Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Public

A. Michael Froomkin

University of Miami School of Law

 

Recognition Markets and Visual Privacy (see here for pdf)

Ryan Shaw

School of Information ~ UC Berkeley

 

On Hawara's Codes

Tung-Hui Hu

UC Berkeley

 

Pamela Samuelson, Commentator

School of Information & School of Law ~ UC Berkeley

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__Michael Froomkin __

Privacy Enhancement techonology - PET

Complex surveillance regime (exists), not necessarily directed. Public private, a mix of all kinds of sight. Facial recognitions (not yet state of the art). If you keep that stuff around, you can always go back (to investigate). That aspect of data retention is worrying

Tracking cellphones, tracking GPS. Maybe worried about RFID, but not ranked as highly

 

Cameras

• Facial recognition
• Data retention

Tracking

• Cell
• Vehicle
• Rifd
• 'Exotic' means

 

Can The Law help? "Don’t hold your breath."

Even in 4th amendment law, there is a limit of “plain view” doctrine

• Limits sense-enhanced searches
• Relies on expectations – a one-way anti-privacy ratchet? (cameras change expectations)

 

Tort of intrusion on seclusion (very limited)

• Paparazzi
• Upskirt pix in some states

 

Public/private distinction somewhat illusory

Even if you could regulat public it can buy or subpoena the data (data – getting things from cellphones)

Everything private works its ways into the public. (true for privacy in the home? Visual privacy?)

 

Legal Solutions Unlikely

Is the law going to treat a camera like a pencil? (no law against sketching in public) agent of newsgathering.

Lack of incentives for statutory or regulatory

Pub an dpriv cameras proliferate

Many think surveillance = safety

 

SO What kind of selfhelp?

Concession – defending SELVES not SOCIETY

 

Avoidance behaviors not so practical

Turn off phone (until you need to hear form the babysitter)

Stay away form ubiquitous cameras, etc.

 

Fight back methods

External wireless camera and RFID signasl can be blocked

FCC regulations?

Could a law be against it..

 

Disable the cameras – damage to property

Lasers

Hi-intensity infra-red LED to damage the camera

 

Block the cameras view: your own little cloud of smoke

 

Masks as PETs?

Advantages

• Block camera IDs
• Cheap
• Colorful
• Expressive

Limitations

• Don’t block signals
• Uncomfortable

 

Anti-Mask Laws exist. Based in political issues. Kkk loses, “masked Iranians” win (?) (what about the black bloc? I saw NY anti mask laws deployed against anti-globalization protestors)

Court cases

• Narrowing constructions (intent to intimidate)
• Inconsistent results

 

BUT masks have social baggage

Negative images, Bank robbers, KKK

 

What about Veils?

Gendered

Have political messages

• Sometime radical islam
• Protest against sexualized gaze (isn't this is an aspect of privacy?)

 

NO-monitor Zones

Why would government do it?

Fear of crime magnet

Like the “free speech zones” a political concession, and insult our vision of society

The best place for undercover cops

Privacy hats have same problem “don’t look at me” invites attention of people who don’t respect this

 

Online Interaction for privacy?

Can stay in own house

But optimized for surveillance, technologically. Capturable.

No public law constraints.

Who does it? Private citizens, techies, some classes, musicians. Mopre of our life is being conducted

 

DRM might be the answer here

Can we stop users from collecting content?

“trusted computing” means we don’t have trust, but it is software that prevents data gathering.

If you had a space built designed to take advantage of that feature in the hardware.

 

__Ryan Shaw__

Recognition Markets

Colorado Univeristy students Hemp Fest. Mass smoking of Marijuana

 

Cops posted signs saying they would be videotaping. Students ignored the signs. Perhaps a sense of safety in numbers. But the cops posted all the pictures separated into individuals, and offered 50 dollar reward to any student (only student?) who could identify them.

 

A new sociotechnical system constructed for the purpose of recognition.

 

Recognition_ linking of images ti the people places things or concept which they depict

 

Recognition Markets

Systems that use human-in-the-loop, to solve image recognition problems. Often economic systems in which ‘recognition serveices’ are exchanged for a reward

 

Higher level overview

A list of categories LSCOM Lexicon Definitions and Annotations Cersion

 

Signal-based recognitions systems- signal processing

1. collect and analyzed as collections of low level signal features
2. use features to build a statistical model of the thing to recognized
3. new image present to it
4. model provides an answer as to whether the new image depicts that thing

 

Intelligence analysts annotate archives of images - Shaw gives a selection from the "H" section of the annotations.

(general merriment at the implied assumptions that these all have easily defined visual characteristics)

 

these kinds of annotations haven’t worked very well

There is a “socio-technical turn" in recognition system design, away from technical recognition system design

Like Yochai Benkler's discussion of Peer production requirements

These systems use the power of human recognition

 

• The ESP Game (Carnegie mellon) now licensed by google and used in their image search. Something about how many people simultaneously come up with the way to describe an image (?). Can even tag regions within photos

 

Warner: Semiotic Labor

Move has been to replace semantic labor with Syntactic labor

But now (peer recog) syntactic labor replaced with semantic

 

Systems now connected to social networking systems. Facebook. Presented to only those who know the people in the photos (this is like the hempfest example)

 

New Areas: Cameras on the border. Minutement could monitor the border from their couches

 

Or replacing or augmenting airport security this way.

 

Phones have GSM and cameras. Location sensing plus image is extremely rich

 

Ethical design and implementation

• Emphasize Contextually appropriate use of metadata
• Tracking provenance to combat recognition spam and gaming
• Understand limits of tech protections
  • Distributed groups of volunteers may overwhelm
• Define the responsibilities of image aggregators
• Cal senate bill 1386 (for other data aggregators), similar laws for image aggregators?
• Educating participants in recognition markets

 

Many in tech world (Rick Rushad) pretend their designs are separate from society.

 

 

__Tung-Hui Hu__

On Hawara’s Codes (change of topic). On Hawara is a conceptual artists.

 

TH is interested in the entersection between surveillance and digital communication.

Background is re: what code means to us, all from 40 years ago.

 

Recently he was stopped at an airport because his ID was expired, then they wrote NO ID on his ticket and let him through. led to thoughts about identity and proof and relationship to images and other 'tags'

 

Omnipresent surveillance – being challenged to produce photo ID

What part of identity did the card secure? How did that expire?

Identity theft. Do you need a photo ID to vote? ID in society. Am I composed of the sum of my codes (SSN, digital certificates)

What happens to traditional signals of identity like his photograph?

 

Western Art till 1960s – expressing inner subjectivity

The argument was that photographs and signatures are true because they come from our bodies

Cybernetics complicates relationship between image and identity

 

On Hawara creates a new model of identity based on code

He leaves no trace of his existence around. No interviews and no photographs. In the 1960s He send hundreds to telegrams ‘I am Still Alive’ and ‘I am not going to commit suicide, don’t worry’

Self-surveillance, related to Jennicam and Steve Mann, he chronicled everything he saw

In I Went, chronicled his wandering

In I Met published names of everyone he met

I read and I Got UP..

In his DATE paintings he simply takes 8 hours to paint an image of the day’s date.

In his LOCATION painting (his latitude and longitude)

Uses objective codes as the basis of subjectivity

 

Replaces the authority of the eye with the communication.

Self is broken into discrete units

Like digital communication, disassembling communication into units, sending it somewhere and re-assembling it

 

Calendar of 100 years with his life marked as a dot on the days (identifying when he painted a painting by the color): referring to a collective pattern, finding ourselves after the process of communication has digitized us

 

Capturing identity in a snapshot vs. 1000000, he typed that many years in books. Just the dates.

A pinhole camera could take a picture for 20 years (except what about night)?

Can information have temporality or can we introduce it into information?

What does surveillance look like over time?

 

The work only appears incommensurable from the position of the immediate present.

 

Code (1980) make sense or nonsense. Trying to make sense of numbers themselves can be hard. Like reading bytes of a jpeg file. But maybe it represents a different model of visuality. How do we understand it as information?

 

Made an English English dictionary. It’s a blank mathematical grid. About redundancy. All language is repetition, or because it is repeatable it can be digitized and hidden. (?)

The structure of modernism (says a critic). “a transfer in which nothing changes place”

It maps the surface

Date paintings are stored in a binder that chronicle news events of the day and paint samples

 

As all vision is interpretation, color is one possible interpretation of sensory data, a way of seeing code.

 

Has a Braille work. Accompanied by French poems as a nonreader. But what did the Braille say? It is not incomprehensible to them is that exoticism?

 

From human to code, “digitalizing” converting an image into numbers. then How to render codes about humans visible or understandable. Re translate.

Now it is often initially digital (from a camera).

 

…

 

Photograph is not a mark of signature. A mute object has its link severed to me. Can be recontextualized by others. It’s not me. Barthes “ belongs to the world not me. Not my picture, the picture”

 

Contrast French law – individual is owner of any likeness made of them. How is this compatible with the history of French art? What about Cezanne?

Challenged a lot in France.

..

 

another art project, aspects of a letter made blank, when we fill in with our own memories

 

How does surveillance determine meaning?

 

..

another piece. Scans chatrooms in real time and constructs an installation that makes use of the text. “I and “I am” are prevalent. The installaton reconstitute those “I”s into a different place.

Like cameras that reconstitute us elsewhere.

We seek photographic evidence of our existence as we seek privacy from cameras.

 

Comment: P. Samuelson

Self-help techniques. Ways to respond to surveillance. Empowerment.

Steve Mann sees empowerment as engaging own surveillance. But also we can evade or avoid surveillance.

 

Like the Rebar presentation – a playful challenge to the space, what surveillance entails.

These too are a challenge to surveillance.

 

MFroomkin’s discussion of techniques to protect against surveillance. Interesting because it didn’t so much address protest movements about cameras. “Motorists against detection” a British group of drivers angry about cameras. More than 2 million people a year are ticketing for violating speeding laws, and yet the cameras only changed the rate of speed in the place where thy can be detected by 2.2 miles. It’s a new tax, but it doesn’t serve its purpose. They attack cameras. pictures of smashed, defaced or burnedout cameras. Paint, wrapping paper, hammering, burning tires.. we usually have discussed the Uk as mostly surrendered. But this is quite violent.

In Berkeley, they got rid of many parking meters because of them being defaced.

Civil Disobedience aspect of resistance.

 

AS Prof at Washington Law School talked here about Hacktivism. Civil disobedience and protest in the streets, usually you might be arrested and fined modestly. But hacktivism violates criminal laws, and face much more serious penalties. This seems more likely for digital surveillance. In re Ryan – will they wear masks next time?

Re: Mr. Hu – an artostocratic reaction to surveillance.

 

(How does identity without visual presence exist? Is the code enough?)

 

(when is privacy actually publicity? Protestors wear masks so they can speak publicly. The veil as a political statement)

 

point made in comments that people on parole or what not have reduced expectation of privacy. Courts are segmenting populations expectation of privacy based on that, but don’t allow individual who have HIGHER expectations of privacy (John Gilmore) to have their concerns met.

(What about groups (as opposed to individuals) who have higher expectations? Veiled women? Searches of women by women a response to that? Who else is seen as culturally expecting privacy?)