/ Cory Doctorow / 9:54 pm Sun Apr 3, 2011

TEDxObserver talk on kids and privacy

Here's a video of my talk on kids, privacy and social media ("A Skinner box that trains you to under-value your privacy: how do we make kids care about online privacy?") at last month's TEDxObserver event in London. It was a great day and there were a ton of interesting talks (the set is here).

TEDxObserver 2011 video: Cory Doctorow

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  1. The volume is really low on this video. I can barely hear it on my (somewhat pitiful) laptop speakers

    1. The volume is not low in the video, it’s one of the sound channels that has been inverted so the sound is cancelled out. Pan the sound to the left or right and it sounds fine.

  3. Having never heard nor seen you, Cory I was looking forward to playing this. Unfortunately the pace of your talk is so speedy I can only make out every other word. Later this week I’ll give the video another spin and see if it falls together for me.

  4. Personally, I didn’t have any issues with audio volume or pacing… great talk. Well done.

  5. Yesterday I pondered ‘Guerilla Consumerism’ how Consumers could react in a cellular fashion to Marketing and Marketing data; some of what Cory discusses here ( with the volume turned right up ) is where I was coming from.

    The first thing I am teaching my children is that security answers dont have to be correct answers. I know my Daughters next school require a Fingerprint for removing a Library book. I raised a question about this in the school and you could see the discomfort of the teachers. I wonder if I can get my Daughter a fake thumbprint or two to carry around ?

    The greatest barrier to much of this will be the peer pressure to conform and adhere to the society ( and here we are talking school children ) norms and expectation.

  6. Nicely done… Always good to remember that the internet is a tool and not an company-run operating theater. Also, just forwarded this vid to my GF. She’ll be glad to hear that it’s way cooler NOT to have a Facebook account!

  8. Funny how often a TED presenter has to cut short because of time constraints, while Cory have time to spare. No wonder as his pace seems to be that of the interested geek rambling about a topic of interest.

  9. i am reminded of two things.

    1. the EU traffic tracking and storage directive.

    2. Voltaire’s statement about defending peoples right to speak even if the topic of the speech offends him.

  10. One side effect of TED talks is you put sometimes knowledgeable people in front of a large audience who don’t normally do public speaking, or might not have done any speeches since high school speech class. If you’re not a native American English speaker, I can see why some people might have trouble following his speech. To my ear he’s clear and understandable.

  11. Took my laptop to the other room and concentrated and I’ve been able to understand more of what Cory’s said. I definitely don’t agree with any of what was said regarding Facebook. Rather than functioning like a “BF Skinner stimulus mechanism” Facebook operates in accord with how real people function. What exactly is wrong with sharing a math grade to a bunch of friends and family. Really, the Facebook bashing and over-analysis has become a bit much.

    Calling everything done on Facebook as “done in the service of a business model” is pointing out the obvious. Facebook is basically entertainment and a little bit informational. A million other entertainments in life serve businesses and business models. Disneyland (for goodness sake) is operated in service of a business model

    I kind of wish Cory hadn’t lumped smoking and over-eating into some sort of “caused by delayed gratification” category – people smoke cigarettes and over-eat for a wide variety of reasons NOT just because the consequences exist too far into the future

    His provocative thoughts on kids and privacy are generally right on, though I’m not sure if his ideas would be implemented let alone understood by most average parents

  12. I have Outlook 2010 with the social connector installed. I am amazed at how surprised people are when I tell them what I have learned about them WITH NO EFFORT WHATSOEVER. I just see various info about them underneath every e-mail they send me.
    I’ve seen embarrassing posts from job candidates, photos of family etc. from people who have not friended me or vice versa. It’s only when I tell (educate) them about this that they sit up and take notice.
    I’ve always found it fascinating that as soon as you introduce a computer into anything, people naturally assume that all the rules of life are necessarily different. They don’t allow strangers into their house, but they do double click on executable files they’ve downloaded from an untrusted place. They wouldn’t tell a perfect stranger intimate details of their life, but they will tell Facebook. They wouldn’t put treasured possessions into a room that floods regularly, but they do save photos on a fragile hard drive with no backups.
    The list goes on…

  13. @burritoflats: I guess I’m not a real person then. In my book “real people” don’t mindlessly give out personal information to complete strangers … except on the internet, of course, which was kind of Cory’s point.

    Cory, I completely agree that someone should be teaching kids this stuff. But it appears to me that there isn’t really even a resource to teach *adults* this stuff.

    I’m pretty tech savvy, and I have no idea, for instance, what the best practice is when faced with a web form with too many invasive questions. — beyond giving as little information as possible.

    1. @shadowbird: I don’t use facebook, but my wife and children do. They absolutely do not consider posting things on facebook to be ” [giving] out personal information to complete strangers”. In their eyes they tightly control who is in their circle of friends, and they don’t consider their disclosure to be anything other than a more convenient way to accounce things that, with or without facebook, they’d still like to tell this group of people.

      Whether the controls over their circle of facebook friends is really as tight as they think it is – that’s obviously a different story, but i don’t think that the answer would change the human psychology aspect of this one way or another.

      1. In their eyes they tightly control who is in their circle of friends

        That’s precisely the point — it’s designed to give that impression, but in fact gives the information not only to the tightly-controlled circle of friends but also to Facebook itself, the authors of a bunch of apps on their page and the authors of a bunch of apps on the friends’ pages.

        It’s Facebook and the authors of the apps who are the “complete strangers” in the story.

    2. “In my book “real people” don’t mindlessly give out personal information to complete strangers”

      Well I do it, pretty much every time I make small talk with my barber or
      with the checkstand checker at my local supermarket. And I also trade
      very personal information with my doctor and actual family and friends.

      We human people came supplied with something called “Free Will” –
      no one’s twisting my arm to chat and trade information on
      silly old Facebook. As we all continue to enter the Computer Age
      we’ve got to watch out for rampant paranoia. 500 million FB users
      can’t be wrong. Facebook is fun, it’s gossip and an ongoing
      work of tribal art

  14. People are looking to drop that one bombshell for a jolt of social re-enforcement , followed by… Facebook cashes in the precious material of our social lives and trades it for pennies.

    Irony?

    I’ve never believed children should be allowed on the Internet unsupervised, but that boat has already sailed for most parents.

  15. I dont want to be an ass or anything but to me facebook is close to invaluable. Sure I could set up a blog or some kind of email-list or something but its much easier for me to get things Ive done (I freelance allot) spread as quickly as with my friends on facebook. Its shit, the little things I can do like a fake name or avoiding some information disclosure about me isn’t enough but we lack something better. Or perhaps its just me. Since I’m not well known (like Cory) there is little option that I know off.

    So basicly I’m wondering. Does anyone have some kind of alternative tactic for people like me? I’m not trying to be cute or anything I really really really wanna know. I’d like to drop facebook the second I figure out something better but until then I kinda need to use it. So how do I market myself using the internet in another way thats more effective?

  16. Great talk, Cory. Thanks for posting. I have a question, though…

    I have no interest in interfering with my 11-year-old son’s privacy, in person or on the Internet. Whatever conversations he’s going to have, he’s going to have. We’ve educated him to be thoughtful, cautious and kind and I don’t worry about pedos, terrorists, bad spelling, etc.

    I do, though, use a parental blocking program to keep him from finding some of the scariest, porn-iest, bloodiest stuff on the Internet, and I think that may be a separate issue from privacy and personal freedom for kids. There is simply a bunch of truly heinous stuff out there that is so easily (and often inadvertently) found, that I don’t think an 11-year-old needs access to. Partly it’s stuff that’s related to sex, partly to violence, partly to just scary stuff. I’ve found crap on the Web that I didn’t mean to and that, frankly, has given me nightmares. I’m old enough, though, to be able to self-regulate those materials, and self-heal if I encounter something really objectionable.

    I want my son to be able to differentiate good from bad information, to be privacy-aware, to know how to spoof other systems and make decisions effectively about how/where/if to give over personal information. But I also have this idea that, as a parent, I have more responsibility for his well-being and education than do governments, schools, companies, etc. Parent-kid is a special relationship, isn’t it? To say that I don’t want people spying on my kid doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t know more about him than almost anyone else, since he is, very much and in lots of ways, my responsibility.

    Any thoughts about how to let a good, smart, gentle kid onto the Internet without parental controls… without having to explain “2 Girls, 1 Cup” to him before he’s old enough to see a PG-13 movie without me?

    1. @andyhavens brings up an excellent point about censorship and privacy, which seem to be lumped together in Cory’s speech, but are (or should be) independent of each other.

      So what IS a parent to do to allow their child a fairly unfettered (and snoop-free) access while still keeping them away from the nastiest part of the internets?

      1. I think censorship and privacy are closely connected issues (really two sides of the same coin) because both have to do with controlling the flow of information: Censorship is about controlling the flow of incoming information, while privacy is about controlling the flow of outgoing information. Out of all the information that is publicly available online, who gets to decide what I will be allowed to see? Out of all the personal information about myself, who gets to decide how much I will share with others, and who will be allowed to have access to that information?

        As an adult, I think that I should be the one who gets to decide both of those things for myself. Obviously, the situation would be different for young children who are not yet mature enough to handle these responsibilities for themselves – their parents at home and their teachers at school will have to police both incoming and outgoing information on their behalf. But what about older children? Does it really make sense to say that older children should be responsible for policing their outgoing information for themselves, but that their parents and teachers should continue to police their incoming information? If you’re going to teach older children responsible internet use, then you’re going to have to start trusting them with responsibility for incoming as well as outgoing information. (Besides, while it’s true that there are many things online that are inappropriate for children, I seriously doubt that there’s any online content that children can access that will truly scar them for life. The greatest online danger to children doesn’t come from the information they happen to access, but from the information they reveal about themselves to others.)

        1. “Besides, while it’s true that there are many things online that are inappropriate for children, I seriously doubt that there’s any online content that children can access that will truly scar them for life.”

          If the litmus test for whether or not I want my son to see something is whether or not it will scar him for life, then I think I need a new litmus test. There’s plenty of stuff out there that *I* am disturbed by, and I’ve got 44 years of experience, 20+ of those as a communications person and history buff who routinely researches some fairly dark and gritty stuff.

          I still have bad dreams about a beheading I saw on the Web years ago. Truly heinous, scary, awful stuff. As an adult, I made the decision to watch it because I thought that if our country was involved in a war for which this was one consequence, I needed to understand it better. I think, now, that I was wrong. I wish I could un-watch it. Other than seeing someone’s last moments in all their terrified gore… I didn’t learn anything. But I also knew, when I went into it, that that could end up being the result.

          Children don’t have the experience to make those decisions; at least not all at once, and not all the time. My job as a parent is, I think, to help my kid “ease his way” into some of life’s challenges, not just dump him off the dock to sink or swim.

  17. 1) I tried to Print Out the video by clicking the “Printable version” button. No luck.

    2) Back in the day, on just about every BBS in Montreal, some non-newbie would post (*) Believe No Posts (*). This would appear at least once a day on various SIGs (Oh, look it up.) on various BBSes.

    This would foster healthy skepticism and careful reading of other people’s writing. I’d like to think that this would also foster wariness of corporate skinner boxes.

  18. @pauldavis:
    “Whether the controls over their circle of facebook friends is really as tight as they think it is – that’s obviously a different story […]”

    No, that’s *this* story. Cory asserts that Facebook is designed to manipulate people into haemorrhaging personal information, and I happen to agree.

  20. Lets not forget that even with the latest privacy controls “upgrade”, facebook defaults to share anything you enter onto their page with anyone that comes and reads your profile. And even changing those settings have very little effect on what third parties can read if you happen to sign up to one of their games.

  21. Not sure what’s wrong with your speakers, sounded like any other youtube vid to me …

    Great talk Cory, I only wished everyone thought this way; unfortunately we’re in the minority.

  22. I am coming around to the idea that I actually need to maintain my privacy on the internet. I don’t particularly care if people know the details of my life, but I think I need to start maintaining my privacy so that I can actually have opinions and be politically active without my work, etc. knowing about it.

    However, what can I do? Does anyone have a good list of practices that I could use? In b4 too lazy to google. I know the BB readership is knowledgeable in these matters, and I would rather draw on your knowledge than waste time blundering around and finding subpar answers.

    As to the other matters Cory mentions – How do I jailbreak my devices? How do I set up a proxy to sidestep censor walls? How can I do these things to maintain my privacy? Cory makes good points that these things should be taught, but how can we teach ourselves to do these things?

    1. Ditto to what “Mecharius” commented; is there any kind of tutorial out there for making myself more secure online? I only understand about half the things Cory listed towards the end there (where he talks about encryption, jailbreaking etc)
      Someone on BB should be able to give pointers in the right direction

  23. Great talk! How about a follow up on what best practices we should use and how to present them to kids with tech-novice parents?

  24. Excellent talk, Cory! And I agree with you 100%. I wish every parent and educator would watch this and heed its message. Unfortunately, I suspect that lots of people are going to reject just about everything you said out of hand. We have the misfortune to be living in an age that values security over liberty, community over autonomy, conformity over individuality, and transparency over privacy. So, your thesis goes against the conventional wisdom, and will likely fall on deaf ears – or, worse still, be met with outright hostility. It’s a shame.

  25. What I think people who are having a problem with what Corey is saying here are looking at this from an adult’s point of view, one who grew up without this stuff. It’s much easier to step back and eyeball social networking technology if you weren’t conditioned by it as a child.

    Kids growing up being conditioned by this business model won’t look at these issues the same. Just as we don’t look at TV or telecommunications in the same way as our grandparents.

    The difference, I suppose, is how much private information is given up for the sake of this business model—food for thought.

    Who knows, maybe some day future generations will look back at this and say, “They were way too concerned about this” or “They were right, we gave up too much.”

  26. I had a thoght after listening to this… treat all your personal information as you do your private parts. Do you show your privates to complete stranges all the time? Even people you know?

  27. “And I also trade very personal information with my doctor and actual family and friends.”

    Who, are, of course, ‘complete strangers’? But that’s beside the point. when you give information out on Facebook you’re not giving it to one person. You’re giving it out to *everyone*.

    Your barber, in person, has limited ability to do damage with the fact that you got blind drunk last night. But if that fact possibly harm you in the hands of another, then with Facebook the chances are good that that other will have every opportunity to see it.

    “500 million FB users can’t be wrong”

    Are you actually capable of rational thought, or do you genuinely think that spouting cliche is a good way to have a debate? If the majority are always right, then the sun rotates about the earth, women shouldn’t vote, and time is a universal constant.

    1. “Are you actually capable of rational thought”

      Oh, yeah. I’m fully capable (I think)

      Anyway, since you seem hung up on keeping
      all your personal stuff very personal, I would like to challenge
      you to keep your life completely closed-up and hidden to all for the
      rest of this week. Don’t use your ATM or credit cards…

      And don’t give your address to anyone at any post office
      or at any sort of auto repair shop. Don’t use any PIN numbers
      of any kind anywhere. Don’t talk to strangers, lest you accidentally
      reveal some deep, guarded secret or fragment of special information

      Do it for a week and report back here.

      It’ll be difficult, but I have confidence in you
      and I know you can do it! And by all means, don’t
      join or participate in or do any Facebook stuff
      which might screw up this whole challenge

      Good luck!

      1. You continue to confuse giving out information under your own cognisance to limited numbers of people IRL, with Facebook giving out information to everyone on the internet without your consent.

        I’ve already pointed out the massive difference between those two, and you’ve chosen to ignore that. Giving my credit card to the guy at the petrol station != giving my credit card to the entire internet.

        You don’t have to respond to what I say, of course — and you certainly don’t have to agree with me — but debate is about actually addressing the points that the other person makes. Replying to me without doing that just makes you look like a bit of an arse.

  28. Besides, while it’s true that there are many things online that are inappropriate for children, I seriously doubt that there’s any online content that children can access that will truly scar them for life.

    Well, I dunno about the kids, but I’ve seen stuff online that scarred me for life. I don’t mean that as a humorous exaggeration, either. I’d gladly cut several fingers off my left hand, slowly, if it meant I could un-see some things forever. Seriously. shudder. You have no idea.

  29. Just the other night, my nephew called me up and wanted to play a popular browser-based multiplayer game(“Free Realms” by SOE…) I went to install it, and was confronted with a horrifyingly blatant invasion of privacy: The game required a browser plugin(to do the 3D rendering and whatnot..) and it was wrapped in a step-by-step installation with huge lettering(obviously directed at children) which basically instructed you to circumvent your browser security and antivirus while it installs a rootkit. These are the exact words from the splash screen:

    “Install SOE Web Installer?

    It can access:
    [ALL DATA ON YOUR COMPUTER AND THE WEBSITES YOU VISIT.]”

    I do believe they are using children as unwitting pawns to install rootkit/wiretapping/surveillance malware…

  30. You’re really out there, Cory. People being public about their lives isn’t inherently wrong. I, for one, think it’s good we’ll be able to increase accountability and safety at the cost of privacy.

    Access to information is a powerful thing, and as all powerful things it can be used for good _and_ evil. Your position is similar to that of people who are against the Internet because there’s porn on it. True, the cop, the marketer and the burglar will know everything there is to know about me, but, and that’s the crux of my argument, I’ll also know everything about them.

    Like it or not, the age of publicness is near, and it will be good. Mark my words :)

  31. Everybody is being so serious. I don’t mean to offend anyone by going offtrack, here, but I’d like to make one obtuse observation.

    As an old man who made his living as a photographer 35 years ago, I don’t accept that chimping makes better photographers. Chimping makes for better editors.

    Back in the day, when I hit the release on my 6×7 camera at a wedding, I knew I had just spent 3 bucks plus. I’d better get every shot right. The feedback delay was meaningless.

    Today, though, the incremental cost of taking another picture is zero. You just hold down the button and take a thousand shots. One or two will come out right.

    Back in the day, a very few photographers with really big budgets could work like that. They’d shoot thousands of slides in a studio afternoon, then fire up the light tables and throw out all but 50 that went to an editor who threw out everything that wasn’t going to be published. That was an incredibly expensive way to work.

    Nowadays, anyone can do that. Anyone can metaphorically release their million monkeys on a million typewriters and get an occasional Shakespeare sonnet out of them, especially since the typewriters can now help with the spelling.

    But it still take a photographer to write a whole play.

    Bottom line – I don’t accept that the quality of the average snapshot is any better today than it was back in the day. We just have zillions to choose from, so we can highlight the few that are accidentally good.

  32. @andyhavens & anon #36:

    You should both consider a career in political punditry, since you seem to be quite talented at pulling a single quote from my comment, ignoring everything else I said, stripping this selected quote of its context, taking it far more seriously than it was ever intended, and dissecting it as if it were the central point I was trying to make, even though it was only marginally relevant to my argument. Kudos.

    Let’s see if I have the skills for this.

    Anon #36 wrote: “I’d gladly cut several fingers off my left hand, slowly, if it meant I could un-see some things forever.”

    Really? Perhaps you should seek psychological help for your desire to harm yourself. And I don’t think someone who feels that self mutilation is preferable to viewing inappropriate content on the internet ought to be allowed anywhere near a child, much less allowed to supervise a child’s internet use. Someone ought to call child protective services on you.

    How was that? Maybe I’m not yet ready to audition for Fox News; but I thought that was pretty good for a first attempt at taking someone’s words out of context and interpreting them in the worst possible light while completely ignoring the broader point he or she was trying to make. But clearly I’m not as talented in this regard as either of you are. I’m especially impressed with andyhavens, who in his concluding paragraph skillfully managed to restate the very point I had made in my own comment about the need for age-appropriate parental supervision and teaching kids to be responsible internet users, while cleverly implying that I was arguing that such supervision and education was unnecessary. That is what I call skill. I don’t even think that Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly could have done it better. I’m in awe.

  33. This was a great talk, and it made some important connections between ideas that had been loosely floating around in my head. As a father, I plan on putting these ideas to work as my little guy grows up.

  34. something about the left & right stereo channels out of phase and cancelling each other out if mixed to mono, or so said a comment on youtube (what? youtube comments useful?). i had effectively no audio on my 1stgen macbook air until plugging in headphones.

    where can i get a transcript? i think the “Skinner box” line buries the lead & want to summarize on my tumblr by quoting from the proposed solution at the end of the talk.

  35. What Cory is saying, vis-a-vie the expectation of a lack of privacy as the normal state of things reminds me of the “Zero Tolerance” approach that many school systems take.

    All that that does is reinforce to the student that violence – or in this case privacy and concealment – is a tool that only the the state has at its disposal, and those subjected to the rules of the state had better just accept it.

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