Facebook and the expectation of privacy

Graffiti on a bench

Another privacy spat has erupted in relation to Facebook, the social networking site. It all began when the site began actively advertising everything you did you all of your friends: every time a photo was updated or a relationship status changed, everyone could see it by default, rather than having to go looking. After that, it emerged that Facebook was selling information to third parties. Now, it seems that the applications people can install are getting access to more of their information than is required for them to operate, allowing the writers of such applications to collect and sell information such as the stated hometown and sexual orientation of anyone using them.

Normally, I am in favour of mechanisms to protect privacy and sympathetic to the fact that technology makes that harder to achieve. Facebook, I think, is different. As with a personal site, everything being posted is being intentionally put into the public domain. Those who think they have privacy on Facebook are being deluded and those who act as though information posted there is private are being foolish. The company should be more open about both facts, but I think they are within their rights to sell the information they are collecting.

The best advice for Facebook users is to keep the information posted trivial, and maintain the awareness that whatever finds its way online is likely to remain in someone’s records forever.

[Update: 12 February 2008] Canada’s Privacy Comissioner has a blog. It might be interesting reading for people concerned with such matters.

Bans, taxes, or nothing

Bridge over the Rideau Canal, with art

A former chairman of Shell has argued that the European Union should ban cars that get fewer than 35 miles per gallon. The basic idea is that there is no reason for cars to be less efficient than that and the new ones that do more poorly are intolerable luxury items. Forcing all cars to meet the standard is presented as a way of making the rich “do their share” when it comes to climate change.

Similar arguments exist about lightbulbs. Should governments ban incandescent bulbs, impose extra taxes on them, or do nothing? The last option won’t help with climate change mitigation. The middle option risks dividing the world between an upper class nicely lit in flattering yellow hues and an underclass rendered corpselike by flickering green compact fluorescent bulbs. Banning the bulbs outright could prevent their use in the few situations in which they are genuinely highly valuable, as evidenced by the willingness of their owners to cut emissions in other areas in order to not have to give them up.

The ideal solution is sustainable, tradeable carbon allowances. Everyone on earth gets about 750kg a year, and are free to trade it between them. Yes, the poor will sell to the rich, but they will do so voluntarily because the money is worth more to them than their emissions are. This certainly isn’t perfect (people may sell under duress or still lack sufficient means for a decent life), but it’s better than the ‘grab what you can’ approach that dominates presently. Of course, this allowance approach is hopelessly unrealistic. The emissions of people in the rich world are so far above what’s sustainable, they would never sign on to a system that required them to cut back as far as is appropriate.

Another big question has to do with induced technological change. Automakers will howl to the moon if you demand that they make 35mpg cars across the board. Sputtering, they will swear that it is impossible and even trying will bankrupt them. Actually forced to do so, however, it is probable they would squeak over the line. The question is whether such a policy would have benefits that outweigh the associated costs – including the perceived loss of liberty on the part of car makers and car owners.

How then do policymakers reconcile the possible with the fair, the risks associated with climate change and the reality of other social and equitable issues? The idea of forcing manufacturers of luxury cars to turn out models that get 50mpg does have appeal, but it is probably a mistake to conflate the fighting of climate change with the desire to reduce the profligacy of the wealthy. Excessive emissions are the behaviour properly targeted by climate policies: not pompous displays of extravagance. Mandated standards do have a role to play in situations where elasticity of demand is weak and there are possibilities for structural change. Those, in combination with carbon pricing, do have the capacity to help us move to a low-carbon economy. The devil of that transition, as ever, is in the details.

Mastercard and RFID

I got a replacement Mastercard in the mail today and was slightly surprised to learn that it has an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) tag in it. The idea is that it will let merchants bill you card by having you put it near a reader, rather than swipe it though a magnetic strip reader. The existence of the RFID tag does raise a couple of issues, however.

First, it has been shown that such tags can be activated using inexpensive directional transmitters from relatively long ranges. The way they work is by using the energy in the incoming radio signal to power the circuitry that produces a response. I don’t know if the tag in my card simply has a unique identifier, or whether it actually performs a challenge-response authentication. Either way, it is likely that the presence of the card, and the fact that it is a Mastercard, can be determined at a distance of several tens of metres at least, using information and equipment fairly easily acquired.

Secondly, I don’t know about the liability associated with such cards. I know that if I lose my Mastercard and report it promptly, I am only liable or $50 at the most. I am not sure about a situation where somebody clones the RFID tag and uses it to make purchases.

Overall, I see little value in contact-free payment systems. I would rather have a traditional card without new features and vulnerabilities. Unfotunately, Mastercard says that RFID-free cards are no longer available.

More on RFID:

Fishing should never be subsidized

Milan Ilnyckyj in shadow

The economic case for government subsidies can be made in one of two ways. The first is the argument based on externalities: the idea being that one person’s behaviour creates benefits for others, but that those others do not compensate the actor. An example might be a landowner who refrains from cutting down trees uphill from rivers. All river users benefit from the flood control and lack of silt. In this case, it might make sense for the government to pay the landowner to save the trees – in providing the subsidy, the government encourages a more socially optimal behaviour. This justification doesn’t work for fisheries. Fisheries are a common property resource and, as such, tend towards over-exploitation. Having fishers catch more does not provide anyone else with benefits; indeed, it harms the ability of everyone else to use marine resources. Subsidizing fishing pushes fishers to continue catching fish even beyond the point where it would normally be unprofitable, leading to further depletion.

The second argument for subsidies is the ‘infant industries’ argument. The idea here is that it can take a while for a new business to reach the level of existing businesses in the field. A brand new textile industry in an African state may not initially be able to produce goods at a cost and level of quality competitive with existing industries in Asia. In such cases, you can justify a temporary program of subsidy, intended to get the industry running. Once again, this doesn’t apply to fisheries. If anything, there is too much fishing capacity in the states that subsidize heavily (North America, Europe, and Japan). Excess fishing capacity is being exported into developing states, depleting the resources there.

The one form of subsidy that can be justified in relation to the fishing industry is subsidized training to get out of it. We can recognize that fishers are having an increasingly difficult time making a living, while also recognizing that subsidizing their fuel or equipment will just batter fish stocks further. The solution is to help people to transition into other industries where they can sustain themselves without depleting pools of resources common to everyone. It is always hard for politicians to say that an industry should be smaller, or should not exist at all, but, in the case of fisheries, that is probably the only position that makes economic and ecological sense.

Carbon tariffs

It is only a matter of time before the first state imposes an import tariff on goods from countries that are not taking action on climate change. On one level, that is fair enough. If domestic manufacturers are paying for their CO2 emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme or carbon tax, they have some legitimate objections against imports from foreign competitors who are not doing so. That said, the actual experience with the first such tariffs is likely to be a huge legal and political mess.

Membership in the World Trade Organization – something common to most big emitters – carries a number of obligations of varying levels of obscurity and enforcement. You can bet that countries that have such tariffs applied to them will protest such treatment aggressively. It would also be fair to bet that the winner of the contest will be determined on the basis of economic power, rather than the rightness or wrongness of arguments. It is even possible that the resulting compromise will be worse from a greenhouse gas mitigation standpoint than if the argument had never begun.

That said, it is at least logically possible for the global trading system to help in the development of an effective global regime of rules, norms, and decision-making procedures around the issue of climate change. It obviously won’t have an effect on countries that don’t do a lot of trading, but they are probably not the most essential ones to get on board anyhow. What will matter most is which of the two biggest economic blocs will triumph: the United States, still in denial about what solving climate change will require, or Europe, where at least some leading states are starting to get serious.

Patchwork rules and industry strategy

In many states, a disjoint can be seen between action being taken on climate change at the state or provincial level and inaction at the federal level. Some people argue that such approaches are fundamentally inefficient because they increase uncertainty and the cost of compliance. While this is true in a static sense, it ignores an important element of game theory. Generally, the moment at which it becomes possible to effectively regulate an environmental problem is the moment when industry decides that some form of regulation is inevitable. It then switches its attention from lobbying for total inaction to lobbying for the kind of regulatory regime that suits business best: something as large-scale as possible, with long enough time horizons to guide investment decisions.

This is certainly the pattern that was observed with ozone depletion. Industry went from saying: “There’s no problem” to saying: “There’ a bit of a problem, but it would bankrupt us to fix” to realizing that regulation was inevitable, lobbying for a kind that suited them, and developing superior alternatives to CFCs within a year.

As such, it is entirely possible that grumbling about a “patchwork of regional approaches” signals the approach of an inflection point, beyond which effective regulation and large-scale industry and consumer adaptation occurs.

Democracy as constraint

One common view of the nature of democracy is a system wherein a populace seeks to advance the common interest, either through direct participation in decision-making that affects everyone or through the election of representatives to do so. This view posits the existence of a universal interest that is beyond the sum of individual interests; the aim of government is to help to pull the reality of life closer to the kind of life that would be established through the realization of that universal good.

One major problem with this view is the possibility that, with a few exceptions, no such universal interest exists. We have a universal interest in not being exterminated, but it’s not clear that there is any such thing in the realm of social policy. An alternative view of the nature of democracy highlights its procedural characteristics, two of which I consider to be the most important: the division of power and oversight.

Democracy, viewed in this way, is a system of rules designed to limit the collection and arbitrary usage of power by individuals and groups. It recognizes the fundamental difficulty of this struggle, derived from the way in which most people given the opportunity to rule will try to use that power to perpetuate their influence. It likewise recognizes that authority in the absence of oversight leads inevitably to abuse, whether by corrupt politicians, unaccountable police, or an unconstrained army. The most important institutions within a democracy, then, are things like the rule of law, courts, regulatory bodies, a free press, and elections. The last of these serve less to select a group of representatives who have the right ideas about the universal good and more to rotate people often enough that they cannot escape the shackles that democracy is meant to impose upon them. When rulers do wriggle out of those bonds, the results are corruption, incompetence, and tyranny.

A procedural view of democracy does not assume the existence of a universal good – it just acknowledges that people have life projects of their own and, unconstrained, most are happy to trample all over the plans of others. The basic idea derives from the expression: “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.” Unfortunately, plenty of people are happy to swing regardless. Only by constraining individuals in some ways – especially those in positions of power – can we have any hope of living our lives unmolested.

What, then, of social programs and all the efforts government makes to cajole and convince the populace of things? It is certainly possible that such cajoling can serve worthwhile ends, such as making people aware of previously unknown dangers. It can also serve far less universal ends: the promotion of the interests of one group through a devious appeal to a universal good. Arguably, much of politics is jostling between groups with narrow interests, seeking both to gain access to power and represent their personal interests as universal. This is exactly the kind of conduct a procedural democracy is meant to check: marrying empowerment within the sphere of individual agency with constraint in realms of inappropriate interference.

I am not willing to wholly disregard the possibility that democracies can develop projects based on the universal good, and perhaps even carry them out more effectively than other systems of government. What I am arguing is that such endeavours are a potentially valuable benefit of democracy, rather than its foundational justification. The aim is less to achieve the ‘best’ – a mode of thinking perhaps best suited to fascist states – but to moderate and avoid the worst. As such, when we abandon the principles of oversight and divided power, whether out of ambition or fear, we sacrifice a critical aspect of what it means to live in a democratic society.

An idea for reducing electoral fraud

Sasha Ilnyckyj, Mica Prazak, Alena Prazak, Oleh Ilnyckyj, and Milan Ilnyckyj

When it comes to elections, there are a number of different kinds of attacks against the voting process that should concern us. Excluding things like bribing and threatening voters, we need to worry about votes not getting counted, votes getting changed, and votes being inappropriately added. In the first case, an unpopular government may remove opposition supporting ballots from ballot boxes in marginal constituencies. In the second, they might alter or replace ballots, converting opposition votes to government ones. In the third, they might simply add more ballots that support the government.

A relatively simple measure could protect against the first two possible attacks. When a person votes, they could be given a random string of characters. One copy would get printed on their ballot, another would be theirs to keep. Then, once the ballots had been tabulated, a list could be posted on the internet. Sorted by electoral district, it would list the various options people could have chosen, the total number of people who chose each, and a list of the random strings that each person brought home. The importance of the random string is that it preserves the integrity of the secret ballot. Because each string is generated using a random number generator, no string can be tied to an individual. Only the copy given to the voter allows them to check that their vote was properly counted.

Under this system, if I voted for Candidate A and got the string “GHYDMLKNDLHFL,” I could check the list under Candidate A on the website and ensure that my vote was counted for the right person. If my vote hadn’t been counted, my string wouldn’t be anywhere on the list. If it had been miscounted, it would appear in the wrong place. People who found themselves in that situation could complain to the electoral authority, the media, and foreign observers.

The system remains vulnerable to an attacker adding new ballots in support of their candidate, but only to a certain degree. Provided there are some independent observers watching the polling station, the approximate number of people who voted can be pretty easily determined. If the number of votes listed on the website is well in excess of that number, it can be concluded that fraud has occurred.

None of this is any good against a government truly committed to rigging an election; they will always be able to brush off complaints from foreigners and the media, and they will rig the electoral authority. At the same time, it would make rigging more difficult and increase public confidence in the electoral system in any state that implements it. Being able to see your vote listed in the appropriate place may also make elections feel more concrete and personal.

The system does create some new risks. Attackers might force voters to share their random string. If they did so, they could determine who an individual voted for: a worrisome prospect in situations where people could be threatened to vote in one way or another. Likewise, having confirmation that a vote went one way or the other could make vote-selling a bigger problem. With a standard ballot, there is no way to know whether a paid voter actually voted the way they were paid to vote. These additional risks should be borne in mind in the context of any particular election or state. In some cases, they could make the dangers of this approach outweigh its benefits. In most places, however, I suspect it would be beneficial and relatively inexpensive.

Some previous posts on electoral security:

Conditional support for our troops

Ottawa commuters in the snow

Walking through the Rideau Centre yesterday, I came upon a cart selling t-shirts with various slogans on them. Beside the silly Che Guevara stuff was one shirt that caught my attention. In white letters on a red background it said “Support our Troops.” Under that were both a maple leaf and the flag of the United Nations.

It struck me as admirably post-nationalistic. We recognize the sacrifices made by members of the armed forces, but also that their conduct needs to be bounded by international law. While the sentiment is admirable, it sits uncomfortably with the reality of how ignorant most Canadians seem to be about what we are doing in Afghanistan. People really think we are mostly building bridges and distributing big bags of rice. The reality of the all-out war in which we are committed is very different.

That is not necessarily to say that we shouldn’t be fighting the Taliban along with our NATO allies; it is simply to highlight that Canadian governments manipulate the perception of Canada as a ‘peacekeeping nation’ to keep people from looking too closely at what our armed forces really do. The degree to which many people seem happy to continue to believe in the peacekeeping myth just because it makes them feel good is also problematic.

Defending bike lanes over the web

MyBikeLane is an interesting concept in distributed social law enforcement. The idea is that people take photos of cars parked in bike lanes and then upload those to the site along with details on when and where the incident occurred. Since they can be sorted by license plate, the worst offenders can be easily identified. New York has by far the most active community, followed by Toronto.

Since I carry a digital camera at all times anyhow, I will keep my eyes peeled for possible contributions once I resume biking. For now, my small hybrid tires and the recollection of my nasty Halloween fall are keeping my bike in the basement.

I learned about the site from this interesting blog.