So much is possible with the digital tools we have today — Google provides information from billions of sources instantly, Facebook lets us stay in touch with friends around the globe, and Twitter allows anyone to broadcast their thoughts wherever they are. But with all this freedom comes a tradeoff, as Twitter’s censorship news reinforced for many this week: in each case, we are essentially at the mercy of the company whose network we are using (and being used by). If Google doesn’t like your name, it can block you; if Facebook doesn’t like your status it can delete it, and if Twitter gets a takedown request for your message, it will disappear. Our freedom of speech relies on these new information gatekeepers.

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it now has the ability to censor individual tweets within certain countries. Although the company made a point of stressing that it will only do this in extreme cases, where it is required to do so by law — in Germany, for example, where promoting Nazi principles is a crime — the news produced a wave of criticism from users and Twitter critics about how the information network was “committing social suicide” and caving in to dictators and authoritarian governments. Although Twitter said it would be as transparent as possible, and it appears to be possible to work around the blocking of tweets, the impact of the news was still negative for many.

#TwitterCensorship. Dear Twitter, I face so much censorship in Sudan as a journalist, you were my free and safe space. I'm grieving now.—
ريم ايس كريم (@ReemShawkat) January 27, 2012

Some wondered whether the move was connected to the investment by Saudi billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal, while others have been muttering conspiracy theories about Twitter censoring the #Occupy hashtag from its trending topics (which the company has repeatedly denied doing). For every balanced perspective from an observer like Jillian York at the Electronic Frontier Foundation or sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who argued that the policy was positive, there is a rant from someone about how Twitter has failed to uphold its promise as a bastion of free speech. Even high-profile Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei said that “if Twitter starts censoring, I’ll stop tweeting.”

Trust is the currency in our relationship with networks

Google has been riding the slippery slope of user trust recently as well, after criticism that its new personalized search features are an attempt to use its market power to promote its own Google+ social network — something that not only irritated competitors like Twitter and Facebook, but made some (including me) question whether the search giant had turned its back on the promise it made to users in 2004 to provide objective search results. The outcry over the changes then spilled over onto Google’s new privacy policy, which drew fire from privacy advocates and users despite the fact that little had changed.

The common thread in both of these incidents is trust, and the perception on the part of some users — and government regulators as well, in Google’s case — that Google and Twitter are both losing some of what made them unique: in Google’s case, an objectivity or purity in its results, and in Twitter’s case a sense of freedom and openness (rightly or wrongly) about the network and users’ ability to publish whatever and wherever they wish. Twitter’s changes seemed especially disappointing to some because of how powerful that freedom was during the events of the Arab Spring in Egypt and elsewhere.

Facebook may not have touched off any storms this week on the trust front, but it is an old hand at disappointing users, whether it’s by changing privacy settings without telling them, tracking users even when they aren’t logged in or removing content in what some allege is an attempt at censorship of certain topics. Google and Facebook have also irritated users by requiring the use of real names, which critics argue benefits the companies and their attempts to serve advertisers more than it does users.

Principles are important, but these are businesses too

The reality, of course, is that these are businesses with corporate interests, not triumphant defenders of free speech — and they each provide the bulk of their services for free, and make money by selling their users’ attention to advertisers. General counsel Alex Macgillivray says Twitter is committed to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and the company says it would never use its new powers to block tweets during an event like the Arab Spring, or prevent dissidents in Iran or China from using it to further their cause. But how do we know this for sure? We don’t.

The standard response when someone criticizes Google’s privacy policy or Twitter’s new tactics or Facebook’s changes is “Don’t use them.” But what is the alternative? Google isn’t just a search engine but a giant email provider and has a host of other services people need to do their jobs. Facebook and Twitter are tools that hundreds of millions of people use daily to connect and share with their friends and family — which is why “open source” alternatives such as Diaspora and Identi.ca have failed to gain much traction.

Dave Winer and other open-network advocates have repeatedly made the point that relying on a single corporation, or even several of them, for access to such important tools of communication is a huge risk. But what choice do we have? We either have to try harder to find more open alternatives, or we have to trust that Google and Twitter and Facebook are looking out for our best interests — and when they don’t, we have to make it clear that they are failing, and hold them to account.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jennifer Moo and Richard Engel, NBC

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• How publishers must adapt to multiple content discovery options
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

More information has come to light about Microsoft’s announcement Wednesday about its planned departure from exhibiting and holding a keynote speech at CES starting in 2013. Read more…

Neowin.net

A massive list of what Apple allows its employees to do and to not do in regards to leaking information, writing on social networks, speculating on rumors and more has, ironically, been leaked. Read more…

Neowin.net

The promise of the internet age is one of unparalleled access to information of all kinds, but it has also seen the rise of some powerful gatekeepers who control our access to that information — gatekeepers like Google, Facebook, Apple and even Twitter. All of these new information overlords have been in the news recently because of their control (or perceived control) over certain information, and the reaction from users has reinforced the tension between the freedom that these companies provide and the hoops through which we have to go in order to achieve it. How does that alter the way we see the world around us?

Google, for example, has been accused of censorship for removing certain terms from its “auto-complete” and Google Instant search features, including terms that relate to potential copyright-infringing services such as file-sharing network The Pirate Bay, or torrent search engines like Isohunt — both of which have been the subject of lawsuits and other actions because they refer people to infringing files. Google has said in the past that it does this because it is trying to help media companies combat piracy and so excludes terms that it believes are “closely associated” with piracy.

Is it really censorship when a search engine removes a reference to such sites from its auto-complete feature? After all, users can still search for those terms and find them in Google’s index quite easily. It’s not as though links to The Pirate Bay have been removed from Google’s index altogether (although the prospect exists that this could happen, if Congress passes laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act — which allows private companies to force search engines to remove sites from the doman-name system — or legal judgements like the one handed down in Texas this week hold up).

Is it censorship to exclude certain terms?

I raised this question on Twitter after a report in TorrentFreak about Google’s actions, and several people — including sociologist Zeynep Tufekci — said that it is a form of censorship, or at the very least a kind of “algorithmic gate-keeping.” While many people may not use auto-complete, others do, and the argument is that their experience will be reduced, even by a small amount, due to this filtering. Tufekci said these small kinds of changes can affect the way that people process information, in subtle but important ways.

Follow @techsoc@techsoc
Zeynep Tufekci

@mathewi It is important to discuss the emerging power of algorithms as new gatekeepers. Not as bad as old media, sure, but still powerful.

November 24, 2011 7:00 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

Google is an old hand at this kind of thing, since it has dominated the search market for the past half a decade at least, to the point where it is being investigated by the federal government for antitrust activities. Critics claim that it deliberately removes terms from its search results, or highlights others that promote its own products, and argue that the company should be forced to abide by some kind of legislated “search neutrality,” similar to the telecom-industry principle of net neutrality. But does Google really have a duty to provide unfiltered results? Is there a societal downside?

Twitter has come under fire for something similar — or at least the perception of something similar: advocates of the “Occupy” protest movement have complained bitterly over the past few weeks about how the network is excluding terms related to the movement from its trending topics list. Some users may never look at this list, but it has come to be seen by many as a badge of honor. During the recent removal of Occupy camps in Los Angeles and New York, there were repeated accusations of censorship against Twitter for allegedly removing those terms from its trending list.

Twitter says its algorithm is responsible

Twitter has said a number of times that it doesn’t filter trending topics to remove specific terms (although it does remove offensive words and phrases). Instead, the trending algorithm looks for short-term spikes in activity, and that tends to exclude terms that are being used a lot over a longer period of time. In an email message to me, Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said:

Trending topics are based on an algorithm that looks at spikes. Trends surface the fastest rising popular topics, or the hottest hot topics. They are not curated. Bottom line – we aren’t censoring #occupy terms.

Even Apple has been criticized for gatekeeping of a sort, with accusations this week that Siri — the voice-activated search assistant that appears as a feature in Apple’s latest iPhones — is deliberately refusing to provide users with information about abortion clinics. The company has apparently said that this is a glitch in the software, not a deliberate choice to exclude certain information, but the uproar over the incident speaks to a larger concern about Apple’s control over what its users do.

If you control the platform, you control the information flow

As Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues in a recent piece for MIT’s Technology Review, the company has an almost unprecedented level of control over what users do with its devices — and potentially even over what information they can access and how — because it controls the platform from end to end. What if Apple decided, or was forced by law, to prevent users from going to certain sites in Safari? Or from asking Siri to search for certain terms, such as The Pirate Bay? That may seem far-fetched, but it isn’t. Google could be forced to do the same kinds of things in Chrome.

Of course, people don’t have to use Google, or Twitter, or Apple, or Facebook. They are free to use other search engines and information networks, and many do — but the vast majority of people do not. As research has repeatedly shown, most people use defaults because they are easier (which is why search deals like the ones Firefox signs are so valuable). And that has the potential to erect barriers to free information flow, even if most users don’t realize that they exist.

What are the potential ramifications of that for society, as more and more people access the internet through proprietary platforms and devices, or become “locked in” psychologically to certain services? How are algorithms changing the way that we perceive the world around us? We are only just beginning to find out.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni and Stefan

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo
• Managing infinite choice: the new era of TV user interfaces

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Embedded devices all around us are turning data into insight through intelligent systems. How far have we come, and where are we headed?
Microsoft PressPass, Information for Journalists – Feature Stories

Thanks to smartphones and wireless networking and SMS and Twitter, we are all swimming in an ocean of real-time information — an ocean that can often seem overwhelming. Are new technologies going to help, or are they going to increase the problem? A presentation at the recent Society for News Design conference included a video called “The Storm Collection,” whose creators imagined a near future in which real-time updates about a news event would be shown in virtual heads-up displays on picture frames, car windshields and even eyeglasses. But would this kind of technology make our information-overload problem better or worse?

In the video (embedded below), the two creators — Matt Thompson, editorial product manager at National Public Radio, and writer/blogger Robin Sloan, who is also part of the media partnerships team at Twitter — talk about some of the technologies we already have for getting live updates about something like a tornado hitting a small town: SMS for text messaging people, mobile media websites with official information, Instagram for sharing photos of damage, and Twitter and Facebook for talking about the event and posting status updates, pictures, videos and so on.

Want to watch a video from an unmanned drone?

What might things look like a few years from now? Among other things, Sloan and Thompson imagine photo frames that include news-related and location-based updates about the person who appears in the picture (“Sarah checked in at Tornado Safety Zone”), televisions and video terminals that show a real-time video feed from unmanned drones flying over the damaged areas, and heads-up displays embedded in car windshields and eyeglasses that give live updates about damage near the user of the device (“Downed power lines in area, please use caution”).

I have no doubt that the things that Sloan and Thompson are describing are close to becoming reality, if they aren’t already. And the benefits of having a photo frame that could update you about the location of the loved one in the picture in case of emergency — by using GPS or a location-based service such as Foursquare, presumably — seem pretty obvious. And if anyone likes a constant stream of real-time news and information about the world, it’s me: I am connected to Twitter almost all the time (as my family will tell you), and I use Instagram and Facebook and plenty of other social services to keep track of what friends and family are doing.

But I wonder whether a world like the one portrayed in “The Storm Collection” would be a positive thing for many people, and particularly those who already feel overwhelmed by the waves of information that they are already subjected to — whether it’s 24-hour TV news programs, or Twitter and Facebook, or all the other real-time sources we are all bombarded by throughout the average day.

The biggest issue is one that media analyst and journalism professor Clay Shirky has described, when he said that the problem with the digital age isn’t so much information overload as it is “filter failure.” As Robin Sloan is no doubt aware, Twitter is a great example of this phenomenon in action: it allows you to follow the comments of hundreds of even thousands of people, as I do, but it doesn’t really provide all that many great ways of filtering that content so that it is manageable. Trending topics is one way, and lists are another, but neither of these provides a great solution.

How do we deal with “filter failure?”

Twitter isn’t alone in this — Facebook has implemented “smart lists” and now allows people to “subscribe” to others in the same way Twitter does, but in some ways this actually exaggerates the problem instead of solving it. Google+ has Circles, which allow users to create mini-groups that they can either follow or post their comments to, but many people don’t use them (just as many people don’t use Facebook or Twitter lists, which have been around for awhile now). As a result, it’s still easy to become overwhelmed by the “activity stream,” whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or Google.

To come back to “The Storm Collection” example, it looks as though Sloan and Thompson see most of the real-time news updates and unmanned-drone videos and so on coming from media outlets (in this case the Fresno Bee, owned by McClatchy). But the filtering problem exists for media companies as well — in fact in some ways it is worse, because they are taking in so many other sources of content in addition to Twitter and SMS and photos. And this is complicated by another phenomenon that Sloan and Thompson dealt with in a 2004 video project called EPIC 2014: namely, the explosion of “user-generated content” or citizen journalism that blogging and other tools allow.

As a post from a BBC “user-generated content” editor described earlier this year, filtering and making sense of this never-ending stream of information is not an easy task: the UGC desk at the British broadcaster has a large staff that try to verify and “curate” news reports from Twitter and Flickr and YouTube about events such as the revolutions in Egypt. Andy Carvin of NPR has turned his personal Twitter stream into a one-man newswire of curated and verified “citizen journalism,” but even his output is so massive in some cases that it needs a second set of curators using tools like Storify to filter what he has already filtered.

In the presentation to the Society of News Design, Sloan said: “If the world is suddenly this new terrain full of all these new screens and all these new ways to get stories out there, [journalists] should be in the business of identifying rich new territory, sending out scouts, and seizing it.” In the end, the problem may not be identifying or seizing these new territories, but coming up with ways to prevent them from becoming just another piece of flotsam in a never-ending sea of real-time content.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Ed Kohler

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising
• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• Facebook and the future of our online lives

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Sources close to Nokia suggest that the Finnish company may be seeking to create another operating system for itself in order to retain leadership in the ‘feature phone’ market. Read more…

Neowin.net

A Microsoft employee who leaked information relating to an unannounced Nokia Windows Phone device has resigned from the company after being told he would be let go for improper use of social media. Read more…

Neowin.net

Sony has announced it has hired Philip R. Reitinger, a former member of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to be its new head of the company’s global information security and privacy division. Read more…

Neowin.net

Google’s image search engine started to show additional information about photos after clicking the results. The landing page’s sidebar includes EXIF data: camera, settings, focal length, flash usage and exposure bias.

“Additional details are found from within the image file, often saved there by the digital camera that took the picture or the application that generated the image. This data can also be manually added or changed after the image has been created. Google doesn’t create or change this data in images created by others. The data is saved using the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) specification and can include details about the type of camera that took the image, the camera settings (like aperture, focal length, exposure length, and flash settings), and the copyright and usage rights associated with the image by the person who created or edited the image,” explains Google.

Another change is that you can click “more sizes” for other versions of the image and “similar images” for visually related images. The sidebar also includes the search result’s snippet.

The sidebar can also include a list of related searches, which offer a lot of information about the image and help you find similar images:

Google should also add links to the previous and the next search result so that you don’t have to go back to the list of results.

Google Operating System