are on Facebook, as we've seen earlier this week, the appropriate way to respond, or is it about lawsuits, such as the case of Google Bus, or can we envision more productive, more forward-looking, more innovative, discursive responses? The fourth observation I take from the Swiss case, the street view ruling is symptomatic for the types of questions that the legal system has to cope with when operating in a quick-silver tech environment. Technological advancements, commercial practices, and shift in user behavior put pressure on traditional legal concepts and definitions. For instance, what does personal information mean? Street view also nicely illustrates the typical response pattern taken by the law. It seeks to subsume the new phenomenon under old rules, and only over time might react with innovation within the legal system itself, which is often the enactment of new laws or the introduction of new doctrines. The Grockster case here in the US is a great example of such a legal innovation. Of course, much more could be said about the law. I'd just like to add one other aspect. The ruling is also interesting in the sense that it brings up the question of the legal systems, reasonable expectation, vis-à-vis certain design choices and limitations. In this particular case, the law expects perfection. The court didn't consider it to be sufficient that Google's blurring technology catches 99% of the faces of individuals pictured. It requested a 100% hit rate. I could distill several more themes and topics from this particular illustration from this use case that I think is relevant for this conference, including economic considerations that play a key role, of course, across the board. And I hope we'll have a chance to explore some of these economic issues as well today. But let me conclude by sharing the following thought. In an environment where the lines between the private and public are blurring, where technology is developing so rapidly, where user behavior is in constant flux, where complex feedback loops exist among technology, law, economics and user behavior, and where norms become increasingly contextual, fragmented and ad hoc. I think it is our shared responsibility and challenge, both as designers and law and policymakers, to think about the creation of advanced spaces for negotiation and conversations about privacy and its boundaries, the exploration of new types of interfaces among spheres and layers, and also the creation of hybrid private public spaces. My hope is that today's conference is a starting point in that direction of kind of moving beyond the traditional discussions and tensions we've seen over the past few years when it comes to this question of private and public. With that, I'd like to turn over to Judith Donath with thanks to her and Jeff Wong, as well as Amar Asher and Caroline Nolan and the Birken team for actually organizing this conference. Thank you, Judith. Rapid fire in the early morning, right? Yes. Okay, good morning. So again, I'd like to thank all of you for being here and Urs for that great introduction. So in some ways, he said many of the things I was going to say here, I will talk in more general terms. I think the focus on street view is excellent. One of the issues around privacy and public space is that we're certainly not lacking for examples. You can open the newspaper on any day and find today between street view and face recognition in Facebook and congressmen sending pictures of themselves to girls on Twitter. The notion of how do we understand the boundaries of what is public and what is private and how technology is changing it certainly is an ongoing concern for pretty much everyone. So I think one of the foundations that we're thinking about here is that it's certainly clear that technology is having a profound effect on our understanding of what is public and what is private space. Both, I think some of the main pieces are there's an enormous amount of data that is being collected about everyone, whether you opt into using new technologies or whether you simply walk down the street. So all of your behavior, which was once very ephemeral, is quickly turning into a permanent record that can spread throughout the world and be seen in different contexts and this sort of movement of context, both in time and space, is really at the heart of what we understand as a loss of privacy. At the same time, the boundaries of how we can see what is public are also shifting as more and more of our activities happen in online spaces where we really have very little idea of space and even in physical spaces, you know that there's a huge construction around our notion of public and private. We all like to go to restaurants, people enjoy being out in public. There's some reason that we like to have meals even with a close friend, a lover or something, but still in a public space. But we have very interesting norms about we don't join other people at other tables no matter how interesting their conversation is. And if it's really interesting, we may listen to it, but we work very hard at not making eye contact so they're not aware that we're listening. If you get, I grew up on Long Island where you spent a lot of time in traffic jams and realized that people forget that their cars are transparent and that the fact that they're getting dressed or picking their nose in this space that feels very private is actually a public space. So it's not solely the online world that makes us forget about these boundaries, but it certainly makes that kind of loss of understanding what boundaries are much more common. So I think one of the themes we want to keep in mind here is this understanding from the design world of how do we understand what is this new public, where being in public might involve sitting alone in your room and typing something which will then be permanently spread throughout the world. But I've come from a variety of different disciplines. For many years I was at the Media Lab which is a technology and design center and one of the biggest criticisms at the Media Lab is that people do fascinating work and privacy is this forgotten afterthought. I then have moved to the Berkman Center which in the tradition of law schools privacy is often seen as a goal in itself as opposed to a means to an end. So part of the idea of putting together this sort of multidisciplinary conference and bringing together people from design and computer science and law etc. is that these different fields and architecture have very different notions about what is desirable, whether privacy is a goal in itself, something that we want to have in order to have freedom to behave in certain ways. Is it something that we really grudgingly accept because publicness is what is interesting to us or is what makes the world interesting. So part of it is bringing together these different perspectives. But I also want to introduce a bit of a historical perspective is that we also have to remember that we're looking at privacy and public space from a perspective of a time in human history that we've had an almost unprecedented amounts of privacy. Not only in our dwellings the notion of a private home but also in the mobility particularly of American society but you know throughout the world if you're mobile you get up and move from the place you were born you lose track of people who knew you in the past. It can be very isolating but it's also a very very private life. So there's a norm of privacy that we're coming from that also might not be, it's not necessarily a given of what was normal before technology but it's a time of very extreme privacy. There's the notion of the fall of public man, the alienated stranger in their urban setting and also among other forces there's things such as the move to a market economy of things that we once relied on very very tight networks of other people working very closely together. It is now possible to live your life completely isolated from any kind of real relationship with other people you can go into work, have a job, move frequently and live a very isolated life and certainly be clothed and fed and everything in ways that perhaps were never possible before. So we should also look at the changes in privacy and public space from different cultural and historical perspectives. Another key element I want us to keep in mind today is the question of who is watching us because that's also one of the big differences between different types of public spaces is that a lot of our issues around our behavior in public is that who is watching has a lot to do with whether being in public is a good or a harm for ourselves. A lot of the issues around online data is if this material is being collected by marketers who are hoping to turn you into a consumption machine, a less than benign government that is hoping to repress your behavior is very very different than if it's part of what makes for a cooperative society. It's very very hard to have cooperation amongst a set of completely anonymous individuals who have a very very high level of privacy but when you have that extreme of privacy you don't have society. And so one of the sort of big underlying questions that I think we haven't seen addressed that much in the discussions around privacy in public space is given the changes that these technologies are bringing that we really are living in this era where data is collected whether it's online or it's your face being recognized in the street, your movements being tracked, your health data being tracked. There is a tremendous amount of surveillance. There is an enormous change in privacy and our understandings of its boundaries but besides trying to move back and recapture what had been perhaps a imperfect and not necessarily real nostalgic space of privacy, the other way of looking at it is what kind of society do we want to form in this world? What are the ways that we can transform a lot of these changes into a better society? And so that's sort of the biggest question underlying this conference. And so as you know I think Amar has emphasized a lot it's a conference also where the speakers are introducing very interesting and different perspectives on it but I think almost everyone, probably everyone in this audience also has a very strong interesting perspective and a great depth of knowledge. So I hope that these issues and the other ones that come out during the different sessions we really want to emphasize how much we're looking for this to be not a series of lectures but a discussion among all of us. Thank you. And now I'd like to introduce Jeff Wang who is one of the co-creators of this conference. Okay, hello and good morning. I would just like to take a few minutes to say a few things about the logistics of this conference. It was a conference that was largely oversubscribed so there's a long waiting list and we had to limit the number of participants to 120 in order to encourage some interactivity, some intimacy, some participation. So I would hope that you would take the privilege of being in this conference to participate. So here are a few more practical information. The Twitter hashtag is hash and hyper public. So you should tweet as much as possible also because there's an installation just outside the door that has been created by Jeff Richknaps and his team at the MetaLab called Oracle that would selectively choose the most private tweets that is received at this tag and then make it public, project it on the wall, but then also create semi-permanent memorabilia that looks like this printed on a vintage thermal printer that you can take home. Then we are tipping the proceedings and we'll make them public or we'll make them available online. There will also be a Berkman intern teams that will go around during the breaks and conduct informal interviews. And again, I hope that you are willing to take a few minutes to answer the questions and be part of this conference. What the Berkman intern teams, I think Claire, Hannah and Shreya asked me to do is to briefly introduce the installation outside the door which is called hyper mural, I think. So it's a mural where everyone is supposed to write whatever comes into their minds either publicly on the wall or if it's more a secret or some gossip that he or she doesn't want to share with everyone on those little sheets of paper and put them inside the box. I don't know what they will do with it but you should pass by and then ask them. And finally, food for thoughts. So after the conference, there is this traditional food for thoughts dinner that is self-organized and there's a wiki site for the conference that you should consult and then sign up for or propose any of those food for thoughts dinners. So with that, I will give back to Judith to introduce the first panel. Thank you.