[Air-L] offlist - Re: Privacy Buzz

Charles Ess charles.ess at gmail.com
Sat Feb 13 20:57:37 PST 2010 

Or, to put it in the terms I draw from Niel Postman's contrast between
Orwellian and Huxleyan visions of dystopia - we are in love with the
technologies of our enslavement (in part, because they threaten to undo our
capacity to think - in the ways critical for liberal democracy).  Bit of a
problem (pun intended).
- charles


On 2/14/10 2:38 AM, "Richard Forno" <rforno at infowarrior.org> wrote:

> 
> I agree .... again, while I don't use Gmail or Facebook, etc......I am more
> concerned with the personal privacy "violation" to/for friends than I am
> anything having to to with a state government.  Why?  Because i presume that
> anything I do/say in cyberspace, or has the possibility to transit through or
> exist on a server/service that I don't have positive control over, potentially
> can be intercepted or compromised for any number of legitimate or nefarious
> purposes.  That reality is not something one should fear only in totalitarian
> societiies, by the way.
> 
> That said, to me, the more sinister "motive" is what Christian talks about:
> economic exploitation -- but I certainly acknowledge and appreciate those with
> political concerns here as well.    It's also one of the reasons I've been
> slow to embrace things like Facebook (I don't) and only recently began
> dabbling with Twitter and LinkedIn.   Put bluntly, I just don't like the idea
> of a for-profit entity knowing my social network, which can be used for
> marketing or other purposes that I may not appreciate or agree with.    Am I
> paranoid?  Perhaps.  But I am under no obligation to use these services, so if
> I chose 'not to play' it's no big deal for me .... even though many of my
> friends would love it if I joined them on Facebook.   ;)
> 
> -rf
> 
> 
> On Feb 13, 2010, at 7:59 PM, Christian Fuchs wrote:
> 
>> I think Buzz is an interesting new phenomenon.
>> 
>> I find interesting about the NY Times article and the reactions of some users
>> to Buzz that they primarily stress the danger that China, Iran, etc could use
>> Buzz for engaging in the (political) surveillance of political oppositionists
>> and that they label such endeavaours totalitarian, while at the same time
>> they do not provide a critique of the economic surveillance machine
>> constituted by Google's expanding services, its collection, storage,
>> analysis, and commodification of personal data, and its market dominance.
>> 
>> Surveillance and Big brother are not only somewhere out there in China or
>> Iran, they are also present in the heart of capitalism itself - in the form
>> of economic surveillance, and Google is one of its primary executors.
>> 
>> Buzz privacy policy for example says:
>> "When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the
>> product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users
>> who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on
>> Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services"
>> "If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view "nearby" posts,
>> your location will be collected by Google."
>> 
>> The task is to collect as many data about users and to then to sell this data
>> as commodity to advertising clients. Google fears the competition by Facebook
>> and Twitter in the social networking market, and so has set up its own
>> service (although I doubt that I will be so successful because until now it
>> only supports rather trivial functions).
>> 
>> To only focus on the political surveillance capabilities that Buzz provides
>> for some non-Western societies and to ignore the immanence of economic
>> surveillance, is a form od Digital Orientalism that is ideologically blind
>> for the forms of stratification that are at the heart of Western economies.
>> 
>> Cheers, Christian
>> 
>> 
>>> On Feb 13, 2010, at 11:33 AM, Aziz Douai wrote:
>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>> 
>>>> I guess I am one of the lurkers on the listserv, but here goes my first
>>>> contribution: Buzz. If you have used the new google social network service,
>>>> how do you feel about the seeming violation of privacy? A few days ago, I
>>>> decline my Gmail's insistence on adding trying the new feature/service.
>>>> Now,
>>>> the New York Times has a great article (Critics Say Google Invades Privacy
>>>> with New Service:
>>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html) on how
>>>> users' rights to privacy appear to have been violated. The article raises
>>>> the interesting question of how totalitarian regimes may use the service to
>>>> suppress political dissent. Google's rhetoric and carefully constructed
>>>> image following its row with China is put to test.
>>>> 
>>>> Anyway, I am curious as to how AIR members have found the feature with
>>>> regard to both privacy and security.
>>>> 
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> 
>>>> Aziz
>>>> 
>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> -----------------------------
>>>> Aziz Douai, Ph.D.
>>>> Assistant Professor, Communication Program
>>>> Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies
>>>> University of Ontario Institute of Technology
>>>> 2000 Simcoe Street North
>>>> Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4
>>>> E-mail: aziz.douai at uoit.ca/ azizdouai at gmail.com
>>>> 
>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> ----------------------------------
>>>> 
>>>> "A popular government without popular information, or the means of
>>>> acquiring
>>>> it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."  James
>>>> Madison, 1822
>>>> 
>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> ------------------------------------
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>>> _______________________________________________
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>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> - - -
>> Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs
>> Associate Professor
>> Unified Theory of Information Research Group
>> ICT&S Center
>> University of Salzburg
>> Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
>> 5020 Salzburg
>> Austria
>> christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
>> Phone +43 662 8044 4823
>> Personal Website: http://fuchs.uti.at
>> Research Group: http;//www.uti.at
>> Editor of
>> tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a
>> Global Sustainable Information Society
>> http://www.triple-c.at
>> Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the
>> Information Age. New York: Routledge.
>> http://fuchs.uti.at/?page_id=40
>> _______________________________________________
>> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
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>> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
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>> 
>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>> http://www.aoir.org/
>> 
> 
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