The end of practical obscurity

by | Tuesday, August 05, 2008

There is a somewhat troubling story in NYTimes a couple of days ago: (If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?) about CriminalSearches.com, a free service that lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States! This is part of a growing trend of how technology removes / erodes people’s privacy. The creators of the system argue that they are doing nothing wrong, and that this information was always available anyway. “We are just trying to provide what’s already out there in an easier fashion, for free,” Mr. Lane said. “We think it’s pretty helpful to families.” However the potential for misuse is huge.

An important weakness is that the data at some level is inconsistent and suspect. Not the least because jurisdictions vary a great deal in what they records they maintain. Some track traffic violations while others do not. Moreover there are many errors in these databases as well and already some evidence that freely available information (that was once much harder to obtain) has been used in illegal ways. For instance,

A recent investigation at the Justice Department demonstrates how once-obscure, now easily accessible public information can be abused in egregious ways. The investigative report by the department’s inspector general and internal ethics office said government lawyers mined sites like Tray.com and OpenSecrets.org, which report on individual political contributions, to discover political affiliations of job candidates.

If you find all this more than a bit scary, that’s not surprising. But welcome to this new world of information – a world where information that was hard to get at is now easily available. The NYTimes article reminded me of two phrases that can help us understand the change that is occurring here, and these are “practical obscurity” v.s. “ambient findability” (a term popularized by findability expert Peter Morville, and introduced to me by Leigh Wolf).

As the article says, “Academics have a term for the old inaccessibility of records like those for criminal convictions: ‘practical obscurity.’ Once upon a time, people in search of this data had to hire private investigators to navigate byzantine courthouses and rudimentary filing or computer systems, and to deal with often grim-faced legal clerks… In a way, the obstacles to getting criminal information maintained a valuable, ignorance-fueled civil peace. Convicts could start fresh after serving their time without strangers knowing their pasts, and there was little risk that unsophisticated researchers could confuse people with identical names.”

This idea of “practical obscurity” is increasingly being replaced by the idea of “ambient findability” which Peter Morville, describes as “a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.”

Practical obscurity v.s. Ambient findability… Hmmm…

Topics related to this post: Good | Bad Design | News | Politics | Representation | Technology | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Senseless signage

Great examples of funny, absurd and weird signage from across the world. Archived for use in my 817 or 917 classes. Check out Senseless signage, parts I through 10.

Post-lunch session: Geetha Narayanan

Geetha Narayanan, Director Mallya Aditi International School and Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, is someone I have wanted to meet for a long time. One of the pleasures of of this conference is getting an opportunity to hear her speak ... and I was not...

Ask-ing Cuil questions of Google

How do we evaluate a search engine? Chris Wilson attempts to answer this question (with help from the crowd) in his article on Slate "How To Talk to a Search Engine: Three queries to help decide if Google or Cuil or Ask is right for you?" The three search items he...

White paper on TPACK

The Commonwealth Educational Media Center for Asia (CEMCA) recently published a report on ICT Integrated Teacher Education Models. One of the pieces in the report was by us. Here it is below: Koehler, M.J., Mishra, P., Akcoaglu, M. Rosenberg, J.M. (2013)....

Mind(ful) Wandering & Creativity: New article

Mind(ful) Wandering & Creativity: New article

Illustration by Punya Mishra We have covered a wide range of issues related to creativity, technology and learning in our almost decade-long series that we write for the journal TechTrends. Over the past few years we have conducted almost 30+ interviews with some of...

How to identify AI generated text?

How to identify AI generated text?

I think I solved the biggest educational challenge of our time, namely: How do we recognize AI generated text from human-created ones? Just to provide some context, the advent of large language models and generative AI have made it essential that we, as educators,...

TPACK as one solution

TPACK as one solution

The Consortium of School Networking (COSN) is one of the leading associations for school system technology leaders. COSN recently released the first of three publications in their series on Driving K-12 Innovation: Hurdles 2019. The goal of this series is to...

Photo triplets

Christopher Bowhuis (a student in our summer on-campus MAET program) provided me a two minute tutorial on cloning myself, or anybody else for that matter. I had to go home and try it out with my kids (and a few of their friends who just happened to show up). Below are...

Cyborgs are us!

Are we becoming cyborgs? William Saletan has a recent article in Slate titled Full Metal Socket about this issue. As he says: Cyborgs aren't studs from the future. They're old folks. As we age, our parts wear out. That used to mean immobility or death. Today, we can...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *