Puzzling over privacy

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | No Comments

Photo credit: Kaukab Jhumra Smith, 2011

When I went for a walk on the beach with my cousin a couple of Sundays ago, I did not expect to find myself in a Facebook video shot and shared by someone with more than 2,500 friends.

We were at Clifton Beach, the most publicly accessible and over-developed of Karachi’s shores. Plastic wrappers, soda bottles, fruit peel and animal waste lay intermingled with cream-colored seashells and stringy dark seaweed on the distinctive shimmery grey sand. This was the kind of beach where you kept your shoes on.

Yet an hour and a half later, my cousin Rakshanda and i found ourselves plastered in silvery sand as we raised and lowered ourselves into various yoga poses right there in front of the waves. Around us, about nine other people, all men, tried to follow the directions shouted into the ocean wind by an athletic blond woman. I felt sticky but euphoric at our long walk and the chance to meditate into the sea-scented breeze.

The woman, Dr. Zsuzsanna Fajcsak, a Hungarian native and a fitness and life coach, leads a seven-kilometer walk followed by a 15-minute yoga session on Clifton Beach every Sunday morning. What I didn’t know at the time is that Dr. Zsu is also big on sharing the group’s activities on Facebook and building a larger following. When I first realized she was conducting interviews during our walk with a little yellow digital camera, I felt a little uncomfortable. And when I realized our yoga poses in the sand were also being captured on camera, I felt a little powerless.

Pakistan is a conservative country, and I was not sure I wanted pictures of myself in odd positions in the sand floating around the Internet. My discomfort was not enough to make me stop what I was doing, though, and I did not speak up about my feelings or ask for the camera to be put away. While Dr. Zsu put up several pictures and videos of the walk on her public Facebook profile that evening, none were the dreaded shots of me doing the downward dog in my sand-covered gear.

But this incident did raise some questions for me about the nature of privacy, and our own expectations, in this age of instant media and online sharing.

• Was it unrealistic of me to expect my actions to remain private when I was part of a group in a public setting like the beach?
• Do social media users have any responsibility to ask permission before they record a person’s actions with the intention of sharing the recording? Would this responsibility change if they intended to share the recording just among their friends, rather than publicly?
• Should cultural context — like a country’s socially conservative climate — play any part in determining the answer to these questions?
• And most intriguing of all, have Facebook’s fungible privacy settings loosened our own definition of personal space? Now that we can calibrate “private” as something that we share with our friends, or with the friends of our friends, or with the world at large, our concept of privacy has been turned into a spectrum, a veritable rainbow of variation. Would I have been less disturbed at having my images out there if the user who shared them had 100 friends, rather than 2,500?

Probably. But I’ll be the first to admit that doesn’t make much sense.

RIP, Cliff Carle

Posted on | January 1, 2011 | 3 Comments

Some people are ringing in the new year in their party clothes and hats. I’m ringing in mine in my pajamas, wondering how to memorialize a man whom I haven’t seen in two years and whose death I learned of just a few hours ago. He actually died last week. But I can’t let this year draw to a close without acknowledging that the world is a little duller without him and his ability for capturing beauty in the tiniest of details — although this is the same world that often denied him its biggest comforts.

I met Cliff Carle when I joined Washington’s newspaper for the homeless, Street Sense, as its editor in 2007. Cliff was scrawny, with a straggly salt-and-pepper beard and a wicked sense of humor. His voice was raspy and instantly recognizable. He often wore a hat or rakish bandanna on his head. But what you noticed most about him was the camera equipment he carried around like an extension of his person. I rarely saw Cliff without at least one camera around his neck. A homeless guy with an expensive camera, you ask — how is that possible?

Cliff was the talent behind “Cliff’s Pics,” a photography centerfold Street Sense would publish nearly every month. He had an amazing eye for composing a picture, whether by finding an unusual angle, highlighting natural patterns, or getting really, really close. He loved big subjects, like D.C.’s architecture, and tiny subjects — things people would ordinarily pass on by — that he would infuse with importance through extreme close-ups. “Things like flowers, bugs, drops of water,” Cliff once said in a 2007 interview with volunteer editor David Hammond, published in Street Sense’s fourth anniversary issue. “It’s a whole other world down there by our feet!”

He’d sit with one of our interns or volunteers to pick out his best shots from the hundreds he’d taken in the last couple of weeks, and suggest captions for them. Trying to get him to submit his stuff by deadline could be a real struggle — but oh, his stuff was worth it.

“I can do wild things with a camera like Evel Knievel could do wild things with a motorcycle,” Cliff told David Hammond in that interview three years ago. I remember laying out the page and choosing to focus on Cliff’s upturned eyes for the accompanying portrait. To me, it captured the dreamer in him. The world Cliff lived in could be an ugly one, but he chose to turn his camera lens upon its flashes of beauty.

Creepy or inevitable?

Posted on | August 12, 2010 | No Comments

Imagine my surprise some weeks ago when I found this photo on an ad on my Facebook page, plugging a freelance writing site. Here was a woman who looked eerily like a younger version of my South Asian mother, asking me if I was looking for work as a writer. I’m South Asian. I’m a woman. I’m a freelance journalist. I couldn’t not click on the ad.

A little while earlier, I’d covered an academic conference where a research team from Facebook presented a prize-winning paper exploring how Facebook could use U.S. Census data to predict its users’ ethnicity. It based its predictions on their first and last names, and related those predicted ethnicities with the way users interacted with friends online. Bottom line: people tended to have more friends and communicate more often with others of the same ethnicity.

Not exactly groundbreaking news, you may say. But when you think about what it could mean for marketing to Facebook users, that uncanny photo in an ad on my own Facebook profile begins to take on new meaning. How hard could it be to swap out advertising photos based on users’ assumed ethnicities? And wouldn’t users be more likely to click through ads with pictures of someone who looks like them? I certainly did.

I updated my Facebook status asking my other freelancer friends if they had seen the same ad on their profiles but with a different photo, but didn’t get much of a response. So I don’t have any proof besides a hunch that I’d been taken in by a very clever marketing ploy.

Of course, Facebook may not need Census data to mine information on ethnicity. Profile pictures can be a dead giveaway in many cases. And as readers of my related post on the SmartBlog on Social Media pointed out, predictions of ethnicity based on names are becoming quite meaningless in an increasingly multi-racial world. “What ethnic group would this program predict for Donovan McNabb?!” asked a reader identified as LilOle.

The Huffington Post linked to my original post on the Facebook paper as a lead story on its Tech page. Have you noticed anything different about the advertising on your Facebook lately?

Shoot better online video

Posted on | July 29, 2010 | No Comments

You think making a good video is about the pictures? Wrong. It’s about the sound.

Check out more tips on online video-making from broadcast journalism instructor Mary Coffman in my latest post for the SmartBlog on Social Media.