Search 2.0: Web 2.0, Personal Information Flows, and the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine Michael Zimmer, PhD Fellow, Information Society Project Yale Law School AoIR Annual Conference Vancouver, Canada October 19, 2007
Search 2.0: Web 2.0, Personal Information Flows, and the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine 1. Perfect Search Engine: 10 100 2. Faustian Bargain 3. Web 2.0 ≈ Search 2.0 4. Externalities 2.0 5. Re-negotiation
Dissertation • The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine Values, Technical Design, and the Flow of Personal Information in Spheres of Mobility – conceptual investigation of the values at play with the quest for the perfect search engine ≈ privacy, autonomy, liberty – technical investigation of the design features of the perfect search engine itself – contribute to value-conscious design • Dissertation 2.0 3
Perfect Search Engine • “process and understand all the information in the world” – perfect reach • “understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want” – perfect recall “Like the mind of God” 4
Perfect Reach “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” 5
Perfect Reach • God-like omnipotence • Powerful crawlers; content acquisition • Often, personal data previously obscure is now searchable – Random mentions & utterances – Usenet posts – Court documents – Old, incorrect news articles 6
Perfect Recall • Provide results that suit the context and intent of the search query: “Paris Hilton” • User satisfaction & loyalty • Increased revenues 7
Perfect Recall • God-like omniscience • Requires collection of information about the searcher – Server logs – Cookies – User accounts • Database of intentions Source of insight into what someone is thinking, not just what that person is doing 8
Perfect Recall • Over two dozen products & services • Interconnected via cookies & Google Accounts • Contacts, news, subscriptions, blogs, books, stocks, appointments, e-mail, friends, computer files, discussion groups, URLs… 9
Faustian Bargain • Perfect search engine promises breadth, depth, efficiency, and relevancy… • …but lose “security via obscurity” • …and involves the widespread capture of personal and intellectual information Complicated further with Web 2.0 10
Personal Information Flows ~ Web 2.0 11
Personal Information Flows ~ Web 2.0 12
Perfect Reach 2.0 13
Perfect Recall 2.0 • Recall of search engines captures Web 2.0 personal information flows 14
Search 2.0 Sophistication Digg Flickr YouTube Twitter 15
Search 2.0 Sophistication 16
Search 2.0 Sophistication Plazes Dopplr Upcoming 17
Search 2.0 Sophistication 18
Search 2.0 Sophistication GPS: 40.75704, - 73.98597 Date: 10-Sept-2007 Time: 20:25 Camera: Nokia N95 19
Search 2.0 Sophistication 20
Search 2.0 • The omnipotence and omniscience of the perfect search engine • Combined with the open flows of personal information embraced by Web 2.0 • Power, scope, and sophistication continue to increase 21
Externalities 2.0 • Disciplinary power • Panoptic & social sorting • Invisible & alluring 22
Disciplinary Power • Law enforcement – Deleted/Draft Gmail messages as evidence – Search history “neck snap break” – Police crawling Facebook & MySpace • Employers • Storage of records – China – Brazil 23
Panoptic & Social Sorting • Oscar Gandy // David Lyon – Identified, assessed & classified through surveillance of day-to-day transactions – Coordinate & control access to goods & services – Classify & categorize into social strata • Targeted Ads – Financial motivations – Profile users potential economic value – Behavioral targeting 24
Invisible & Alluring • Invisibility – Collection often automatic, hidden – Compelled to provide info as condition of use – Too easy to take “at interface value” • Alluring – “I find myself getting sucked down the Google wormhole” – “It’s all part of Google’s benign dictatorship of your life” – “I don’t know if I want all my personal information saved on this massive server in Mountain View, but it is so much of an improvement on how life was before, I can’t help it” 25
Faustian Bargain 2.0 • Perfect Reach extended to include much more of the world’s information – …but contextual integrity of personal information flows is lost • Perfect Recall allows further personalization of services – …but few aspects of our online lives are protected from surveillance and oversight • “Resistance is futile” 26
Solutions? • Need to reconceptualize privacy • Need to reconceptualize surveillance • Re-negotiate the bargain • Value-conscious design 27
Reconceptualize Privacy • Cannot hide behind the rhetoric of no expectation of privacy or already public information – Not the same personal provided in other information-seeking scenarios • Significant shift in informational norms – Violation of the contextual integrity of the privacy of personal information 28
Reconceptualize Surveillance • Participatory panopticon – Knowingly making personal information flows available for surveillance • Lateral surveillance – Peer-to-peer surveillance via Web 2.0 • Netaveillance – “Neta” ネタ : tidbits of life shared as social currency – Openly and purposefully providing a continual stream of the details of one’s daily life – Coupled with ability to view and capture similar streams from others 29
Re-negotiate the Bargain • Law & external regulation – Yale “Regulating Search?” - difficulties – EU - keep pushing! • Internal policy & self-regulation – Intel & Microsoft – No one wants to be first - until now? – Usually imperfect • Design – Lessig: “how a system is designed will affect the freedoms and control the system enables” – Design is a critical juncture to re-negotiate 30
Value-Conscious Design • Engage with technical designers to protect values • Variables – Default privacy settings – Automatic activations – Mingling server logs – User access & control – Opt-in (or at least, opt-out) • Challenges of pragmatic engagement remain 31
Conclusions • Faustian Bargain 2.0 – The God-like omnipotence and omniscience of Search 2.0 promises to provide incredible access to incredible amounts of information – But provokes issues of privacy, surveillance, power, and control • Re-negotiation – Reconceptualize privacy and surveillance in a Search 2.0 world – Value-conscious design – Avoid another Faustian bargain with “the mind of God” 32
Search 2.0: Web 2.0, Personal Information Flows, and the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine Michael Zimmer, PhD Fellow, Information Society Project Yale Law School michael.zimmer@yale.edu http://michaelzimmer.org
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