Category Archives: Cyberlaw

Sun, Sand and GikII VIII

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It’s GikII time.

When robots, drones, autonomous agents, Facebook stalking, teleportation, 3D printing, MMORPGS, science fiction, computer games and superhero justice are discussed within the realms of the law and LOL cats, you know the time for the annual GikII workshop has arrived! Yes it’s time for GikII VIII – and a time to immerse ourselves in debates about cutting-edge technology, popular culture and the law.

This year GikII will be “in sunny, golden-sandy Southern city of Bournemouth with its sparkling sea and almost California-like-but-not-quite atmosphere. It will be held on 16-17 September 2013″

All the info you need is over here.

Contributing to the commodification of our existence

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When you think you have seen it all… Göteborg this week experienced a “slut shaming riot” (not three words I expect to see in one sentence) actually the background is better explained here but I couldn’t resist “slut shaming riot”. The short version is:

The turmoil was set off after an Instagram user asked for tips on “sluts” in Gothenburg, and promised anonymity to anyone sending in pictures. More than 200 pictures were submitted, giving names and alleged sexual activities of girls aged 13 to 14.

A 17-year-old girl was outed on Facebook as being behind the Instagram account, a mob  organized via Facebook, set off to teach her a lesson.

The rioting students then moved over to the Nordstan mall in central Gothenburg, forcing confused holiday shoppers to take cover inside stores as police work to bring the unruly teens under control.

Naturally the media was asking lots of strange questions attempting to find someone to hang. Who’s fault is it? Kids today? Social media? Technology in general?

Most reports didn’t explicitly say it but they were steeped in the nostalgia of days gone by and the illusion magnified through history that these kinds of things never happened when they were young, that things really were better in the good old days.

Really stupid. A largely non-violent riot made up of teenagers? The concept is as old as history. People using an external trigger to let of steam and to take advantage of a situation… That must describe almost every riot in history!

Amid all this media clutter the question gets asked: Are we going to grow up and stop using social media? The answer is most obviously NO. Social media users like using social media – it fills a need and provides a service. Obviously we will not stop using this medium.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about what the medium is doing to us. There is a great level of social media fatigue. My favorite example comes in the form of humor. We are developing a larger ability to poke fun at social media use – it’s not pointing at the stupidity of others but actually poking fun at our own use.

Take for example the excellent Look at this Instagram (Nickelback Parody) which show’s how our need to “share” is not innovative, creative or special. Seriously “Look at this coffee foam… I’m frigging Michelangelo” talks to me :)

However there are more important problems that are being missed. Our “bad” behaviors – oversharing, outing others, narcissism, voyeurism, stalking… just to name a few – need to be addressed but while we argue on the correct social norms of social media use we are blind to the bigger problem.

We are contributing to the commodification of our own existence. The companies that provide these services are collecting all our data. It’s not only the material you share but all your behavior (check out YouTube What Facebook Knows About You & Malte Spitz’s TEDTalk: Your phone company is watching).

These massive surveillance systems use the data they collect to manipulate the way we think by hiding and revealing different information to different users (Have written and spoken a lot about this. Here is an example). Then there is the question of who should own the rights to a users data. BTW please remember a picture of your face, flirting online & comforting a loved one is all “data”.

The licensing puts the legal right in the hands of the companies. You signed the license. You don’t like it? Then f**k off. But there is more to rights than licenses. I like the way Mat Honan expresses his sense of being betrayed in Why I Quit Instagram

By now you’ve likely heard Instagram changed its terms of service. There is a lot not to like, but I didn’t quit because of any single change in particular.

Why did I quit Instagram? It’s the thoughtlessness, stupid.

Instagram was built not by a team of ten in San Francisco’s South Park – but by tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people all over the world. …

Which makes it remarkable that the company has shown such utter disrespect for that very network of people.

We like using social media and should be allowed to use social media. What the discussion should be is turning to the question of why companies are allowed to profiteer in the way they do on our data.

Who is going to protect us? Well it should be the same legislators who are busy abdicating their power to the social media companies and hiding behind the sanctity of the contract: In this case a ridiculous document few have read, even fewer can understand and whose terms get changed at the drop of a hat.

We are protected by lofty human and civil rights documents. Government has a duty of care to ensure that we are not harmed. And still nothing.

The rights we have worked hard to achieve, the rights we so proudly proclaim in other circumstances are now all being contractually frittered away…

Every pic you take
Every post you make
Everything you like
All your friends in sight
Facebook’s using you

Every smiling friend
You post on Instagram
Won’t belong to you
Nothing you can do
Facebook’s using you

Oh can’t you see
They know you and me
Can match your name to a face, that can be accessed anyplace

And maybe just next year
Whatever shop you near
Cameras ID you
To further market to
Facebook now owns ‘you’

Since it came the net is a worse space
If I share I feel like I’ll be traced
The buttons and the “like us” pleas disgrace
The thoughtful words that they replaced
I just can’t not feel paranoid

You own nothing here
It couldn’t be more clear
Instead of getting mean
You feed the machine
The one that’s using you

—© 2012 Facebook
via Rosinal McDonald (found in the comments section of Why I Quit Instagram)

Bileta 2013 Call for papers

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I have a soft spot for the Bileta conference. It’s one of the earliest technology law conferences I began to attend and many of the people I met at the early conference are still colleagues. Bileta is the British and Irish law education and technology association and this years conference will be held between 10th – 12th April 2013 at the Liverpool Law School, University of Liverpool.

The extended call is here: http://www.bileta.ac.uk/content/files/2013_conference_call.pdf

Important Dates

January 18, 2013: Submission of abstracts and panels (subject to double blind review).  February 1, 2013: Notification of acceptances.
March 15, 2013: Full Papers (between 7,000 and 10,000 words, excluding footnotes).

Real Fame at Last: my acceptance speech

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As an academic we measure stuff and compare all the time. I’m not talking about research but rather the comparisons between each other. Who has the longest publication list, given the most keynotes, sat on the most advisory boards…

Today is a major moment as I have received the highest form of praise an Internet researcher can obtain. It is an object of desire that I have been dreaming of, but not daring to hope for.

So I would like to thank the academy, my advisers, supervisors and all my collaborators: without you guys none of this would have been possible.

Today a cease and desist letter finally graced my inbox.

We are requesting that you remove the link back to our site.

Admittedly it’s the weakest form of c&d letter and is not accompanied by evil threats but it contains the most vital statement necessary to enable induction into the halls of Internet fame. Once again: Thank You.

Police, Evidence and Facebook

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One of the things I presented at IR13 was in a 10-minute panel presentation on the regulation of Internet by spaces such as Facebook. I wanted to use this all to brief time to enter into the discussion of a problem of police, policing, procedural rules and technological affordances – easy right?

This is going to be a paper soon but I need to get some of the ideas out so that I remember the order they are in and so that people who know better can tell me how horribly wrong, ignorant and uniformed I am about the rules of evidence in different jurisdictions.

So the central argument is that computers have been used for a long time in police work and we have created safeguards to ensure that these computers and databases are not abused. In order to prevent abuse most countries have rules dictating when the police can search databases for information about someone.

Additionally, many countries have more or less developed rules surrounding undercover work, surveillance work and the problem of what to do with excess information (i.e. information gained through surveillance but not relating to the investigation that warranted the surveillance). As you can tell I need to do more reading here. These will all be in the article but here I want to focus on a weakness in the rules of evidence, which may be presented to the courts. This weakness, I argue, may act as an encouragement to certain police officers to abuse their authority.

Facebook comes along and many government bodies (not limited to the police) are beginning to use it as an investigative tool. The anecdotal evidence I have gathered suggests no limitations within the police to using Facebook to get better photos of suspects, finding suspects by “trawling” Facebook and even going undercover to become friends with suspects.

Now here is an interesting difference between Anglo-American law and Swedish Law (I need to check if this applies to most/all civil code countries): The Anglo-American system is much better at regulating this are in favor of individual rights. Courts routinely decide whether or not information gathered is admissible. If a police officer in America gathers information illicitly it may not be part of the proceedings.

In Swedish law all information is admissible. The courts are deemed competent to handle the information and decide upon its value. If a police officer gathers information illicitly in Sweden it is still admissible in court but he may face disciplinary actions by his employer.

So here’s the thing: If an officer decides he doesn’t like the look of me. He has no right to check me up. But there is no limitation to going online.

He may then find out that some of my friends have criminal records (I have several activist friends with police records) or find politically incorrect, borderline illegal status updates I wrote while drunk (I have written drunk statements on Facebook).

This evidence may be enough to enable him to argue probable cause for a further investigation – or at least (and here is the crux of my argument) ensure that he will not be disciplined harshly in any future hearing (should such a hearing arise).

The way the rules are written Facebook provides a tool that can be used to legitimize abuse of police power. And the ways the rules are written in Swedish law are much more open to such abuse.

Here are the slides I used for the presentation

Is there an inverse Filter Bubble?

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The whole concept of Filter Bubbles is fascinating. It’s the idea that services like Google & Facebook (and many more) live on collecting data about us. In order to do this more efficiently they need to make us happy. Happy customers keep using the service ergo more data. To keep us happy they organize and filter information and present it to us in a pleasing way. Pleasing me requires knowing me. Or as Bernard Shaw put it “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may be different”

Its this organizing that makes creates problems. At its most benign Google attempts to provide me with the right answer for me. So if I search for the word “bar” Google may, based on my previous interests (searches, mail analysis, Youtube views etc), present me with drinking establishments rather than information about pressure. Maybe useful, maybe annoying. The problem occurs when we move on to more difficult concepts. The filter bubble argument is that this organization is in fact a form of censorship as I will not be provided with a full range of information. (Some other terms of interest: echo chamber & daily me & daily you).

Recently I have been experimenting with filter bubbles and have begun to wonder if there is also an “inverse” filter bubble on Facebook. The inverse filter bubble occurs when a social media provider insists on keeping a person or subject in your feed and advertising despite all user attempts to ignore the person or topic.

So far I am working with several hypothesis:

  1. The bubble is not complete
  2. The media provider wants me to include the person/topic into my bubble
  3. The media provider thinks or knows of a connection I do not recognize
  4. The person I am ignoring is associating heavily with me (reading posts, clicking images etc)

This is a fascinating area and I need to set up some ways of testing the ideas. As usual all comments and suggestions appreciated.

Tolerance is law

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Enjoying the great feeling of seeing my latest article (together with Jan Nolin) in (digital) print! Please check out Tolerance is law: Remixing Homage, Parodying Plagiarism which has been published today in the open journal Scripted.

Would like to thank the reviewers for pointing out the flaws and helping us improve the article. But I still want more so every and all comment is appreciated.

The abstract is boring but the article is (hopefully) much more interesting. Abstract:

Three centuries have passed since copyright law was developed to stimulate creativity and promote learning. The fundamental principles still apply, despite radical developments in the technology of production and distribution of cultural material. In particular the last decades’ developments and adoption of ICTs have drastically lowered barriers, which previously prevented entry into the production and distribution side of the cultural marketplace, and led to a widening of the base at which cultural production occurs and is disseminated. Additionally, digitalisation has made it economically and technically feasible for users to appropriate and manipulate earlier works as method of production.
The renegotiation of barriers and the increasing number of creators who publish their works has led to an increase in copyright violations and a pressure on copyright legislation. Many of these potential violations are tolerated, in some cases have become common practice, and created social norms. Others have not been so fortunate and the law has been rigidly enforced. This arbitrary application decreases the predictability of law and creates a situation where creation relies on the tolerance of the other copyright holders. This article analyses different cases of reuse that test the boundaries of copyright. Some of these are tolerated, others not. When regulation fails to capture the rich variation of creative reuse, it becomes difficult to predict which works will be tolerated. The analysis suggests that as copyright becomes prohibitive, social norms, power and the values of the copyright holder dominate and not law.

M Klang & J Nolin, “Tolerance is law: Remixing Homage, Parodying Plagiarism”, (2012) 9:1 SCRIPTed 7 http://script-ed.org/?p=476

Your Phone Company is Watching

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Data retention and mobile telephones are seen as boring subjects. But change that to “Your phone company is watching” and get Malte Spitz to harass his phone company to use his right to information. The data he gets maps out 6 months of his life – check out what he does with the data. All of a sudden data retention is not boring – it is scary serious.

Spitz demonstrates simply why this is important. He argues that we have to fight for our right for self-determination every day. He is right and history may depend on it.

 

What kind of data is your cell phone company collecting? Malte Spitz wasn’t too worried when he asked his operator in Germany to share information stored about him. Multiple unanswered requests and a lawsuit later, Spitz received 35,830 lines of code — a detailed, nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life.

Malte Spitz asked his cell phone carrier what it knew about him–and mapped what he found out.