The Peep Diaries

Interesting post in the Utne Reader Science and Technology blog. It starts talking about apes spying on each other having sex and moves on through Facebook’s Beacon debacle, “the attention economy”, the new book by Daniel Solove about reputation, and finally discussion about how all this is leading to less and less in terms of expectation when it comes to privacy.

Hey my article on How We Learned to Love Surveillance, published in the Walrus Magazine, is now available on the newsstands. You can read it online here but please also consider picking up a copy or subscribing since we need to support Canadian magazines!

Okay, all this week I’ve been having conversations with Private Detective Steven Rambam. He runs the Pallorium detective agency. He’s truculent and honest and probably a little bit crazy which makes him perfect to be part of the whole Peep project. He does lectures on the death of privacy and specializes in digital detection. Oh and did I mention that he’s also hunted Nazis and been arrested by the FBI? (they dropped the charges).

He agreed to investigate me and report back what he discovers. He says he will find out everything there is to know about me including pictures of my friends and tape recordings of them talking about my most embarrassing moments. Should be sweet! Naturally all his recordings and files will go up on peephal.com once as it develops. Stay tuned my friends….

The plan right now is to have him unveil the results of the investigation at the HOPE (hackers on planet earth) conference in New York in July with me on stage in front of a live audience who has gathered to hear Steven talk about the death of privacy. Naturally we need to get the whole thing on tape for the doc and book. I have to talk to the producers about this and hopefully it will work.

Okay, so I’m excited. I mean Steven actually promised to give me a “digital colophony.” It’s just what I’ve always wanted.

Listen to an interview with Steven here. (It’s the 2nd half of the show.)

Couldn't resist one more post before I go. There's a new Kleenex site that harnesses the energies of peep to the marketing of tissue. It's called Let It Out and it's basically videos and short posts by anonymous individuals venting about their problems. It's like Post Secret meets Hallmark. Corporations are jumping on the peep bandwagon like there's no tomorrow. Why not? People all over the world generate the content for a fraction of the price a traditional campaign would cost and they just sit back and enjoy the branding. It makes you want to cry. It makes you want to...Let It Out! I don't have time right now but when I get back from vacation I'll try posting some possibly "inappropriate" letting it out posts to the Kleenex site and let you know how long they last. You do the same and posts the links in the comments.

Interesting New York Time article here – Nielsen Looks Beyond TV . Basically the tv ratings giant needs to branch out because fewer and fewer people are watching conventional tv in a conventional way. So they want to track web usage, cell phone usage, shopping etc. Problem is, people don’t necessarily want all that stuff tracked. Here are a few choice quotes:

“Nielsen’s goal is eventually to coax all its television households to agree to Web monitoring as well.”

This month, Nielsen announced an investment in a small company in California that tracks people’s eye movement, brain waves and perspiration while they watch television. Nielsen had already acquired several smaller measurement companies, like NetRatings, which tracks Web surfing and is now called Nielsen Online.

“One of the things we will do better is provide a broad view of how a consumer goes through their day,” said Susan D. Whiting, executive vice president of Nielsen and the executive leading A2/M2. “Broadly, it’s about how are consumers spending their time, how are they consuming media, whether it be TV or music or movies or whatever they’re doing online. And as that content and all that activity moves from device to device, how can we measure that?”

Article goes on to note that stiff competition Neilsen faces as various different companies fight with each other to track the minutiae of all kinds of media usage. It’s interesting that the big problem Neilsen is having is getting people to agree to have all their different activities monitored — agreeing to have your tv or online use monitored is one thing but both plus cell use starts to feel a bit what…Big Brother? Invasive? Scary?

We are doing the work of peep for corporate entities pretty much daily, but so long as it is buried in the quotidian of shopping for groceries or doing a google search for a decent Ethiopian restaurant we don’t notice. At the same time it’s probably a positive that when people are actually asked if they’d like their media use to be monitored they tend to say no.

Some good peep material on CNN today. first up, we’ve got a “news” report on a nanny mishandling 7 month old twins. needless to say, there is ample nannycam footage showing the twins being swung around and left to fend for themselves on the couch. the actual public need to see this material is somewhat doubtful though the reporter tries to salvage her credibility by ending with something about how the mom wants other families to know that they can also get nannycams and bust their caregivers.

Next up, a couple of minutes of security camera school bus action featuring what is proudly advertised as a school bus brawl. Watch burly bus driver lady and burly teens pull hair. Again, there’s an attempt to pretend this is news, not voyeurism, by ending the segment with a 4 second clip of a mom saying something like, “I’m shocked.”

I’m not.

Here’s an interesting bit of news reported by AP – Google to Store Health Records. Many people already immediately go to Google after they get back from the doctor with a diagnosis of everything from depression to cancer to cataracts. So there’s a kind of weird logic to it. It also theoretically makes sense to have our health records online so that any doctor anywhere could access them, though the image of the doc in the ER surfing your records is a weird one, hmmm…okay…allergic to nuts, ah, and here’s his blog and his online dating profile…interesting stuff he’s into, better check him for STDs while I’m at it…anyway, okay, you get the picture. The big point here is that it’s now time for us to think of some better system of making this potentially life saving info available other than 3rd party for-profit corporations who make a profit off, at least in part, reselling information about us. In Canada, for instance, where medicine is provided by the provinces, some kind of standardized government system could be imagined that 1) provides this service to everyone regardless of their access to the internet and their ability to sign up for a Google account and 2) doesn’t link it to everyday activities like logging in to your gmail. I mean how many people leave their email account open throughout the day? Overall, though, there are so many problems with how to keep this kind of material private and strictly between doctor and patient I’m frankly amazed that Google is even going there.

So a long gap between my first post and the next two posts. That’s because the launch date for the blog got put off until Sally (director of the peep culture documentary) got back from Paris. You see, the doc people want to film the launch of the blog. So everyone’s coming over today to capture this exciting moment. I spent the morning cleaning my office. You can see the floor now. It’s nice. I’ll take a picture.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit anxious about the whole thing. I’ve never blogged or really had much about my personal life out there. As a writer I like to re-read and re-think everything I put out there. I’ll need to get over that. Plus, of course, the whole idea of developing an audience of people interested in peeping my life. I can honestly say that I have no idea what that will feel like. So we’ll see.