Google's Elephant Named "Privacy"

I attended a talk on privacy at Google's Kirkland office on Thursday. It wasn't nearly as attended as I had expected, maybe 30 people, but that's probably because they scared people off by saying you could only attend one of the 3 sessions they have scheduled.

Wendy Seltzer, of Northeastern U, was the speaker and did a good job of providing a sort of "history of privacy" crash course. To summarize:

• Katz vs the US - basically, a man is charged because the FBI was snooping on a call from a public phone. The FBI position, "there was not physical intrusion" and his position, "yeah, but I (and society) have an expectation of privacy" in that context. The supreme court ultimately sided with Katz, but Seltzer raised the question, "How does the 'expectation of privacy' apply when we're posting all of our information on Facebook?"
• Netflix had a $1M contest asking someone to come up with an improved movie recommendation algorithm. Here's the scary question: can your movie recommendations be traced back to you? Does it matter? The answer is 'yes' (researchers reverse-engineered it) and 'yes' (because this teacher didn't get her teaching certificate due to the contents of her MySpace page).
  
• AOL's mishap over a year ago reads like a dark comedy. The example that Selzer gave was the discovering of the identity of a 62 year old woman "No. 4417749" that searched for : “numb fingers”, “60 single men”, “dog that urinates on everything.” I thought this was 'funny':

User 311045, possibly a Florida resident, is preoccupied with another topic as well:
how to change brake pads on scion xb
2005 us open cup florida state champions
how to get revenge on a ex
how to get revenge on a ex girlfriend
how to get revenge on a friend who fucked you over
replacement bumper for scion xb
florida department of law enforcement
crime stoppers florida

The net of it, according to Seltzer, was that future legislation needs to take into account the "context" of privacy violations. In other words, if I post a drunk picture of myself on Facebook, that's not intended for employers or the electorate, but for my friends only.

I'm not sure I agree.

• Ubiquity makes information "contextless": The availability of the information makes the "context" of this information indeterminable. It would be like painting my social security number on the side of a building and trying to claim that it's intended only for my wife.
• Legislation shouldn't replace personal responsibility: If I post my social security number publicly in Facebook, I'm sorry, it's my fault if my identity is stolen. This also assumes adequate public education, which may not be a fair assumption at this point. It never occurred to me that my searches and netflix activities paint such a clear picture of my identity.
  
• Legislation should protect from consolidation and broken promises: If two companies (say Google and Blogger) merge, both of whom I've consented to having my information, that doesn't mean I consent to my data being merged. If a company promises a level of privacy protection, and fails to do so, I should have recourse. Though, this just seems like standard contract law.
• Existing notions of privacy are antiquated: Society should fundamentally rethink personal privacy instead of trying to find technology and legislation to maintain our current notions. The genie's out of the bottle.
  

The silver lining in all this may be more transparent and authentic society where we accept that people get drunk on the weekend and not consider this a negative reflection of individual professionalism. :)

Choosing a Web Design Agency, Choosing Blue Flavor

When I started at Livemocha back in April, we knew from the get-go that we weren't going to even try to design the UI design ourselves. We're a talented group, that's for sure, but sexy and usable graphic design isn't one of those talents. Our original design was ripped from Facebook and comprised of pages and pages of dense copy and functional elements, and Blue Flavor did an amazing job, albeit not without frustration, mostly on their part with us (me, the messenger), at distilling our imprecise and evolving requirements into something that we're proud of.

I spent over 2 weeks "interviewing" potential freelancers and agencies. A couple observations that came out of this exercise:

1. Freelancers are good graphic designers, and good web designers, but it's hard to find a freelancer with good application-type information architecture experience; particularly when you're developing a social app.
   
2. Big agencies such as Zaaz (do a lot of cool work with Converse) and Happy Cog (legendary Jeffrey Zeldman is founder) want you to spend a lot of money up front on "planning" (target customer analysis, branding guidelines), "optimization" (keyword optimized content for SEO), "validation" (user experience and usability testing).

So, what you end up with are freelancer proposals that seem like a lot of money given their experience (they ARE artists after all), and big-agency proposals that will literally take 10x as long as you have and will cost 10x the size of your budget.

The Blue Flavor team were great to work with; though their frustration with us was apparent (and justified, I should emphasize). I had to laugh when Matt (one of the Livemocha devs) forwarded me a Joel on Software blog post that echo'd a similar experience.

Agency to Joel: "but wait, look here, it's right in Basecamp, you said that this design was 'excellent work' and you were 'elated' to have the 'best web design ever in the history of the universe.'"

Joel's post made me feel a lot better since I wasn't the only idiot client in the history of web agency relationships - actually, sounds like I'm a stereotype. Though, I wasn't the only one playing a part: Blue Flavor also uses Basecamp, their offices are across the street from Adobe and the walls are covered with silk-screened music and "web 2.0" posters, and their boardroom table is a ping pong table (an idea which we shamelessly stole for our own office).

Anyway, these guys are rock stars and they were definitely a perfect fit for us. I'm sure we'll use them again once we outgrow our current design. Check out their case study on us - I have some pretty sweet quotes in there (and yes, I'm being sincere and the figures are true).