"Chinese City Uses Facial Recognition to Shame Pajama Wearers"

That headline is from … not the Onion, but the New York Times, which reports:

When officials in an eastern Chinese city were told to root out “uncivilized behavior,” they were given a powerful tool to carry out their mission: facial recognition software.

Among their top targets? People wearing pajamas in public.

On Monday, the urban management department of Suzhou, a city of six million people in Anhui Province, sparked outrage online when it published surveillance photos taken by street cameras of seven local residents wearing pajamas in public along with parts of their names, government identification numbers and the locations where their “uncivilized behavior” had taken place.

City officials quickly apologized, but not before stirring nationwide ire over the use of a state-of-the-art digital tool to stamp out a harmless and relatively commonplace practice — an unusual note of resistance in a country where the instruments of digital totalitarianism have spread largely unchecked.

On social media, the Suzhou department publicly called out, among others, a Ms. Dong, a young woman in a plush pink robe, matching pants and orange pointy flats, walking on a street, and a Mr. Niu, who was singled out for donning a black and white checkered full pajama suit in a mall.

“Uncivilized behavior refers to when people behave and act in ways that violate public order because they lack public morals,” read a post on WeChat, a common social messaging app, which has since been deleted.

“Many people think that this is a small problem and not a big deal,” the post said. “Others believe public places are truly ‘public,’ where there is no blame, no supervision and no public pressure.”

“This has brought about a kind of complacent, undisciplined mind set,” it concluded.

Hidden camera invades privacy at Airbnb

A couple staying at an Airbnb in Ireland made the discovery:

"I could see the live stream video of myself looking at his phone," Nealie Barker, 42, said. "I had this horrible, sinking feeling ... We're definitely being watched.” ...

The couple, who was traveling with their four children and niece, contacted Airbnb, which doesn’t allow hidden cameras.

"Airbnb had no advice for us over the phone," Nealie Barker told NBC News, adding that the representative didn’t seem to understand the severity of the situation.

Feeling Airbnb was unhelpful, they called the host themselves. As he denied their questions about cameras on the property, she said, her husband asked, "Well then why am I [looking] at a livestream of myself?"

The host hung up but called back later, saying there was only one hidden camera.

Why I'm still talking about Covington

A week after the media meltdown over Covington, it's not surprising that some people are starting to say eh, this is old news; people have apologized, so why not give it a rest?

You could give various responses about the larger significance of the debacle, that some people haven't adequately recanted, etc.

But I want to add something, which is that this feels personal because it could so easily happen to any of us. The encounter was so mundane that you have to wonder what other non-events will be used to try to destroy you or me. It happened to be video-recorded not because it mattered, but because that's just so easy with 2019 technology.

I didn't have to worry about that when I was 16, but I can't help thinking: what would it have been like if this had happened to me when I was 16? Are some people not having that thought because they see him as the Other, and consequently lack empathy for him?

I also think about what will happen if I ever have a kid. Would my 16-year-old always stay on the right side of the face police? Or might he occasionally be awkward at that age? What if he had some kind of a mental or physical disability that caused him to have facial expressions or body movements that people took the wrong way? (I say "he" because so much of the vituperation that's been directed at the Covington kids has been explicitly based on their gender.)

In the past few days, I've been under the weather (getting better now, so don't worry about me), and sometimes as I've stood around in a public place, I've stopped to think: hey, I might have had an inappropriate facial expression just now, because of a combination of feeling a little out of it and feeling physically uncomfortable. If someone were video-recording me, could they find one still that made it look like I was "disrespecting" the wrong person?

When I see a post saying the kid's "smirk" (always that same exact word choice) is proof that there's something bigoted or wicked about him, I wonder if the person saying that has gone through life always making an appropriate facial expression for every social situation. Would you even want to be someone who always makes what others consider just the right expression? That sounds like someone who's very safe and inoffensive and well-scripted, not someone spontaneous and flawed and quirky.

I grew up in a far-left college town, and I've known so many young people who were free spirits, who were nonconformists, who were determined to be themselves no matter what anyone else said, who had a passion for noisy music and experimental art, who listened to the color of their dreams . . . And back then, it didn't seem incongruous that they were mostly on the left. Today, I see so many people on the left sternly admonishing a 16-year-old for having the wrong smile in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's a prissy attitude which seems like the antithesis of so many lefties I've known. How can you be a young person who identifies as left/liberal and take that attitude? I've always had my differences with the left, but for most of my life I at least would have admitted that hey, a lot of them are cool people, interesting people, people who are worth talking to, especially if you don't share their politics. And that has no resemblance to some of the self-appointed arbiters of propriety we've been seeing on social media.

I want to say to some of these people joining virtual lynch mobs based on the latest viral video: Is that really who you are? Or are you too afraid to say what you really think? Or have you forgotten what you really think because you're more focused on . . . looking just right?

Takeaway from Mark Zuckerberg's Senate hearing

Facebook needs to make sure no one says anything that makes anyone else feel bad — while giving everyone unprecedented, airtight privacy protections!

Good luck with that.

Best. Reason for anonymity. Ever.

Hillary Clinton's inadequate answer on her emails

This answer by Hillary Clinton in her press conference about her emails is flawed. She's asked how the public can be assured that she withheld only personal emails, not work-related emails that might be "unflattering."

Her answer is that "you would have to ask that question to every single federal employee," since they all have the responsibility to decide whether to use their personal or work email addresses, depending on whether they're talking about something work-related or not.

See the problem? Think about it . . .


When she decided which emails to turn over, a long time had passed since she had sent them. She's had the time to reconsider things she said before. She's gotten to see which subjects have become controversial over time. She's had time to reflect on strategy for an upcoming presidential campaign. After all that time, then she decides which emails to call "work-related" — knowing that as long as she assigns that label to a given message, the public will likely see it.

And which kinds of messages have the most potential to be "unflattering" to a political candidate? Messages she sent on the spur of the moment, without much reflection or political calculation. Or messages about something we now know is a hotly debated issue, but that she didn't realize at the time would end up being a big issue.

None of that is true of a federal employee deciding whether to use their work email address or personal email address to send a message.

What Facebook does with your face

Sterling Crispin’s “Data Masks” are haunting portraits that don’t actually depict any one person. Instead, they use raw data to show how technology perceives humanity. Reverse-engineered from surveillance face-recognition algorithms and then fed through Facebook’s face-detection software, the Data Masks “confront viewers with the realization that they’re being seen and watched basically all the time,” Crispin says.

“Facebook actually makes masks out of everyone’s faces,” the artist explains. The social network analyzes every face that appears in photos on its servers and renders them into three-dimensional models. “It’s happening whether you get tagged in the photo or not” . . .

As the U.S. government builds biometric databases like its Next-Generation Identification face-recognition system, it’s more important than ever to know how our identities are captured and processed by the technology we adopt. Crispin’s work is a reminder.

(Quoted from "This Is What Your Face Looks Like to Facebook" by Kyle Chayka.)

"But don't you think that if a government official claims that something has to do with national security, ...

... rules of privacy and speech don't matter at all?"

So Ben Wikler (a friend of mine) wryly asks Ben Wizner of the ACLU, which just filed suit against the US government over the Obama administration's surveillance programs. Listen to that interview and more about PRISM here.

Paul Krugman on two different kinds of "surveillance states"

"There was a really good article written five years ago by Jack Balkin at the Yale Law School. He said that technology means that we’re going to be living in a surveillance state. That’s just gonna happen. But there are different kinds of surveillance states. You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it’s doing. Or you can have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible. And we are kind of on the authoritarian side."

(Here's the video.)

Does the New York Times really expect us to believe . . .

. . . that Sarah Wendell is embarrassed to be seen in public reading romance novels, when she clearly agreed to pose for that photo in the New York Times?

It reminds me of scenes on The Real World where two characters would have a "private" conversation about something they were desperate to keep a secret from their other housemates. If they had actually wanted to keep anything private, they wouldn't have agreed to have their lives broadcast on MTV.

Will there be a naked revolt against airport body scanners?

I've been seeing a lot of comments like this:

I am an old man and I don't have any prudish feelings left. I have also been subjected to lots of invasive medical procedures where several men and women were participating and watching. So, I am used to being naked and exposed. So, I am considering stripping completely, totally, the next time I go through TSA screening. I wonder what they will do to me if I stand there dangling in public; I am curious and I expect the reactions will be amusing. I won't care if I miss my flight or get whisked out to detention somewhere. At my age, I don't have lots to lose that I haven't already lost. Provocateurs serve a public purpose, and I am happy to serve my nation.

I wonder if anyone is actually going to follow through on this. That was just a pseudonymous comment on the New York Times' website, so there's no way to verify it. He'd need to be someone who's disturbed enough by the body scanners to want to protest them (at the risk of violating who-knows-what federal law), but relatively comfortable with people seeing him naked. Is there anyone like that out there? He would need to be motivated by a desire to protect the privacy of those who are much more sensitive than he is.

Suicide and gay shaming through online privacy invasion at Rutgers University

A search for [Rutgers suicide] — not on the whole web, but restricted to blog posts only in the past 24 hours — returns over 8,500 results right now. The same story is also on the front page of Memeorandum, a website that automatically generates a list of the top news stories being covered by both traditional journalists and bloggers.

This is the story that's getting so much attention:

The death of a Rutgers University freshman stirred outrage and remorse on campus from classmates who wished they could have stopped the teen from jumping off a bridge last week after a recording of him having a sexual encounter with a man was broadcast online. . . .

A lawyer for [Tyler] Clementi's family confirmed Wednesday that he had jumped off the George Washington Bridge last week. Police recovered a man's body Wednesday afternoon in the Hudson River just north of the bridge, and authorities were trying to determine if it was Clementi's.

Clementi's roommate, Dhraun Ravi, and fellow Rutgers freshman Molly Wei, both 18, have been charged with invading Clementi's privacy. Middlesex County prosecutors say the pair used a webcam to surreptitiously transmit a live image of Clementi having sex on Sept. 19 and that Ravi tried to webcast a second encounter on Sept. 21, the day before Clementi's suicide. . . .

Collecting or viewing sexual images without consent is a fourth-degree crime. Transmitting them is a third-degree crime with a maximum prison term of five years.

Whether or not Ravi and Wei end up receiving any criminal punishment, they've already been punished in the media: the New York Times is prominently displaying yearbook-style headshots of them.

The Times reports:

Rutgers officials would not say whether the two suspects had been suspended. But in a statement late Wednesday, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick, said, “If the charges are true, these actions gravely violate the university’s standards of decency and humanity.”

More details of what happened:

Ravi's Twitter feed on [September 19] referred to seeing his roommate have sex with another man in their room on the Piscataway campus, classmates said.

"Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay," Ravi said on his Twitter page in a Sept. 19 entry posted at 6:17 p.m.

Two days later, Ravi posted another entry directing his nearly 150 Twitter followers to iChat, an internet messaging service with a live video feed.

"Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again," Ravi wrote in the Sept. 21 post.

Ravi's Twitter feed has since been taken down. But the entries survived in a cached version of the page still available through Google's search engine this afternoon. . . .

Prosecutors said Ravi and Wei set up a camera on Sept. 19 and broadcast live images of Clementi having a "sexual encounter." Ravi is also accused of trying unsuccessfully to broadcast a second sex scene Sept. 21.

Clementi wrote this on September 22 as a status update on Facebook:

"Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."

I'm interested in how an incident like this becomes a major story in both the mainstream media and blogosphere, even though it might seem to be a strictly local story that's affected a relatively tiny number of people. What is it about this story? Suicide? Homophobia? Using internet technology to bully and invade someone's privacy? Don't all those things happen all the time?

Well, none of the elements are new, but they intersected dramatically enough to grab our attention. So it's understandable that the news and blogs are covering this so widely.

But I wish the shaming of gays weren't something we passively accepted as just-the-way-young-people-are, until something like this happens. It shouldn't take a death to make homophobia temporarily worth expressing concern over. Virulent homophobia — especially among youths, who tend to have low inhibitions about broadcasting their bigotry and a strong interest in building up their reputations by tearing down their peers' — is a huge, national problem whether or not it ever kills anyone.

The Library of Congress is going to "archive the collected works of Twitter."

We're going to record "the second-by-second history of ordinary people."

That NYT article makes this important point (which it attributes to unnamed academics):

For hundreds of years, . . . the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, . . . it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.

I've been critical of Twitter. But I only wish we had this kind of access to random people's fleeting thoughts from 50, 100, 200 years ago.

On the other hand, most tweets surely aren't very interesting. It's hard to imagine that more than 10% are worth going back and reading even a year later. But the Library of Congress is apparently archiving all tweets. This seems bizarrely undiscriminating for such an august institution.

Now, sifting through the 55 million tweets per day (!) would be an enormous task, so I'm not surprised they don't bother to do that. But couldn't they come up with an algorithm that would automate the process of distilling the whole archive into something with more overall value? For instance, they could have a rule that they only archive tweets that have garnered a certain number of "favorites."

Lastly, this is disturbing:

[T]he vast majority of Twitter messages that would be archived are publicly published on the Web.

"The vast majority"? You mean some of the posts that will be stored in the Library of Congress will be from posts that were never publicly published — that is, from "locked" accounts? How is that not a flagrant violation of privacy?

"As soon as a celebrity walks through a naked machine, some creep will want to save the picture and send it to the tabloids."

Jeffrey Rosen argues that the new airport screening device invades our privacy without actually preventing terrorism.

He describes his chance encounter with one of the machines:

Last summer, I watched a fellow passenger at Washington’s Reagan National Airport as he was selected to go through a newly installed full-body scanner. These machines--there are now 40 of them spread across 19 U.S. airports--permit officials from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to peer through a passenger’s clothing in search of explosives and weapons. On the instructions of a security officer, the passenger stepped into the machine and held his arms out in a position of surrender, as invisible millimeter waves surrounded his body. Although he probably didn’t know it, TSA officials in a separate room were staring at a graphic, anatomically correct image of his naked body. When I asked the TSA screener whether the passenger’s face was blurred, he replied that he couldn’t say. But, as I turned to catch my flight, the official blurted, “Someone ought to do something about those machines--it’s like we don’t have any privacy in this country anymore!”

The real problem is that there's no reason to assume that the violation described in the heading would be done only to celebrities.

UPDATE: It's already happened.

Privacy policy

If you and I have any online communications about content on this blog, I may quote them, including your name, unless you specify otherwise.

In contrast, I do not quote in-person communications by name, unless people specify otherwise.

That's my privacy policy.

The latter point is based on the same concerns that Ezekiel J. Emanuel expresses:

When we go out to dinner we should not have to watch what we say, whether we use the right fork, spill the olive oil on the table cloth, or make a mess around our plate.... For most of us anonymous types, we did not have to worry about this when we were younger and our habits were ingrained. But with Twitter, phone-cameras, and the rest, life is different.

It shouldn't be. The assumption should be that we will not appear in print or the blogosphere. Having dinner should not be fodder for Facebook.

He's nervous about this blog post he wrote about having dinner with Larry David. Before he published it, he showed a draft of the post to Larry David, who "happily" gave him permission. But he still has qualms about how he handled it:

After all, if he did not like the piece, he would have been in the awkward position of asking me not to post it. Maybe we need consent before going to dinner, while the date is being arranged? "This one is potentially on the record."

Isn't there a more sensible solution to this? If you want to blog about someone, ask for permission, but don't show them the post word for word -- unless, of course, they're concerned enough that they actually ask to see it before granting permission. I also point out that I could make it anonymous if they'd prefer. This seems to be a pretty effective way to avoid any major ethical dilemmas.

How increased transparency can improve security while empowering individuals

Here's science journalist John Horgan's vision:

Several years ago, the U.S. intelligence services created Intellipedia, a Wikipedia-style website where spies from the FBI, CIA, NSA and other federal agencies can swap information, ideas, speculations related to national security and seek communal consensus. The program was intended to break down the communication barriers that hindered security agencies from preventing 9/11. Intellipedia is called “open-source spying,” but it isn’t open at all; only people with security clearances can access the site, which contains classified information.

The world needs—and will soon have—a truly open-source, unclassified, grass-roots Intellipedia, which will publish information on threats to humanity, whether criminal gangs or corporations, religious cults or governments. The site will post reports from any sources, including non-profits such as Human Rights Watch, international organizations such as the U.N., the media, governments, corporations, and credible individuals. Reports may include satellite and cell-phone images, data from radiation and chemical sensors, transcripts of conversations, records of purchases of potential weapons components, and any other relevant evidence.

Ubiquitous, omni-directional surveillance may remind some of George Orwell’s Oceania or Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, dystopias in which central authorities keep citizens under constant scrutiny. But the whole point of omni-directional surveillance is to eliminate traditional, Big Brother-ish agencies like the CIA and KGB, whose secrecy enables abuses of power. Surveillance will be omni-directional; the public will know everything about the police and other governmental authorities, and vice versa.

Privacy—and the right of civilians to bear arms–is a small price to pay for peace, especially since we’re headed toward radical transparency anyway.

Sounds good to me.

First post

So, I've started a blog.

The backstory: I finally started keeping a regular journal, after years of telling myself I should but never doing it. I found it useful to type up my Moleskine notebooks later on — this made it feel more structured, and it gave me a permanent backup. So then I toyed with the idea of putting it online. (Paper is so transient — you need to put content on the internet if you want it to really endure.)

But that wouldn't work. I'd need to censor so much that's too personal or too boring for other people — the result would be just a desiccated version of a diary. On further reflection, I realized that the thing to do is to cull whatever useable material happens to be in the Moleskines and then freely add to it — links, elaboration (I usually write on my lunch break, so I'm pressed for time), etc. So that's what I'm going to do.

I want the blog to be personal. After all, it's currently invite-only, though that's likely to change as I get more comfortable with the idea of having a blog. [UPDATE: I made the blog public about a week later.] But there are a couple things that "personal" decidedly does not mean here.

Does it mean embarrassing confessions? No — as Summer Anne Burton recently pointed out in her manifesto, you don't need those to be perfectly open and honest with people. Well, then, does it mean invading other people's privacy instead? Of course not. I'm sure I'll occasionally described interactions with other people (maybe you), but I'll try to keep these anonymous. (If I do write anything that you feel is an invasion of privacy, please let me know so I can fix it.)

Does "personal" mean a blog that's obsessively self-centered and introspective, confirming all those critics of blogs as internet-powered narcissism? I certainly hope so. I'll do my best.

One topic I'm going to try to avoid is the 2008 presidential race. Now, I am planning one post that will be a look back at the primary (there isn't a real primary left anymore), but beyond that, I don't want to be posting about "crucial moments" or "important insights" as they come up in this race. To the extent that I want to share any 2008-related links, I'll do so on Facebook or as comments on other blogs.

I don't plan to stick to any particular schedule. I certainly won't come close to my mom's record of posting every day for over four years. I'm writing this in a big Moleskine notebook over brunch at Mother's, to be typed up later. I want this to be a leisurely, contemplative blog, not a "Here's what's going on this second" blog. There's probably a greater excess of content in the world right now than at any previous point in history. We have a glut of content but a dearth of thought. I'll try to correct the balance.

And as you can see from that statement, I'm also trying to avoid the false modesty that's rampant on the blogosphere. So many blogs pitch themselves as "random babblings" or "incoherent rants." Why all the self-deprecation? Anyway, I'll have none of that here! I either want to do this well or not do it all. Let's see how it goes . . .