Technocreep (7 page)

Acquisti expects that you will soon be able to point a smartphones at someone and learn quite a bit about them in real time. Speaking at the TEDGlobal 2013 conference, he said: “Pushed to an extreme, you can imagine a future with strangers looking at you through Google Glass or their contact lens, and with seven or eight data points about you they could infer anything else about you.”
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Professor Acquisti is a scientist, but this field is also a playground for pranksters and people trying to make a point about online privacy. A guerrilla filmmaker named Jake Vale set out to baffle total strangers by showing how much he knew about them. First, he says, he searched for “Twitter, Instagram and other social media posts close to my current location.”
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He then walked up to people in those posts with comments like “Is your name Jessica?” or, with devilish accuracy in one case, “I just wanted to wish you Happy Birthday.” He often knew where they worked and the names of their pets. His subjects found it extremely creepy.

In an even more grandiose demonstration of online privacy risks, the Belgian Financial Sector Federation set up a tent in a square in Brussels and invited people to be part of a TV program with a “gifted clairvoyant named Dave.” After some theatrics like hugging them and jumping around, he proceeded to tell them their most intimate details, from hidden tattoos and secret sexual preferences to their bank account numbers and precise balances.
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At a strategic moment, a curtain drops to reveal hard working hackers dressed in black, bringing up the subject's social media pages on large computer screens and feeding the information to Dave. Instead of a psychic TV show, participants became part of a public service announcement about the risks of sharing too much information online. The tagline is: “Your entire life is online. And it might be used against you.”

Posting photos of friends and family has become a favorite recreational activity for many people. Good natured sites like
awkwardfamilyphotos.com
provide hours of amusement and are probably just fine if the subjects in the photos have consented to be there. But sometimes, personal photos are simply appropriated for commercial and even nefarious purposes.

Tennessee parents Pamela and Bernard Holland were shocked to see an image of their son, Adam, who has Down syndrome, on a website. To their horror, and without their knowledge or consent, a radio station posted a digitally altered photograph of their son holding a sign that said “Retarded News.” While the station apologized, the parents' $18 million lawsuit demonstrates that expropriating and publishing a digital photograph can have serious consequences.
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A similar creepy shock awaited Scranton, PA mother Kaylee Doran who found that photos of her baby that she posted on Instagram were being “re-posted with insulting comments about her son” calling him “ugly” and “disabled.”
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Which brings us to the disturbing online world of “baby role playing.” There is a thriving underground online culture of “fantasy adoptions” and caring for virtual babies, and even children and ­teenagers. There are often clear sexual overtones, with comments such as “all our babies are breast fed” and unsettling instructions about how to change your teenager's diaper.

A mother from Hamilton, Ontario was shocked to find a photo of her baby daughter listed as “up for adoption” on one such website. The outraged mother responded with “Uh, I'm sorry … but this is definitely NOT ‘Ally' and she is definitely NOT for freaking sale! This is MY child, and I did NOT and would NEVER give permission for this post!”
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The photos used on the fantasy adoption role playing sites do not generally meet the legal definition of child pornography, but they are highly unsettling. The scope of this and other online sexual fetish subcultures is difficult to estimate. However, one site alone, FetLife.com, boasts about 2.8 million members with almost 15 million ­pictures posted. In addition to having, as they put it, “a fetish about security,” the site assures prospective members that “Your kinky friends are already on here.”

FetLife is an example of the “Deep Web”—a vast section of the Internet that is not indexed by common search engines like Google. According to some estimates, 99% of online content is out of reach of the search engine spiders and the casual user.
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This includes huge databases that are accessed by entering specific queries, proprietary content behind paywalls, and data on corporate and university Intranets.

There is also a whole array of deliberately hidden information, much of it illegal, which is where some of the most disturbing Internet images are hidden. In a report on the Deep Web, CNN noted that many of these sites use Tor (The Onion Router) to further obfuscate what they are doing. According to the report, secret websites that end in .onion offer “stolen credit cards, illegal pornography, pirated media and more. You can even hire assassins.”
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While the most famous online black market, The Silk Road, was shut down by law enforcement on October 2, 2013, new versions are popping up.
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The legality of using private photos without permission is still being worked out in the courts, and the law depends on where you are located. Europe is very concerned about privacy issues, and even in California, there is a growing awareness that your photos should not simply be there for the taking.

A San Francisco judge ordered Facebook to pay a total of nine million dollars to 600,000 Facebook users whose photos were used without their consent next to “Sponsored Stories” advertisements. Facebook promptly changed its data use policy so it could continue the practice without legal risk, prompting
Information Week
editor-at-large Thomas Claburn to observe that “Facebook Says User Data Is Price of Admission.”
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In a similar fashion, Google's Street View has revealed people engaging in activities, such as leaving the adult video store with a stack of tapes, that they would rather keep private. Yet for every photo that is grabbed without permission, thousands are posted by willing users who are eager to share their lives with their Facebook “friends.” Those of us who are not celebrities or politicians may feel that our photos are not interesting enough to be valuable. However, personal photos can be monetized in some rather creepy ways.

For instance, if you are arrested in many U.S. states, the details of your alleged offense, accompanied by your mugshot, will be placed online by local law enforcement. Non-Americans often find this startling and a bit unsettling, but the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that such posting is legal. Why would a police agency go to the trouble to posting mugshots on its website? One justification is to inform the public about alleged wrongdoers in the community. A more likely explanation is that sheriff is an elected office in much of the U.S. The best way to show you are doing your crime-fighting job is to have a steady stream of seedy-looking “just arrested” mugshots gracing your website, right next to your own smiling face in uniform.

Mugshot photos are generally posted online when a person is arrested, long before there is any determination of guilt. While frequently deleted after thirty days, sometimes the data sticks around. For example, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in Florida has arrests going back to November 2005. Some people appear to have their photos posted there for relatively trivial offenses, such as “trespassing in a park” which is probably legalese for “being homeless.”

The images are not censored and the full legal names and aliases of offenders are provided. I even found one sheriff's office showing a child's full name and photo

We do not know if little Bobby (age twelve years, two months) was guilty, but we do know that he was publicly humiliated on the Internet, which for many young people is the most potent form of punishment. It is true that the record of his 2010 arrest is probably long gone from the Sheriff's website. But the very fact that it is captured and included here illustrates that “on the Internet things never, ever completely go away.”
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Even foreign nationals can be swept up in the mugshot dragnet. A Fort McMurray, Alberta, legislator was arrested in Minnesota and charged with one count of “hiring, offering to hire or agreeing to hire a prostitute in a public place.” The Minnesota law enforcement agency dutifully posted the full and embarrassing arrest details, complete with his full name and home address back in Canada.

As if this posting of mugshots by law enforcement were not invasive enough: a thriving, for-profit “mugshot industry” has sprung up. These websites copy images from law enforcement sources, giving them much wider exposure, often for a longer period of time. This voyeuristic phenomenon started with celebrities such as Bill Gates and Lindsay Lohan, but now just about anybody's image could grace a site like
mugshots.com
.

This website states that its mission is “to inform the public of arrests and hold government accountable,” though those noble-sounding principles appear to be exercised with some flexibility. On their home page the company offers to “unpublish” your photo for a fee. Bizarrely, they also offer to “permanently publish” a particular photo if you really dislike somebody or are proud of your own crime. It is not clear what happens if they get conflicting publish and unpublish requests and payments for the same photo.

Sensing a class action opportunity, a U.S. group, classactionagainstmugshotwebsites.com, is now raising funds to get mugshot posting sites banned. Several states, including Oregon, have already passed laws regulating these sites. That state's version requires website operators to take down an image for free if you are not convicted of the crime or the charge is downgraded to a violation. The site owners have thirty days to comply, which does not help you much if you have a job interview the following week. And, of course, your scowling or grinning mugshot may have already been grabbed and gone viral, especially if your name is Justin Bieber.

The mugshot industry is an excellent example of how opportunistic business ventures can spring up
ex nihilo
when new technologies enable them. The mugshots were always around in dusty filing cabinets, but the advent of easy photo sharing and search engines such as Google have turned viewing mugshots from a pastime for the very weird to a mainstream activity. While legal measures like Oregon's can be helpful, there will always be rogue sites like those hosted offshore, out of reach of law enforcement.

This is why experts believe that the best way to fight creepy uses of technology like this is to strike back with technology. That is exactly what is happening. Google has already announced that it will be demoting mugshot search results so that one youthful mistake does not pop up above decades of good works and community service. Paypal and the credit card companies are also looking at limiting the ability of mugshot sites to take money, which would probably have more impact than any law since this industry is driven by credit card payments.

When Wikileaks was faced with a similar financial blockade, it turned to the anonymous currency Bitcoin. Mugshot operators might wind up telling people who want their pictures removed to pay in Bitcoins, or wire them money through Western Union.

As Kashmir Hill points out in
Forbes
, “Private industry may wind up doing what lawmakers are constitutionally forbidden to do: killing an ugly information practice by both burying it in search results and cutting off its funding sources.”
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Even if the stream of mugshots dries up, malefactors will still have plenty of gold to mine from postings on Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook.

Not everyone who sends you a friend request on Facebook is necessarily your friend. In fact, Facebook's dark side goes back to its very creation. The digital world is a wonderful preserver of information, both wanted and unwanted. Courtesy of a blog entry that was produced as evidence in a court case, we have some verbatim insight into Mark Zuckerberg's thinking on the very night he came up with what would become Facebook:

now I just need an idea …

9:48pm. I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics.

I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. It's not such a great idea and probably not even funny, but Billy comes up with the idea of comparing two people from the facebook, and only sometimes putting a farm animal in there. Good call Mr. Olson! I think he's onto something.

11:09pm. Yea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can't really ever be sure with farm animals … ), but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very Turing feel, since people's ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person's hotness like they do on
hotornot.com
. The other thing we're going to need is a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, Harvard doesn't keep a public centralized facebook so I'm going to have to get all the images from the individual houses that people are in. And that means no ­freshman pictures … drats
.
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What emerged from Mark Zuckerberg's rather crude ramblings that night was:

• a privacy reprimand by Harvard officials
  
• a website called Facemash that became Facebook
  
• a company with a book value over fifteen billion dollars
  
• a communications system that has 1.3 billion active users just about everywhere on the planet, some of whom have to defy their repressive national governments to sneak in a posting or two