Experiencing Lift11, talking about Web3.0, thinking of privacy’s future

I attended the Lift11 Conference in Geneva the past week as a volunteer. Working in the editorial team means I got to see all the presentations, with the downside being, however, not catching any of them(!) as we were tasked to take notes and moderate the live discussion throughout the event. Some talks resonate louder than others with a shared vision of my interests and insightful forecasting to the future. The On-line Community session brought in Chris Heathcote, who observed the emergence of invisible communities: temporal, anonymous communities that gather and disperse continuously, addressing the separation of identities as the desire of togetherness and playing with technology. Brian Solis’s talk about Social Currency is a brilliant summary of individual effort to manage online reputation through conversations they hold with others and about themselves. He implied that once a company becomes aware of the value of social capital, they are more likely to win out their peers, because it is essentially a one-on-one quality marketing and interest focused investment.

Besides the presentations, there were some other interesting conversations going on with people from different disciplines. One with Ulrich Fisher, a filmmaker who decided to hand out the cutter and let the ‘walkers’ do the editing: he creates video with locative meta-data covering the landscape of Geneva, and uses the walking path and walking speed of participants to determine the editing. I got to meet Hasan Elahi himself, who shared generously the visitor IP to his tracking website with a list of intelligent agencies and government institutions. Alessandra Mattana, who was also one of the volunteer team, is currently working on the Web 3.0 project, that seized me wholly with its revolutionary idea about the Internet. Imagine one will be able to access the data directly without even the filter of APIs, a web of less hierarchical data organization. The search, for example, will be based on a semantic model so that the ‘query’ is no longer the fundamental unit of information sourcing. You can describe something to find it without knowing its name.

In the world of Web 3.0, privacy may become a continuum as big as its opportunities. Encryption will face complex changes as something that determines the permissions to the data in every sharing of information.  On the other hand, it may urge the standardization of the privacy setting protocol, powering the user with a wide spectrum of private service specified by themselves.

Robert Scoble on latest ideas from Silicon Valley

The Map of Privacy

This a map that gives a brief history of privacy in the technological spectrum, with the section of ‘digital age’ expanded intentionally to outlook the future of privacy based on current phenomena. At the end a new interpretation to ‘privacy’ was given and referred to as ‘permission’, addressing the massive explosion of outdated information we will be facing with the aging of the Internet and ‘cloud data’. Following the current mode of online privacy management, the control over the information will become so costly and time consuming that it is even less efficient compared to the opposite way: giving permission of the information to the trusted groups and individuals. The map also provides clues to why it would be necessary to introduce the forgetting mechanics of online data and to rely partially on the human memory again in order to regulate social behaviors for privacy.

By designing the map, I got to think more critically over the research and ideas I came across before and to situate my design proposals for hiding (marked in red) in relation to other facts regarding privacy.

View original size here

How to both benefit and hide away from on-line search engine

Everyone has their own little strategies of using on-line search engine to find an answer. We know that tweaking the spelling or the order of the keywords can help us gain faster and more precise answer with Google search. And we more or less have a sense of the patterns of the search tools, though we don’t know exactly the algorithms they are based upon. But how about hiding from it? Using the search engine to figure out where you can hide and make the answer “difficult for other to find” is totally another type of intelligence.

To learn about how people deal with the issue of using on-line search as a “double folded weapon”, benefiting oneself and incapacitating others, I designed a game where the participants used on-line searches to both raise questions to and answer questions from their opponents.

This is how it works

It was found that as the game continued, the participants started to have more concern towards how the answer to their question can be accessed through search engines by the other team, thus adjusted their way of speaking accordingly to avoid the expressions most likely to be sought out. The result was that they started to play “trick” by using misleading and ambiguous information in their questions so that their opponents would have no way to obtain the most efficient keywords to filter through the information, or did not even know where to start.

It fascinates me to find through the experiment, how fast people adjust their way of expressing to their condition, with high awareness of the pros and cons of the media they use. The result was that people tended to hide “literally” by giving misleading and even deceptive information, probably because of the limited time they were given to design the questions and it was the fastest technique they can utilize as a reaction of defending.

After documenting the whole process, I watched closely at the footage and highlighted the moments where such behaviors occurred, and analyzed the language used by the participants at those moments. The tactics of “making tricks” fell into several categories, such as omission, misleading, ambiguity, paradox and concepts exchange. The process of analysis found here.