7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
1/24
logo
Published on open Democracy News Analysis (http://www.opendemocracy.net)
The liberty of the networked (pt 2)
By Tony Curzon Price,
Created 2009-02-12 21:13
1 [0]
In part 1 of this essay [0] I used Benjamin Constant's characterisation of the modern,
individualised liberties as being dependent on the republican liberty of collective self-
determination to characterise the ways in which technology can be seen to be simultaneously
freedom enhancing while also dauntingly threatening. The progressive tech-topians,
recognisable today as they were at the start of the industrial revolution, do not see either how
hyper-individualism might lead to an atomised, dominated subjection or how the new facility for
community-making might generate the tyrannies of society from which modernity promised toliberate us. This second part of the essay elaborates on these dangers. A final third part will
emphasise the inescapably political and collective task of preserving liberty.
The clouds gather [0]
The tyranny of society [0]
Modern/Libero-Phobic: Kafka and Orwell [0]
What about Hobbes? [0] How Web2.0 technology contributes to the Kafka effect [0]
Bibliography [0]
Zittrain (2008) [0] and Benkler (2006) [0] is of
the netowrked computer as a tool of thefreedom of the ancients. It is hard not to be
taken up in the enthusiasm. The wired world
enhances both the freedom of the ancients
and the freedom of the moderns. How can
we not be at the point that Mill thought the
railway and the printing press had brought?
The world, and not just England, can now
Page 1 of 24
http://www.opendemocracy.net/http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Tony_Curzon_Price.jsphttp://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Tony_Curzon_Price.jsphttp://www.opendemocracy.net/7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
2/24
become that mythical Athens that Mill so
desired, surely?
Zittrain (2008) [0], however, is not a Millian optimist. His very ambiguous title tells it all: ``The
Future of the Internet (and how to stop it)". Stop what? The Future or The Internet? Zittrain
(2008) [0]'s is the forecast that, soon, the Internet could end up as the first "self-closing opensystem". The impetus for closure comes, for Zittrain, from the wrong-headed approach to
solving the problems that open systems inevitably, he argues, throw up: 2 [0]
[1]
Page 2 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
3/24
The self-closure of generativity.
Zittrain (2008) [1] argues that companies will be tempted to ``lock-down" open systems in the
face of malware, spyware and privacy breaches. Governments will be called on to regulate,
imposing privacy laws (which they will exempt themselves from, naturally). The Internet will be
balkanised as telephone companies create ``safe havens", networks that bar the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing, privilege one sort of traffic over another, and generally tether the appliances
and software to avoid the ills and risks of openness. The game consoles and smart phones are
a Trojan horse. Sony and Microsoft have designed their gaming platforms to be walled gardens
of computing. The iPhone and other ultra-portable computers are an alliance of consumer
electronics with telecoms monopolies, none of whom seem to want to make the business
``mistake" IBM made in outsourcing and opening the critical pieces of the PC.
This is a story of how the Internet moves from being a privileged domain for the freedom of the
ancients to being a battleground for the libero-phobia of the moderns. He describes the
tendency towards a move from the bottom left quadrant to the top right. Zittrain's own schema is
of a move from ``emergent hierarchy" to ``top-down polyarchy" as a principle of organisation.
[2]
Keeping my distance from a useful taxonomy.
Zittrain's solution for countering this trend is to return, as often as possible and with as muchimagination as possible, to the expert self-regulation that solved the Internet's problems in the
past (Curzon Price, 2008 [2]). Before government regulation, let us find `communitarian"
Page 3 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
4/24
solutions. Zittrain, for example, suggests that we try to address real privacy concerns in the
same sort of way that the early web controlled crawlers with robots.
As we travel with phones, making payments, with store cards we leave a trace through the ether
as surely as any click-trace through the web. Early on in the history of the web, automated
services--for example indexing services--started crawling web servers automatically for
information. How could a webmaster signal that content should not be indexed? For example,
on openDemocracy.net, we want our editorialised articles to be indexed, but not our free-formforum discussions. When a Google search returns an openDemocracy address, we want it to be
for a piece of content that we have vetted, as part of our brand management.
The solution to the problem--the creation of the robots.txt de facto standard--is described by
Zittrain (2008) [2] :
[3]
Controlling crawlers with robots.
This could be a template to decentralised, emergent, locational privacy protection. My own
personal "robots.txt" could instruct cell-phone operators, ticketing agents, credit card
companies, what information about my comings and goings was sellable and what not. I could
specifiy who it could be shared with, and with what degree of anonymity. I would want my
medical record available to hospital emergency rooms in extremis, but not to my employer, for
example.We should as much as possible try to stop the accumulation of information by inventing
the right expressive means to do so. Such ``easy wins" should not be passed over.
Zittrain (2008) [3] sees the emergence of "robots.txt"-style solutions as the victory of hierarchic
bottom-up organisations versus poly-archic top-down organisations (Curzon Price, 2008 [3]). His
exhortation is that we should, wherever possible, look for solutions to information processing
problems that live in the ``hierarchical / emergent" corner of his taxonomy.
Page 4 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
5/24
3 [3]
[4]
Painfully learning the new rules.
Is this new tyranny of the wired communities a passing phase? Something that we will learn to
navigate once the unfamiliarity of the new spaces passes?
When cameras became a cheap mass consumer good, just before World War I in the UK, there
was a national privacy scare. Anyone was at risk of being captured in a private act. And the risk
is with us still, of course, although a combination of copyright, libel and press-privacy laws allow
us mostly to navigate the new contours of privacy. David Cameron, the leader of the UK'sopposition, had to spend a good deal of family money to buy the copyright of a photograph
taken of him during his student days as a member of Oxford's notorious Bullingdon club.
Employers regularly check Facebook and MySpace to find the real person they are about to
employ. In a mirror image of the Bullingdon club example, celebrities are exactly the people who
cultivate their private lives as a business model: they generate monopoly private information in
order to sell it to an eager public. There was an eighteenth century version of this trade: an
enterprising late eighteenth century theatre entrepreneur in London took the muslin curtains off
the boxes in his newly launched theatre. The mob crowded in, not so much to see the spectacle
but more to rubber-neck at the much more attractive soap-opera of the wealthy in their boxes.
But the business model was not right: the wealthy got nothing much from the sale of theirprivacy and left for more traditional venues. ``Hello" and ``OK" would perfect the model by
buying monopoly access to the lives of the ``Pipol" [People] (as, in a lovely inversion of
meanings, celebrities are known in France).4 [4]
The similarity between the patter on a facebook feed and the gossip of "Hello" is striking . It
seems to me likely that the popularity of exhibitionism is quite likely in part due to the
exhibitionism of our celebrity heroes. Their status is measured by the column-inches devoted to
them, so the democratisation of print-space leads to a proliferation on ``micro-Hello"
publications. Facebook is to ``Hello" as the academic blogosphere is to the opinion columns of
the ``mainstream media". Doing what the stars do, be it intellectual or social, makes us all a bit
more like them. The whole point of MySpace and Facebook is that they are public, and give
each the opportunity to be a bit more like the role model in the abandonment of privacy. And just
like the academic blogger versus the WSJ columnist, the main difference is the first do it for
free.5 [4]
Page 5 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
6/24
[5]
``Hello" is the Pipol's Facebook.
Sunstein (2007) [5] that the new facility for niche
information provision also fragments communities,
allowing each of us to live in narcissistic halls of mirrors
where we face no great challenges to our views and
opinions. There is the possibility of a radicalcommunitarianisation of news and opinion that will
eventually, argues Sunstein, undermine the ``broad tent"
institutions that forced us as nations to seek compromise
and agreement. This is a story of the Balkanisation of
politics because the economics of the production of
knowledge and opinion no longer forces us to share costs
with those we might disagree with. Sunstein (2007) [5]
produces many examples of the danger. My colleague Felix
Page 6 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
7/24
Cohen made this short film [6] about the community of
"Vaccine Deniers" on YouTube to illustrate the danger. The
power of the example, of course, comes from the potential
public health externality created by the development of
these credible but not belief-worthy communities.
Flash
Vaccine denial: echo chamber with externality.
Nozick (1974) [6], in the ``Utopia" part of the book, considers what an individualistic approach to
community-formation might be. He asks us, as a thought experiment, to consider a world inwhich each individual can will into being all other individuals; individuals so willed can either opt
to stay in the world imagined by others, or exit to another world of their own willing; the process
is imagined to continue until a stable configuration--if there be one--is found. If there is an
equilibrium, then by construction we have a world in which ``none of the inhabitants of the world
can imagine an alternative world they would rather live in" (Nozick, 1974 [6])[page 299] which
has the stability property of being arrived at in this Utopian way.
When wondering how far this Utopian construction might be from a feasible realisation, Nozick
points to the limitations that include the fact that groups impinge on other groups; that it is costly
to discover groups that one wishes to join, and one might stay in sub-optimal groups for fear ofnot finding a better solution; that communities might actually try to restrict the freedom of choice
of members in order to perpetuate themselves.
Page 7 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
8/24
The first and the last of these ``failures" of Nozick's individualistic communitarianism are the
most troubling in the context of the re-communitarianisation of knowledge-making. The first is a
concern, in our context, that the belief-making of one group will affect another group. The
vaccine deniers are a case in point. Sunstein (2007) [6] provides evidence that the last point is a
danger: that the ``hall of mirrors" entraps people into solipsistic world views and amplifies the
differences between groups.
[7]
Communities create poles.
Mark Hunter, a professor of media a INSEAD, argues that the commercial future of news is
represented by both Rupert Murdoch and Michael Moore. Both of them know how to give anaudience a sense of itself. The quickest way to do this is through polarisation, the exaggerated
invention, even demonisation of the ``other". As the fixed costs of community creation disappear
(a printing press, a distribution network), society can fragment into many non-communicating
Page 8 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
9/24
shards. The return to ancient Greece was not meant to also repeat the Peleponesian wars.
Posner makes the argument that this communitarianisation of news might be a good thing: it
avoids the dead-hand of orthodoxy stamping out the diversity of views that it is socially best to
express, even if only to better monitor.6 [7]
The argument, however, relies on there being not-too-great a feedback between the
encapsulation of a community in a publication, or blog, or forum, and the path that this
community takes. The strength of the worry Sunstein raises comes from this dynamic effect: thetypes of communities you end up with are dependent on the technology used to keep them
together and define them. The Rwandan massacre, for example, would not have been possible
without Radio Mille Collines. The Kenyan violence of January 2008 was made possible by SMS.
[8]
Letting off steam?
There is a resurgence in the tyranny of the group just as there is in the power of collective self-
determination. The two are inextricable. Liberal Whigs have to hope that re-communitarianisation does not have to be Balkanisation. It is as if the ``National" phase of the
evolution of the just society was a dry-run for its global version. Re-communitarianisation, with
global communications technologies, is part of the unpicking of the unitary Nation State, with the
adherence to the tribe returning to many overlapping communities, some digital, and the
functions of the State being spread both above and below the old Nations. The economics of
community-making are an important part of this large-scale historical process. To make it a
historical evolution, and not another return, we should keep our eyes open to the the new forms
of the ancient social tyrannies.
Sunstein (2007) [8] effects point to the
transformation of ancient liberties into
modern communo-tyrannies; second,Zittrain
(2008) [8] and Curzon Price (2008) [8] point
to the sliding from the new communo-freedoms to the modern stifling
Page 9 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
10/24
technocracies of government and other
natural monopoly.
Possibly more dangerous than all of these are the forces that transform modern individualistic
freedoms into the hyper-modern nightmares imagined Kafka (1925) [8] and Orwell (1949) [8].
This is the story of the harnessing of technology into a database State. A little like nuclearpower, so attractive in the 1950s and 1960s, accumulates waste that today appears to pose
small risks of very large harm, so centralised databases are stockpiling a resource which has a
small probability of becoming highly noxious.
The behaviour, identity, past and reputation of each us is now reproduced around large
numbers of state-level and corporate databases creating dangerous concentrations of
personally identifiable information (PII).7 [8] The dangers are of two basic types, call them
Kafka-esque and Orwellian.8 [8]
The Orwellian, in which the State accumulates information for direct purposes of control, is themost obvious and dramatic. Take the example of the hapless mechanic from Stoke-on-Trent .
[9]
Page 10 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
11/24
An innocent's arrest and DNA forever more on the record
Darren's credit ratings, job prospects and life chances have been permanently affected by his
record on the UK arrest and DNA databases. As technocracy would have it, this informationgets shared between more and more government agencies and even in some cases to private
sector subcontractors of government. Of course, the data also gets lost and may find its way
into the public or criminal domain. The impacts on lives and liberty of such Orwellian events are
clear, and our ability to influence through policy is also clear.
The UK, together with many states since the start of the ``War on Terror" (WoT) have increased
the powers of surveillance available to it. There are real threats, and some surveillance is
necessary to protect citizens. But it is important to understand the Orwellian habits that very
naturally come to a State. Here is an example from Scotland:
In Falkirk, which used Ripa [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] 380 times,
citizens could be spied on for noise nuisance, littering, if they were suspected of driving
a taxi without a licence, for breaching the smoking ban and if their expense claims were
thought to be exaggerated.
(The Sunday Herald, July 18 2008 [10])
Jozef K., the anti-hero of The Trial, never knows who is accusing him or what he is accused of.
He has no control over the information that is disseminated about him or any means of
recourse. The story of Jozef K. has become the archetypal story of alienation, one in which the
modern atom has no understanding of the forces at work at him. The case of Mr Bunce , a story,with a somewhat happier ending, hints at a modern version of the story where the information
and crime have escaped your control--it certainly shows a very concrete example that those
who have nothing to hide might nevertheless be caught up in nightmarish information-traps. The
police knock on the door. You are accused of having bought paedophilic pornography over the
web. You are innocent, and unlike Joseph K. you certainly understand the accusation here, but
what have you done that relates to it? Why are you being accused? What piece of information
about your life has been disseminated which leads to this point?
Page 11 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
12/24
[11]
A modern-day Job
Mr Bunce comes out of this sounding like a saint: his salary quartered, his family forgiven for
disowning him ...but many others would remain more resentful.
Commercial databases are increasingly the repository for Privately Identifiable Information. The
case of Yahoo's Chinese blogger debacle is an example of commercial data-gathering being put
to State use.
Page 12 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
13/24
[12]
Corporate and State databases cooperate, 1
Information flow from state to corporations is increasingly common. For example the UK
government's "Tranformative Government" agenda includes offering corporate access to the
National Identity database (for example, for background checks on criminality). Sub-contractors
to government have ways of accessing data--where this can go from multinationals running IT
systems to small operations running local authority wheel clamping services. The film of the
useful UK Department of transport web page on Who we share information with and why [13]provides a small glimpse into the complexity of the multi-way flow of information. Can every
outfit identified as a worthy recipient of information be counted on here to have a careful,
responsible attitude towards the data? How much will lead to stories like that of Darren, Bunce
or Shi Tao?
Page 13 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
14/24
[14]
What your driving says to whom (follow link to film)
report by the Mail on Sunday [15] on CCTV surveillance by
police in Shenzhen and Leeds illustrates the point. In
Leeds, police prove the innocence of a supposed wife-beater with CCTV footage ...a petty thief is caught after the
police thought they would have to let him go ...in
Shenzhen, crime rates are down 10% and detection rates
are up thanks to a state-of-the-art surveillance system.
Here comes the downside:
anti-government demonstrators are identified andpicked up for questioning -- and images of those still
``at large'' are posted on public information pillars ...9
[15]
The Hobbesian state has its attractions. But we have a sort of ``surveillance trap'': how to
ensure that information is used only for the good purposes of fighting crime, and not for the bad
purposes of manipulation and discrimination?
It is very hard for a modern mass state to carry out extensive Hobbesian information processing
without also, to some groups, becoming Kafkaesque. Take the (hypothetical) example of a
young male Muslim rounded-up in a terrorism prevention operation. He is innocent (known to
Page 14 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
15/24
him, unknown to us), and has been arrested because he is a friend of someone who is not.
During interrogation, it becomes clear that the State has a huge amount of information about
this person. He is eventually released without charge. He returns to his community knowing that
the authorities follow him closely and that he is now on a national DNA database, and that his
arrest is a fact viewable by all manner of official departments (and even private sector
companies). When he does not get a job; when his mortgage is refused; when he is burgled ...a
suspicion has to fall on the involvement of the state. Is this a state he is likely to cooperate with?
is he likely to inform against a genuine threat that he knows about? The Kafkaesque State is theone that creates sub-cultures of mistrust in which real threats can find protection and thrive.10
[15]
We can view the Kafka effect as an externality of information acquisition. As long as the process
of acquiring information generates "false positives"--cases where the informational inference is
incorrect--then it will invite false positives in the other direction: inferences by the citizen that the
state is involved in shaping outcomes even when it is not. So the often well-intentioned process
of collecting information for Hobbesian purposes produces a side-product, the false positive,
which creates a paranoid sensitivity. Philip K Dick offers a particularly gruesome twist to the
basic plot in Dick (1956) [15], where information processing by the state has got the point offorecasting and preventingcrime. The Kafkaesque impact of information collection is pernicious:
if a state gives you reason to believe that it is falsely and obscurely accusing you, then your trust
in that state evaporates. Any Hobbesian justification for freedom-reducing measures should
always account for the ultimately freedom-destroying loss of faith in the State that the Kafka
effect produces.
Of course, the same piece of technology in Leeds is less of a worry than it is in Shenzhen,
because civil liberties are more respected in England than in China. Trustworthy states should
be allowed to take Hobbesian advantage of technology, and if we want more surveillance, we
should start by making, through politics, more trustworthy states.
[16]
Page 15 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
16/24
Friendly alligator
All inoffensive, even helpful, you might think. But it is easy to imagine some more problematic
cases.11 [16]
The corporate databases that Web2.0 is creating can be agents of Kafka and Orwell effects justas much as government databases. Already today, the large web-sites have entire divisions
devoted to dealing with the subpoenas served by courts. The information exists, and will be
used in accordance with the laws of the land ...as Chinese bloggers have found to their cost.
[17]
The battle field
If our old liberties and rights did a good--though restricted--job in the late 18th Century, with
State power where it was, they certainly need reinforcing with state power where it is today. Inthe UK, for example, Habeas Corpus has been restricted to a huge extent--police can hold
suspects without charge for 28 days, moving to 42. And this in an environment where
discovering information about suspects can be done at the cross-tabulation of a handful of
Page 16 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
17/24
databases. If it took 24 hours to charge a suspect in the past, the increased efficiency of
information gathering would suggest that it should now take less time to charge, not more. It is
hard to avoid the conclusion that the War on Terror has been a boon to the institutional interests
of technocracy (see (Barnett, 2008 [17])).
1 [17]Many thanks to all the people who have
commented on early drafts of this paper--
Selina O'Grady, Graeme Mitchison,
Victoria Curzon Price, Anthony Barnett,
Jonathan Zittrain, David Hayes, JeremyO'Grady, Stefaan Verhultz. This paper
owes a great deal to a seminar funded by
the MacArthur foundation in March 2008,
"Credibility in the New News" in London.
Many thanks to Kathy Im and ElspethRevere for making that gathering and
space for thinking possible. I presented a
version of this paper to the Annual
Meeting of the Mont Pellerin Society [18]
in Tokyo in September 2009. It was apersonally emotionally charged occasion,
being the child of two members of the
society while feeling uncomfortable with
most of the positions taken by its
members. On the question of theauthoritarian state, however, we were on
Page 17 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
18/24
common ground - at least at some level of
abstraction.
2
[18]The parallel between Zittrain's worries
about the Internet and Hayek's in the
``Road to Serfdom" are clear. In both
cases, there is a call to action against
specified dynamics from within that
threaten all that is best about the system.
The Great Depression provided the
impetus for the sorts of government
actions that Hayek thought would
undermine the market economy, just as
Zittrain thinks malware, spyware and theabuse of private information threatens the
sorts of control that will undermine the
open, creative, re-usable Internet.
3[18]The relationship between anonymity and
the freedom of the moderns is very strong.
It has its counterparts in the modern
notions ofanomie and alienation. Hayek
picks up on the relationship in his
Page 18 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
19/24
discussion of the exercise of market
power through price discrimination:
It is probably not much of anexaggeration to say that almost all
really harmful power [...] rests on this
power of discrimination because it
alone, short of violence, gives them
[firms] power over potential
competitors [...] Though the majority
of people may still be better off for the
existence of such a [discriminating]
monopolist, anyone may be at his
mercy in so far as the nature of the
product of service makes aimed
discrimination possible and the
monopolist chooses to practice it in
order to make the buyer behave in
some respect in a manner that suits
the monopolist [...] Since the power ofthe monopolist to discriminate can be
used to coerce particular individuals
or firms, [...] it clearly ought to be
curbed by appropriate rules of
conduct. (Hayek, 1982 [18], Vol.IIl,page 84)
Page 19 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
20/24
4 [18]
However did the celebrities become ``les
Pipols"? There is a real cunning of
language in this appropriation--arecognition that there is nothing between
celebrities and people except for celebrity.
5 [18]
It brings to mind Keynes' joke that GDP
falls when a bachelor marries his maid--
what was previously recorded as a
monetary transaction is now subsumed in
the un-measured domestic economy.
Similarly, every journalist replaced by an
academic blogger lowers GDP withoutnecessarily reducing welfare.
6 [18]
There are real success stories of citizen
journalism bringing to public attentionstories that might otherwise have been
covered or buried. The great pet food
scare of 2007 may be the clearest
example, (especially because it is an
example so devoid of politics). All overNorth America, pet owner forums started
Page 20 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
21/24
reporting that their cats and dogs were ill.
Forum and blog members thought this
was all too much for coincidence, and
traced the problem to a single Canadianmanufacturer. The pet-owners did all the
investigation and coordinated their work
through their blogs. As Jay Rosen says,
they moved from the demand side of news
to the supply side. The old-media caughtup with the story once the journalistic
work had been done at the grass-roots, by
these consumers turned producers.
In terms of political positioning, the
technology here is a tool of negative
freedom: consumers can aggregate
information and protect their rights as
purchasers against the previously
superior informational power of the
producer. This is an enhancement to thenormal freedoms of civil, contractual
relations.
7 [18]
And quasi-PII--it is often possible tocombine databases none of which have PII
Page 21 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
22/24
to, in the overlap of data, personally
identify individuals.
8
[18]The important distinctions between the
Orwellian and Kafkaesque abuses of
information is made by Solove (2007) [18]
9 [18]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/moslive/article-1027150/The-invasion-Far-Eastern-
technology-poses-threat-privacy.html
10 [18]
Just as Jozef K. was Jewish and feltanyway on the edges of Viennese society,
a ready target of radicalisation, so those
who come into contact with the most
Kafkaesque aspects of our states are
those likely to be close to today'sradicalisable edges of society.
11 [18]
Obviously, the profiling could be used for
old-fashioned price discrimination. The
old headache for tariff setters trying to
implement Boiteux-Ramsey pricing
Page 22 of 24
7/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
23/24
(Boiteux (1956) [18]) for utilities was how
to achieve a ``separating equilibrium"--
how to make sure that the simple set of
tariff choices on offer would distinguishcustomers by their elasticity of demand.
No such constraint with Gator's profiles,
where the identity, or at least identity-type
of a customer could be determined by the
logs of browsing history. ``TCP is likely toclick through for car hire, so don't offer
the special deal ..."
(For the story, Gator was hugely
profitable. It was nearly sold to Microsoft
for large amounts, until Redmond, in its
due diligence, broke off discussions.
Gator changed its name, and now trades
honestly as Claria).
Source URL:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-liberty-of-the-networked-pt-2
Links:
[1] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/34125
[2] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/28440
[3] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/27888
[4] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/120186[5] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/120182
[6] http://www.youtube.com/v/Rsxh_VGftyU&hl=en&fs=1
[7] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/35157
Page 23 of 24
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-liberty-of-the-networked-pt-2http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/the-liberty-of-the-networked-pt-27/30/2019 Tony Curzon Price the Liberty the Networked -2
24/24
[8] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/35169
[9] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/20622
[10] http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/
display.var.2342364.0.how_local_councils_use_antiterror_laws_to_spy_on_ordinary_people.php
[11] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/20666
[12] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/27298
[13] http://www.dft.gov.uk/about/informationcharter/whoweshareinfo
[14] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/27454[15] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/moslive/article-1027150/The-invasion-Far-Eastern-technology-
poses-threat-privacy.html
[16] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/22406
[17] http://www.scrnshots.com/users/tonycurzonprice/screenshots/37417
[18] http://www.montpelerin.org/
This article is published by Tony Curzon Price, , and openDemocracy.net under a Creative
Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercialpurposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department
make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on
this site are published under different terms.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Tony_Curzon_Price.jsphttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=13800mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=13800http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Tony_Curzon_Price.jsphttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/Top Related