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
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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. :)