Internet Marketing (Humour)

People often ask privacy professionals how they lock down their PCs to prevent loss of their data, tracking etc, or whether they use Facebook, Twitter etc...well the truth is, privacy professionals tend to be quite selective on what they post, and in some cases, leave one or two browsers or PCs deliberately open for various reasons. One is to game advertisers, or maybe to examine what advertisers and marketers are actually doing.

One thing I have noticed is that certain retailers, for example Gigantti of Finland comes to mind, obviously pass my purchase details on to some marketer/advertiser. I don't ever remember being asked to opt-out of this, but, I do now get adverts for the things I've just bought. They could redirect their advertising budget and remove a few middle managers and save a pile of cash instead...

Then there's things like this:

I must admit I love these; I never click on them, but without such crap as this, the Internet would be a lot less fun...so let's start.

Top left...doctors are annoyed at a 53 yo mother because she's found a miracle cure to wrinkles. I'm actually more surprised that it isn't cosmetic companies who are annoyed - surely they're the ones who'll be put out of business. I think doctors (even cosmetic surgeons!) have much more important things to worry about. Then you have to ask, "Who is this woman?"  Surely if she's upset so many doctors and discovered a miracle cure for wrinkles why isn't she on magazines, TV or even Oprah?!

Top middle...so women don't want other diets, just a pill that is exceptionally powerful. I guess this is some kind of diet pill and again I'm sure dieting companies would be more than interested in this, but...On the other hand I'm not sure that most women want to go from being normal and healthy to a misproportioned anorexic.

Top right...same again, except a selfie-obsessed, European looking blonde (so it isn't just asian women who know about this) receives a malformed, badly photoshopped lower body by using some secret Asian fat burning trick...

Bottom left...SIPOO?!?! If there are millionaires in Sipoo with that kind of yacht then they're probably getting its wreckage salvaged from the islands in the archipelago after they've run aground. Monaco would have been better idea with that size of yacht and the climate better for all those trees and the swimming pool. Nice use of IP geo-location to personalise that advert to me; almost had me fooled for a moment.

Bottom middle...I have those vegetables in my fridge: broccoli and coriander...sorry, kale and cilantro. Another interesting medical claim and I'm left wondering how those vegetables target those specific areas of your body and how this hasn't been discovered before given that we humans do eat quite a variety of vegetables. I wonder what would happen if you would dilute these vegetables in a big vat of water, shake it, dilute it again, shake it and so on until only a trace of the memory of the vegetables is left?

Bottom right...this is easy for a privacy professional, the EU have already come to your rescue with the Right to be Forgotten. Though I guess if getting out of your Ferrari while posting for the waiting paparazzi is your thing, then the right to be forgotten is probably way down on your list of things to worry about. Unless of course there's that picture in Hello magazine of your looking frumpy and overweight...in which cases I can recommend a miracle pill and two vegetables to help, and if there's any left over skin after the diet, there's a 53yo mother you can talk to; assuming you can get past the rioting throngs of doctors baying for her blood...

Marketing and advertising with a touch of personalisation, the Internet wouldn't be the same without it :-)

Privacy Checklists and a Study in Ontario

Not that particular study in Ontario, but another in Ontario regarding the Surgical Checklist and its "ineffectiveness", which was rebutted by many including Atul Gwande which ended with this quote:

Perhaps, however, this study will prompt greater attention to a fundamentally important question for health care reform broadly: how you implement an even simple change in systems that reduces errors and mortality – like a checklist. For there is one thing we know for sure: if you don’t use it, it doesn’t work.

Relating this back to my experiences in deploying and using checklists for privacy is that THEY ARE NOT A TOOL FOR IMPROVING PRIVACY DIRECTLY but a TOOL for organising your workflows, your actions and ensuring that all members of a team are actively cross-checking each other; and even then this is just a small part of the overall effect. Let us for a moment rewrite Gwande's statement a little:

Perhaps, however, this study will prompt greater attention to a fundamentally important question for privacy engineering: how you implement an even simple change in systems that reduces errors and non compliance– like a checklist. For there is one thing we know for sure: if you don’t use it, it doesn’t work.

In the paper [1] (emphasis mine)

The checklist approach to privacy protection has been debated.[24] Checklists have become important safety elements in airplane and medical procedures and are quite common in security auditing. However, their utility for privacy remains questionable. It might be possible to design privacy checklists for frequent and standardized use cases, but the breadth of potential projects makes a standard checklist for everything an unlikely tool. 

[24]  Ian Oliver, “Safety Systems – Defining Moments” Available at http://ijosblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/systems-safety-defining-moments.html

Indeed the two paragraphs on checklists and privacy impact assessments fails to properly understand the former and compares it against the latter which is a different kind of tool altogether. In fact, a PIA should be done and this would be ensured or reminded by having it included as a point on a checklist for privacy.

Indeed no mention was made, nor has been made of any "standardised checklist". In fact there is a capitalised statement on the bottom of the checklist:

THIS CHECKLIST IS NOT INTENDED TO BE COMPREHENSIVE. ADDITIONS AND MODIFICATIONS TO FIT LOCAL PRACTICE ARE ENCOURAGED.

Which can be read about in this article published back in February.

The point here in both cases: surgical and privacy engineering is that the checklist needs to be accompanied by a procedural and "societal" change for it be successful. One only needs to read about Pronovost's work with a simple checklist and the changes surrounding that to understand how checklists work in practice - that and the other experiences presented in Gawande's excellent book on the subject: The Checklist Manifesto. Our experiences can be read about in the presentation Flying Planes, Surgery and Privacy.

* * *

References:

[1] Cavoukian, Cronk, Shapiro (2014) Privacy Engineering: Proactively Embedding Privacy, by Design

Systems Safety - Defining Moments

As I've been concentrating on "safety improvements", or at least techniques for the improvement of system I've tended to concentrate on four areas:

• Aviation
• Industrial
• Medical (specifically surgical)
• Software Engineering (specifically information privacy)

The parallels between theses areas when it comes to what each define as "safety" and the techniques should be obvious. However the question remains what actually triggered each of these respective areas to take a more inherent safety approach and then what will trigger a similar approach with regards to information safety?

 

Above Diagram Key: Y-Axis: relative degree of safety embedded into that discipline, X-Axis, year of time since seminal incident.

Aviation safety's seminal moment was the 1935 crash of a Boeing Model 299 aircraft during a presentation flight. Instead of blaming the pilots, effort was made to understand the causes of the accident and develop techniques to help prevent similar accidents in the future.

For industrial safety the seminal moment was the 1974 Flixborough Disaster in the UK. This resulted in work on the design of industrial plants and the development of the notion of "inherent safety".

Surgical safety has quite a long tradition especially with the development of anaesthetic safety from the 1960s and the introduction of a proper systems approach. However anesthetists seem not to feature prominently as surgeons and doctors so the fame would probably go to Peter Pronovost et.al. for the Central Line checklist. This was probably one of the major contributors to the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist discussed in detail in Atul Gawande's book The Checklist Manifesto which brings together much of the above incidents. 

If you're still in doubt maybe Atul Gawande's article in the New Yorker magazine entitled The Checklist: If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do? (Dec 10, 2007) might help.

Getting back to the crux of this article, what is the incident that will cause the wholesale change in attitudes and techniques to software engineering that instills such a sense of discipline that we can eradicate errors to such a degree that we could compare ourselves favourably with other disciplines?

The increasingly frequent hacking and information leaks? The NSA wiretapping and mass surveillance? Facebook and Google's privacy policies? None of these have had any lasting effect upon the very core of software engineering if any at all. Which either means that we place such low value on the safety of our information or that the economics of software are so badly formulated in society that the catastrophe would have to be so huge that it would have to cause societal change?

Interestingly, in software engineering and computer science we're certainly not short on techniques for improving the quality and reliability of the systems we're developing: formal methods (eg: Alloy, B, Z, VDM etc), proof, simulation, testing, modelling (in general). What we probably lack is the simplicity of a checklist to guide us through the morass of problems we encounter. In this last respect, this is why I think we're more like surgeons that modern day aviators; or, maybe some of us are like the investigators to the 1935 Boeing crash and other aviation heroes learning their trade?

Facebook and Twitter....instead....

It was one of those funnily serendipitous things that connect everything together...first of all it started "playing" with XPlane 10....a damned good (understatement!) simulator and I suppose the next best thing to actually owning your own aircraft or holding a pilots license...anyway, flying around with some VOR or VOR navigation I ended up in Shannon --- and yes, I did land the plane.

Then I started wondering what flies out of Shannon now - the Shannon Stop-Over has been gone a very long time - and so I ended up looking for the Shannon departures board. Noticing the BA001 and 003 flights there - London City to JFK via Shannon on the outbound leg on an Airbus A318, I was wondering what that service was like.

Read a few passenger reports and noticed a comment about it being like the Pan Am Lunar Shuttle inside - certainly the photos of the all business-class seating look like it.

Which brings me to a clip of the said Lunar Shuttle from Kubrik's 2001:


Which then got me thinking:

1. The Blue Danube or more correctly An der schönen blauen Donau is a beautiful piece of music perfectly suited to a space docking
2. Kubrik was a genius
3. A.C. Clarke's 2001 is also a piece of genius
4. We had vision in the 1960's of a future where space travel and space-stations might be common place
5. We got Twitter and Facebook instead....

 ....which allows me to write about what we could have had instead of having it....

Grothendieck Biography

Mathematics is full of "characters", Grigori Perelman, Pierre de Fermat, Évariste Galois, Paul Erdős, Andrew Wiles** to name just a few and each having their own, unique, wondrous story about their dedication to their mathematical work and life.

Perhaps none more so than Alexander Grothendieck exemplifies the mathematician and since 1991 lived as a recluse in Andorra. However since the body of work and his contribution to mathematics, particularly, category theory and topology has been almost legendary he retains a great mystery about him.

In order to understand Groethendieck and possibly the mind of the mathematician a series of biographies of Groethendieck are being written by Leila Schneps. The current draft and extracts can be found on her pages about this work.

I'll quote a paragraph from Chapter 1 of Volume II, that gives a flavour of Groethendieck's work and approach to mathematics:

Taken altogether, Grothendieck’s body of work is perceived as an immense tour de force, an accomplishment of gigantic scope, and also extremely difficult both as research and for the reader, due to the effort necessary to come to a familiar understanding of the highly abstract objects or points of view that he systematically adopts as generalizations of the classical ones. All agree that the thousands of pages of his writings and those of his school, and the dozens and hundreds of new results and new proofs of old results stand as a testimony to the formidable nature of the task.

This is truly a work at a scale a magnitude more detailed than, say Simon Singh's fascinating documentation about Wiles' work and proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Suffice to say, I look forward to reading it. Maybe Simon Singh should make a documentary about Groethendieck?

** I credit Andrew Wiles with inspiring me to study for my PhD back in 1995

The Elusive Big Idea

An excellent article from the New York Times on "The Elusive Big Idea"; the thesis that in today's society we just don't care about ideas anymore...

The Elusive Big Idea
By NEAL GABLER
Published: August 13, 2011

...

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

...

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

The post-idea world has been a long time coming, and many factors have contributed to it. There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests.

...

Scary thought indeed that "thinking is no longer done"; the implications of this will extend everywhere and affect every facet of our existence.

A further quote from the article:

...we get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show. While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe.

A direct reference to Twitter and social media overall - the nature of communication is changing such that if you can't get your idea in 140 characters no-one is going to read it - assuming that anyone reads and thinks about what is actually contained in those 140 characters.

Is this some kind of existentialist crisis for ideas? And finally as a conclusion:

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

As Levitt and Dubner state in the Freakonomics series of books ( see: Superfreakonomics ) humans need incentive, and if ideas don't provide any incentive in either their thinking, development or execution to our narcissism then those ideas have no value. The problem here is rather self-referential in that narcissists aren't interested in anyone else's ideas - be honest who reads anyone's Twitter feeds or Facebook comments and partakes in deep rhetoric?