So I went to the ACLU's panel on privacy in the digital age last night and I have a few comments I wasn't able to express out loud.  First off, it was a good panel of smart, articulate guys, who clearly knew what they were talking about.  I personally know three of the panelists (including the moderator) and I know them all to be very sharp when it comes to thinking and talking about the social and legal implications of the net.  The audience, for its part, had some good, on-topic questions, and as I expected given the venue, it was a politically left-leaning crowd that was deeply skeptical of authority and fearful of the powers those authority figures can wield with these new, powerful data-gathering and mining tools.  Unfortunately, I think the overall tone of the panel wound up being more pessimistic and fear-inducing than it ought to have been, and I gently lay some of the blame for that at the feet of the panelists, who occasionally let some unfounded fears expressed by the audience go unanswered -- or at least inadequately answered.

For example, one audience member asked a question about intellectual property rights as they pertain to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.  He talked about the end user license agreements that everyone has to accept when they sign up for those services and he wanted to know if it was true that MySpace "owns" your uploaded content.  The response from the panelists amounted to "yeah, you have to be careful and read those agreements or you could wind up signing away your rights."  The only comforting answer was that the social networking sites don't write thick legalese into the EULAs in order to bilk you, but rather they do it to cover their butts, legally.  But the panelists didn't articulate the really important distinction that the audience member was missing: even the most egregious EULAs don't limit your rights to your own content, they merely grant non-exclusive rights to the given site to use your material without compensation.  It's a subtle distinction, but for this audience member, it was key, and nobody on the panel went there.  It's a common misunderstanding that I hear expressed a lot at VCAM.  Independent content producers are worried that when they upload their short film or tv show or music video to YouTube, the EULA they agree to means they no longer have the right to do anything else with their content without YouTube's permission.  That's not the case.  YouTube's EULA is granting YouTube the right to repurpose your uploaded content in any way they want, forever (scary enough, I suppose), but they can't prevent you from doing anything you want with it -- it's still yours.

On that same topic, one of the panelists told a story about a comedian friend of his that was booted off of Facebook for a misunderstood joke.  Okay, that sucks, but he too made it sound like Facebook had somehow "stolen" the comedian's IP.  He said something to the effect of "and now my friend can't get his content back," as if he had mailed off original manuscripts and had no other copies of the work and Facebook wasn't returning them.  But the very act of uploading to a site like Facebook entails making a copy of your work.  Facebook removed the comedian's profile, so the Facebook page was deleted, but the comedian still owned any original content that he uploaded -- it just wasn't on Facebook anymore.  I assume that the panelist, who seemed quite hip to net issues, understood this distinction, but the way he described it to the audience wasn't helpful, it was merely confirming their worst fears about stolen IP and The Man squashing free speech online.

A question was asked about kids putting photos and videos of themselves in compromising positions onto social networking sites and how that might affect their ability to capitalize on future opportunities like jobs and higher education. After all, Google searches are becoming a common part of those vetting processes, and what employer wants to hire "jägerbomb_666" for that accounts receivable position?  What the panelists failed to address in their answers is the disparity between those of us who didn't grow up with social networking sites and the kids who have had them all their lives.  Access to evidence of embarrassing moments in the lives of young people will become more and more commonplace as these social tools proliferate.  Marijuana "experimentation" is no longer a campaign-killer for presidential candidates because the culture around pot smoking has changed in the last 30 years.  Likewise, it will become less of a deal breaker for job applicants to have some embarrassing details about their youthful indiscretions searchable online.  Our culture will adapt to the ubiquity of the technology.  This isn't to say we shouldn't be teaching our kids responsible habits online -- we should -- be we shouldn't assume that the world they will inhabit will be just like the one we inhabit in this respect.

Another audience member asked about the "dangers of community organizing online," and her concern seemed to be that the Powers That Be (specifically the government) might be using the net to gather intelligence on activists in order to use it against them.  The panelists said, sure, there are good reasons to believe that the government is doing this -- they've done it before and the tools are certainly available to them.  To their credit, the panel also pointed out that the sheer volume of that sort of thing happening online offers some protection -- the government only having time for so much nefarious shenanigans -- but that's pretty cold comfort.  The woman who asked the question was obviously concerned about some sort of COINTELPRO situation, but none of the panelists pointed out to her that the net is a much bigger friend to activists than it is a danger.  Maybe it seemed like too much of a no-brainer for the panelists to even mention that the net offers incredible organizing powers and is itself a great weapon against oppression, but the way they left it with the audience member, I wouldn't be surprised if she decided to never send an email again.

Finally at the very end of the panel, Tom Streeter made a great point, and while it wasn't exactly optimistic in its tone, it was at least not complete doom and gloom.  He said that with information being so readily accessible, your best defense might be total openness. Publish your whole life for all to see and you'll never worry about people learning your secrets.  This sort of goes along with my own thinking on this.  Like it or not, we're headed for a world without much in the way of truly private information -- cameras everywhere, RFID chips, quantum computing that slashes through encryption like butter, total information awareness -- so our best bet is to make the lack of privacy as egalitarian as possible. What's dangerous is Big Brother having sole access to our data, but if everyone has access to all the data, the culture can adapt (just like it will adapt so it's not a big deal for job applicants to have indiscreet photos on MySpace) so that secrecy itself is less relevant than it is now.  In a world where nobody has privacy, privacy won't be as important.  I wish the panel had spent more time on that instead of it being the very last thing that was said, but I'm glad Tom said it anyway.

In general, I think the event could have done with an injection of positivity.  What are the good things about sharing our information?  How can data mining help us understand our culture and reach out to other people who share our values and tastes?  How can these technologies actually help to protect us from governmental abuse?  What will society be like when there is no expectation of digital privacy at all?  Allen Gilbert finished up by suggesting that the panel reconvene annually to check in on the changing culture around privacy issues.  Maybe next year's panel will focus more on getting inspired by technology.