A couple weeks ago the Google Books Settlement fairness hearing took place in New York City, where Judge Denny Chin heard dozens of oral arguments discussing the settlement’s implications for competition, copyright law, and privacy. The settlement raises a number of very challenging legal questions, and Judge Chin’s decision, expected to come down later this spring, is sure to be a page-turner no matter how he rules.
My work on the Google Books Settlement has focused on reader privacy concerns, which have been a major point of contention between Google and civil liberties groups like EFF, ACLU, and CDT. While I agree with these groups that existing legal protections for sensitive user information stored by cloud computing providers are inadequate, I do not believe that reader privacy should factor into the court’s decision on whether to approve or reject the settlement.
I elaborated on reader privacy in an amicus curiae brief I submitted to the court last September. I argued that because Google Books will likely earn a sizable portion of its revenues from advertising, placing strict limits on data collection (as EFF and others have advocated) would undercut Google’s incentive to scan books, ultimately hurting the very authors whom the settlement is supposed to benefit. While the settlement is not free from privacy risks, such concerns aren’t unique to Google Books nor are they any more serious than the risks surrounding popular Web services like Google search and Gmail. Comparing Google Book Search to brick-and-mortar libraries is inapt, and like all cloud computing providers, Google has a strong incentive to safeguard user data and use it only in ways that benefit users and advertisers.
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Anyone interested in the long-running debate over how to balance online privacy with anonymity and free speech, whether Section 230‘s broad immunity for Internet intermediaries should be revised, and whether we need new privacy legislation must read the important and enthralling NYT Magazine piece “The Trolls Among Us” by Mattathias Schwartz about the very real problem of Internet “trolls“–a term dating to the 1980s and defined as “someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.”
While all trolls “do it for the lulz” (“for kicks” in Web-speak) they range from the merely puckish to the truly “malwebolent.” For some, trolling is essentially senseless web-harassment or “violence” (e.g., griefers), while for others it is intended to make a narrow point or even as part of a broader movement. These purposeful trolls might be thought of as the Yippies of the Internet, whose generally harmless anti-war counter-cutural antics in the late 1960s were the subject of the star-crossed Vice President Spiro T. Agnew‘s witticism:
And if the hippies and the yippies and the disrupters of the systems that Washington and Lincoln as presidents brought forth in this country will shut up and work within our free system of government, I will lower my voice.
But the more extreme of these “disrupters of systems” might also be compared to the plainly terroristic Weathermen or even the more familiar Al-Qaeda. While Schwartz himself does not explicitly draw such comparisons, the scenario he paints of human cruelty is truly nightmarish: After reading his article before heading to bed last night, I myself had Kafka-esque dreams about complete strangers invading my own privacy for no intelligible reason. So I can certainly appreciate how terrifying Schwartz’s story will be to many readers, especially those less familiar with the Internet or simply less comfortable with the increasing readiness of so many younger Internet users to broadcast their lives online.
But Schwartz leaves unanswered two important questions. The first question he does not ask:
Just how widespread is trolling? However real and tragic for its victims, without having some sense of the scale of the problem, it is difficult to answer the second question Schwartz raises but, wisely, does not presume to answer: What should be done about it? The policy implications of Schwartz’s article might be summed up as follows: Do we need new laws or should we focus on some combination of enforcing existing laws, user education and technological solutions? While Schwartz focuses on trolling, the same questions can be asked about other forms of malwebolence–best exemplified by the high-profile online defamation Autoadmit.com case, which demonstrates the effectiveness of existing legal tools to deal with such problems.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.