From: William Gunn <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 10:38:05 -0700

Sean, you're right to be worried about surveillance and correct that
opt-out is a poor solution. However, let's not lose sight of something
here, lest we be accused of hysteria and lose credibility.

The NSA got access to *private* emails and all other communications by
tapping into inter-ISP data connections directly (with assistance from
AT&T, Comcast, et al).

Pearson just searched Twitter like any other public citizen.

Best,

William Gunn
Head of Academic Outreach
Mendeley | @mrgunn
http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/william-gunn |



On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 10:43 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 09:57:18 -0500
>
> Perplexing indeed. For the record, it is possible to think both Google
> and Pearson are evil. And it is also possible to make a distinction
> between a free search and email provider I voluntarily use and a
> testing monopoly that I (or my children or my students) am forced by
> the state to comply with monitoring me in a separate space and using
> their surveillance to get me in trouble with a public agency.
> Admittedly, with Snowden's revelations, some of these distinctions are
> getting murky - I volunteered to use gmail/google search/etc. and
> Facebook, but I didn't assume the NSA (or private contractors like
> Booze Allen) would so easily gain access to my private data. Perhaps I
> should I have, but I didn't. On that front, there are plenty of
> organizations also pushing for stronger legislation on data privacy. I
> support their efforts too.
>
> Moral norms are not something we just write down and all agree with.
> They emerge from struggle, often against entrenched institutional
> power of one kind or another. This anxiety over Pearson is not in
> contrast to the anxiety over Google or Facebook or even Twitter -
> which just auctioned off a bunch of its "data" to some miners; it is
> of a piece with these anxieties and dismissing them with the fact that
> we are all "complicit" with their platforms is hardly acceptable. In
> the 17th century, Hobbes said we were all complicit and consenting
> citizens simply because we didn't leave the land of the Leviathan.* If
> that's your idea of democracy, there are some folks in Silicon Valley
> that would like to hire you to do some PR work at the next ALA.
>
> http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/
>
> Though, it's worth noting these students aren't able to give consent
> to Pearson and their parents have only the ability to give their voice
> through exit - e.g. through the opt out movement - a la Hobbes which,
> as Hirschman pointed out several decades ago, is a terrible way to
> actually improve institutions, but is precisely the model advocated by
> your Chicago school colleagues. Should we simply give up on the idea
> of a public sphere? A private sphere? Any public regulation of the
> private market? A state and market governed by norms we agree to
> rather than formulated through boilerplate click through licenses and
> free market assumptions of all agents having equal power in that
> contract? Since you are on this forum - which is basically constituted
> as a space to help equal out the power of the contracting parties in
> the increasingly skewed U.S. library market - I seriously doubt you'd
> agree with that, so why is it so different when we are private
> citizens online?
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:43 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > From: Michael Magoulias <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 02:57:51 +0000
> >
> > This thread continues to perplex, but it's a useful indication of how
> > contradictory the collective thinking is when it comes to assessing
> > activities on the web. Anyone who is seriously concerned about the
> > public at large being subject to digital surveillance should focus
> > their attentions on the organizations that are the real offenders,
> > namely Google and FaceBook. (And they certainly shouldn't be using
> > Gmail.) What Google and FB do is infinitely more pernicious than this
> > trivial incident regarding Pearson.
> >
> > There seems to be a drive to consign the same activity to "good" or
> > "bad" buckets depending on how we feel about the actors. If you feel
> > Pearson is evil, then their near-monopoly over standardized testing
> > and monitoring of users will also be evil. If you think Google is
> > good, or perhaps simply not evil, then their even greater
> > near-monopoly over search and their far more successful track-record
> > of invisibly stalking their users and monetizing the results will get
> > a free pass.
> >
> > To me, this just shows that this is all still too new for us to be
> > able to form coherent moral norms governing how people should be
> > treated once it is possible to reduce them to a set of highly
> > "actionable" data points, especially when they are seemingly so
> > complicit in this reduction.