Alexis C. Madrigal

How confused are our notions of user data? Well, let's look at how much it might be worth. There are several different ways we could try to ascertain the fair value of your data.

For buyers, user data is dirt cheap. User profiles -- slices of our digital selves -- are sold in large chunks, i .e. at least 10,000 in a batch. On the high end, they go for $0.005 per profile, according to advertising-industry sources.

But maybe that's not the right way to value the data. After all, each profile of you being sold only takes advantage of some subset of your information. Facebook and Google make roughly $5 and $20 per user, respectively. Without your data in one form or another, their advertising would be mostly worthless, so perhaps your data is worth something in that range.

But let's not forget the rest of the Internet advertising ecosystem either, which the Internet Advertising Bureau says supported $300 billion in economic activity last year. That's more than $1,200 per Internet user and much of the online advertising industry's success is predicated on the use of this kind of targeting data.

If you're keeping score, this necessarily apples-to-oranges comparison yields a difference of 240,000 times between how much a user profile sells for and how much a user, herself, may be worth to the ecosystem. That's six orders of magnitude worth of confusion.

But the problems go even deeper than that. In a survey by Carnegie Mellon's Lorrie Cranor and Stanford's Aleecia McDonald, only 11 percent of Americans would be willing to pay $1 per month to withhold their data from their favorite news site. However, 69 percent of Americans were not willing to accept a $1 discount on their Internet bills in exchange for allowing their data to be tracked. That is to say: if people think data is already flowing to a website, few would pay to hold it back. But if they think their data is being held back, a large majority would be unwilling to share it.

What this means, as Cranor and McDonald put it, is that "people who think they have already lost the ability to control private information ... may value privacy less." If, post-facto, you inform people that you're already using their data, they won't pay to stop you. But if you ask beforehand, they might. So, the companies making the data-tracking tools have serious incentive to erode the idea of privacy not just because they can make (more) money, but because privacy erosion leads to more privacy erosion. The system is self-reinforcing. This is a problem.

One intriguing solution -- in part because it doesn't require politicians or regulators to actually take on businesses -- comes courtesy of a Washington startup, Personal. They want users to entrust their data to Personal and then mete it out to advertisers in exchange for discounts. Your data paired with your purchase intent could yield massive efficiency for advertisers, some of which would be passed on to you in the form of discounts. Personal's CEO Shane Green thinks that his model might mean that user's information ends up being worth far more than the $1,200 estimate we came up with.

"If you do the math on a family vacation to the Caribbean, the low end of the economic value you can realize is 5-15% on the overall dollars you're spending on that purchase," Green told me. "On a $10,000 trip, that can really add up." 

If this model catches on, it could generate positive privacy externalities. If users started to use Personal, or something like it, they might start to want control of their personal data not for vague privacy reasons or because of "creepy" ads, but because they realize that it has real economic value. Instead of exchanging massive amounts of cheap data in exchange for free Internet services, they could capture some of the value that lies in between $0.005 and $1,200 (or more).

If there is one thing I enjoy about the web, it's the way that primary historical materials are as close to hand as a Gawker blog post or a Amazon.com. Getting your hands on real, printed photographs from the 1910s takes work, even if you happen to have a university affiliation.

Online, as part of our daily labor here on The Atlantic, I often find myself at the Library of Congress searching through hundreds of thousands of photographs of all kinds of things. At a time when algorithms are supposed to be reducing serendipity to the opposite of a chance encounter, I find the blunt search tools at the LOC constantly spit out wonderfully unexpected things.

For Alexander Furnas' story yesterday about power, privacy, and data tracking, I wanted to find a photograph of a bunch of dolls, so I searched for "doll shop." Scrolling down the list, I didn't find what I wanted, but one title for a group of photos caught my eye: "Old men making toys in a shop maintained for their benefit, apparently by society women." The record told me George Grantham Bain made these pictures in 1915. The extended description read, "Photographs show men cutting animals and dolls from wood. Women purchasing Christmas gifts. Also, teddy bear factory." There is no more information attached to the record, but who really needs more than TEDDY BEAR FACTORY, really.

Take a look at these photographs. They tell you something about how and where toys were once made. But they also tell you something mustaches and hairstyles, about the way people tucked in their blouses, and what a teddy bear looked like in 1915. You can see how many humans worked in a teddy bear factory and how they held themselves when someone walked onto the floor with a camera.

What I'm trying to point out is this: Algorithms may take the brownian motion out of discovering stuff, but it's not as if adjacency goes away. Serendipity, for me, is nothing more than an openness to seeing.

And more than 80 percent of the President's staff's technology was obsolete when he took office.

flickr/WhiteHouse

Man, you think your corporate email's got problems. In an interview with Computerworld, outgoing White House CIO Brook Colangelo revealed that the official White House email was down for nearly a quarter of the first 40 days that President Obama was in office.

Remember that time Gmail went down a couple times in 2009 and the Internet freaked out? Imagine that happened every three days.

The tech situation when Obama's team entered the White House was worse than even that stat might indicate. The computer that Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel got? It had a floppy drive. 82 percent of the technology in the White House had reached its end of life, Colangelo said.

The White House IT team appears to have improved the tech situation on Pennsylvania Avenue, but it all makes you wonder: if White House comms had a hard time handling day-to-day traffic, what might happen under more strenuous circumstances?

A response to Harper's publisher John MacArthur's lengthy screed against the enterprise of online journalism

This is the Internet, basically, according to Harper's publisher. flickr/wheatfields.

Long before I wrote stories for magazines, I read a magazine called Harper's. It was smart and weird and I felt like I found things there that I couldn't find elsewhere. Wonderful editors worked for Harper's like Clara Jeffery and Bill Wasik and Paul Ford. They brought thinkers like the now-famous David Graeber to my attention years before anybody else.

Dining in fluorescent-lit discomfort with my scrappy friends, we wondered why such a wonderful place refused to be a part of what we knew to be the flourishing intellectual domain known as The Internet. Now, thanks to a curmudgeonly op-ed from Harper's publisher John MacArthur, we know why: one time, when he and Lewis Lapham were dining in San Francisco near the height of the Internet bubble, someone used a word (platform) to describe something he didn't understand, and he's been deadset against such "Internet con men" ever since.

So, Jeffery left to run Mother Jones, which has used digital savvy to put itself back near the heart of the nation's political conversations, and Wasik now works for Wired. Paul Ford makes things on the Internet and writes beautiful pieces about technology. And Harper's, well, they steadfastly refused to put their stories on the Internet, despite the "young people" who tried in vain to change their publisher's heart. "The Internet, I told them, wasn't much more than a gigantic Xerox machine," he brags. (The Xerox machine, I would tell him, wasn't much more than a fast printing press.)
 
Amidst all the nostalgia and rambling, I think his objections to the Internet come down to money, or more precisely, his inability to make any online. The whole Internet publishing enterprise will be a parenthesis, MacArthur thinks, before people come back to their senses and realize that LL Bean catalogs were the apotheosis of the at-home shopping experience. Let me quote him extensively:

In any event, my ad agency contacts tell me that their proprietary research shows that print advertising is remembered longer and more clearly for the simple reason that readers spend more time with a printed article in a magazine than with pieces posted on Web sites. For a genuine apples-to-apples comparison, you would need a controlled test of people spending equal amounts of time on each medium, reading the same or equivalent articles and ads, but I'm unaware of any such study having been done.

The lack of good research might be because the Internet salesmen know that Web sites would lose in a fair test.

You know, there is some research on this. A 2008 review by Louisa Ha in the Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising endeavored to give a "substantive review of online advertising research published since 1996 in all major refereed advertising journals." In this article, we find the subhed, "Comparison Between Print and Web Advertising." This is what Ha says:

Many compare the effectiveness of print advertising versus Web advertising (e.g. Sundar and Kim). They all show the superiority of Web advertising over print advertising in achieving positive brand evaluation. [emphasis mine]

That's not to say that there aren't all kinds of problems with web advertising. Or that there is no role for print. Of course there is! That's the whole point. Advertisers want to buy across platforms (OH MY GOD! THAT WORD!) and they do. Why do advertisers buy across platforms? Because that's how people read now. More visibility for a website means more visibility for a magazine and vice versa. People flip back and forth between Vulture and NY Mag, from Mother Jones' infographics to Mother Jones' great speedup package, from Jeff Goldberg's interview on TheAtlantic.com with President Obama to Jim Fallows' Atlantic cover story dissecting the same man. Ideas don't exist because of print magazines. (Though they often find a beautiful, comfortable home inside them.)

I do respect one thing about MacArthur's op-ed: he does truly value writers and their writing. We agree there. But it is *precisely* because I value my writing that I want it to be online and free. I don't write merely to rub two pennies together; I write because I want to have an impact in the world. I want to work with my community to break stories and tell jokes, to highlight injustice and find better ways of solving problems. That means reaching readers where they are. People's lives aren't divided into "offline life" and "online life," even if we'd like to pretend that's the case. People on Capitol Hill use the Internet. People on Main Street use the Internet. People on Wall Street use the Internet. The Internet is where the action is: it's where all the elegant, dirty, pretty, lowbrow, brilliant ideas come together to commingle and evolve.

Is the structure of the industry changing? Anecdotally, MacArthur's preferred evidentiary mode, the answer is yes. It's harder to be a magazine freelancer, but there are lots and lots of full-time jobs writing for good websites. Less time and thinking space, more health care and exposure to ideas. Is it all good? Of course not, but why is that the standard against which to measure change?

And one more thing, Mr. MacArthur. If you're going to call out my magazine as a bunch of liars, at least have the courage to name us.

One of my major magazine competitors is peddling the falsehood that it is now profitable thanks to a boom in online-advertising revenue. You have to know the economics of direct mail and the cost of mailing magazines to know how preposterous this contention really is.

I think you've missed what is actually preposterous. I happen to know a thing or two about our financials, so let me set you straight. It is a fact that there has been a boom in online advertising revenue; it is also a fact that we get equal amounts of our advertising revenue from the web and print; and our magazine is doing just fine, thank you. But you'd have to know the economics of having a real website to know how preposterous your contentions really are.

Oh, and if you'd ever like to debate the future of media with me, I have a white glove right here and I would happily slap you with it anytime you please.

Correction: Initially, I spelled Clara Jeffery's name incorrectly. I hope she forgives me, as I've known her for a long time.

You might not think about the Fourth Amendment while you're using Facebook and other online tools, but you probably should.



You are no doubt familiar, now, with Facebook's concept of "frictionless sharing." You enable a social reader like the one from the Washington Post and the next time you read an article on the site, news of that textual encounter is broadcast to your Facebook friends.

It is so easy. It seems so simple. But it could also create a fundamental shift in the way that judges view people's expectations of privacy online.

That's the argument that Margot Kaminski, the executive director of Yale's Information Society Project (and sometime Atlantic contributor), makes in an intriguing new article in Wake Forest Law Review.

In Fourth Amendment cases, the Supreme Court has to determine what "a reasonable expectation of privacy" actually is. If you do have that expectation of privacy, then the government needs a warrant to look into your communications. So, if you go out in the public street and shout to the world that you committed a crime, the government does not need a warrant to use that communication. However, if you were to send a sealed letter to a friend containing the same information, you would have a reasonable expectation that the government would not be reading that note.

Because we're talking about expectations, we have to think about what cultural norms are and the actions that signal what norms are in play. For example, Kaminski notes, "In the 1967 seminal Supreme Court case on wiretapping, Katz v. United States, Katz placed a phone call in a public phone booth with the door closed, and was found to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone call, so a warrant was required for wiretapping the phone." Closing the door meant he expected the call to be private.

And the problem with frictionless sharing is that it may leave the door open for the government to collect and use information without a warrant.

"Justice Alito recently contemplated that we may be moving toward a world in which so many people share information with so many friends that social norms no longer indicate a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information," Kaminski writes. "Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, there will be no warrant requirement for law enforcement to obtain that information. This analysis is troubling; sharing information with your friends should not mean that you expect it to be shared with law enforcement."

Kaminski thinks Justice Alito's analysis is dangerously wrong. "This would be like saying that just because you sent wedding invitations to 500 of your closest friends, the government is justified in opening the envelope.  The size of the audience for private communication should not change the fact that it is private."

I think it's one more example of the problems inherent in only thinking of ourselves as consumers of digital content. What we do in this realm will have an impact on our lives as citizens. Norms of privacy we establish for convenience or to up our friend counts will be the norms of privacy that are applied on much weightier issues.

The past isn't always as simple as it seems.

Boy, time makes the good old days look good, no? In thinking about the recent battles over NASA's budget, it seems like the problem is simply citizen support. People don't care that much about space, so space doesn't get funded. Back in the Apollo days, people loved the space program! Except, as this Space Policy paper pointed out, they didn't. A majority of Americans opposed the government funding human trips to the moon both before (July 1967) and after (April 1970) Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for mankind. It was only in the months surrounding Apollo 11 that support for funding the program ever reached above 50 percent. 

Via Cracked 

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

A few minutes ago, at today's Apple event, CEO Tim Cook showed this slide, which we have borrowed from The Verge's excellent liveblog. It shows that Apple has shipped more iPads than its competitors have shipped computers. And that was before Apple announced the new and improved iPad.

Cook devoted the beginning of the event to talking about Apple's vision of a "post-PC" world, one in which your primary computer doesn't have a mouse or a keyboard. This chart shows the success of that vision. And this is just the beginning.

We're worried. With all of the things in the physical world -- parks and baseball, cars and cats, food and drink, duvet covers and lamps -- how will anyone get any reading done?

Can you concentrate on Flaubert when your cute cat is only a few feet away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy when people are swimming in a pool nearby?

People who read books on paper are realizing that while they really want to be reading Dostoyevsky, the real world around them is pretty distracting with all of its opportunities for interacting with people, buying things in stores, and drinking coffee.

The telephone lurks tantalizingly in reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through yelling loudly across the room to someone who might know the answer. And some of the millions of people who have ever picked up a book only to put it back down again a few minutes have come away with the conclusion: It's hard to sit down and focus on reading.

If these paragraphs strike you as silly, I agree with you. Yet, they are a nearly word for word substitution of the latest anti-e-book story in today's New York Times. "Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?" goes the lede.

This story, like many of its ilk, suffers from a baseline problem: how often were people getting distracted before and how do we know things are worse now?

We notice when we are distracted by some newfangled app on a Kindle Fire. We do not notice when we are distracted by vacuuming the rug or going to watch television or daydreaming. Having read thousands of books in my day -- on paper -- I can assure you that the phenomenon of getting distracted while reading a book is not limited to e-books.

So, then the question becomes: does the user interface of the book matter so much? That is to say, does the paper book provide such a different reading experience as to tilt people ineluctably towards distraction?

First, the article provides no evidence aside from some people saying so:

"It's like trying to cook when there are little children around," said David Myers, 53, a systems administrator in Atlanta, who got a Kindle Fire tablet in December. "A child might do something silly and you've got to stop cooking and fix the problem and then return to cooking." ...

Or it's like trying to read when there are children around, regardless of format!

Second, the Times does all of its analysis on what's happening in your hand, but reading is an embodied experience. We're *in the world* while we read, and there have always, always, always been distractions in physical space. If the e-reader engages you more with the thing in your hand, even though the gadget itself is more distracting, that could be a net distraction win.

Third, let's assume the worst, that tablets are "temptresses" as one Times source puts it. OK. But don't we think that people will develop strategies to resist these temptations? What do we think going to the library when you need to study is? Humans respond to the novel technologies they encounter to reshape their experiences of them. If distraction is really bothering all these people, and they really want to read books, then they will find a way to do so.

Even if science can never prove it definitively, we choose to believe this hypothesis.

A new paper in PLoS one posits an awesome historical hypothesis: that Neanderthals wore eagle talons as a kind of jewelry. Here's the evidence. The researchers found precise marks at the top of an eagle talon that were consistent with cutting the claw out of its natural sheath. Then, they looked at talons at three other known Neanderthal sites and found similar marks, but *only* on the eagle talons. Given the multiple sites and the fact that they were occupied at different times over a 65,000-year period, the researchers say "it seems reasonable to argue that Neanderthals in France and Italy regularly used terminal phalanges of birds of prey." But to what end? Well, we can't be sure, but perhaps as jewelry or ornamentation, they argue:

Although the sample size is small, the fact that all the terminal phalanges that show cutmarks are from eagles argues against their utilization in strictly non-symbolic contexts. This last pattern is noteworthy because eagles are among the rarest birds in the environment, a pattern explained by their high trophic position in the food web. This bias toward large and powerful diurnal raptors possibly indicates that the claws were used in symbolically-oriented contexts by Neanderthals, although the latter contexts remain to be more precisely defined. One possibility is that they were used as ornaments...

Now, departing from the science, can I just say that if I ever write a children's book featuring a Neanderthal king, he will be wearing one awesomely gauche eagle talon around his neck.

Image Key: A) example of a fully fleshed golden eagle digit. B-G show cutmarked terminal phalanges from layer 52 at Combe-Grenal (B-C, golden eagle) and layers Jbase (D-E, white-tailed eagle) and I/J (F-G, white-tailed eagle) at Les Fieux.

Via Carl Zimmer. Zimmer, Carl. (@carlzimmer). "Did Neanderthals wear eagle claws as jewelry? You know you want the answer to be yes. http://t.co/YRBffdF5" 05 March 2012. Tweet.

Why? Because they can. And besides, no one else had ever done it successfully.

The site is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood.

Every major website tracks its users as they make their way through the site, but in an analysis completed by the privacy company Abine, one major website stands out for the number and variety of tracking methods used on its site: The Drudge Report.

That's a surprising finding given that the site's appearance hasn't changed in a decade. In a recent salutary profile, The New York Times' David Carr noted the site had "no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of a mid-'90s manual on HTML." But don't be fooled by Drudge's surface simplicity: When you the visit, up to 27 different tracking technologies from 18 separate companies are deployed. Drudge is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood.

Drudge uses twice the number of advertising tools as the average site, according to Abine. And Drudge stands out even among news sites, which Abine CTO Andrew Sudbury said deploy "a high number of tracking technologies."

Abine created the browser add-on, Do Not Track Plus, which allows users to see the hidden communications between their browsers and data-tracking servers across the web. It provides you with X-ray vision into the advertising ecosystem that's monetizing your visit to a website.

While I'm illustrating the problems of ad tracking with the Drudge Report here, let me be clear that what they are doing is only different in degree, not in kind, from what nearly all the national news sites you visit are doing. I  tested other prominent websites using the same methodology we used to look at Drudge. I found The New York Times deployed 10 tracking tools from 7 different companies and The Huffington Post used 19 trackers from 10 companies. The lesson from Drudge is that you can't judge a site's business-side sophistication by the way that it looks on the web.

Drudge Report did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

The Drudge Report's ads are sold by a long-time Internet advertising company called Intermarkets, which was founded in 1997. The site also sells advertising for MichelleMalkin.com, AnnCoulter.com, and the Media Research Center. Even among these sites, there was wide variation in their use of data tracking tools. MichelleMalkin.com only used 17 and AnnCoulter.com just 10

Update*: Intermarkets' hefty response letter, sent this morning, was caught in my spam filter. It's presented here in full. Writing for the company, Michael Loy, chief managing officer, contended that Drudge's data policy "is not materially different from any other websites." Loy also contended -- rightly, I think -- that because DrudgeReport.com does not have social media widgets that track users, it protects its users privacy in a significant way that sites like The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and others do not.

There is a substantive dispute over the nature of the data that passes between your browser and the companies that Drudge works with. There are a number of data exchanges related to ad *bidding and placement* but not behavioral tracking that occur through Drudge's relationship with the Rubicon Project. This data, Intermarkets' Loy says, does not meet the definition that the industry itself has given ad tracking: "the collection of data online... for the purpose of using such data to deliver advertising to that computer or device based on the preferences or interests inferred from such Web viewing behaviors." Note the second clause: the industry does not want to count all data collection in the same way. If it's not explicitly going to be used for behavioral targeting, then they do not consider it ad tracking. 

Lastly, as Intermarkets rightly points out: our own media company uses many similar tools, so it is difficult to state definitely who is spreading what data farther or wider. The reality is that we all do this and navigating this terrain is very complicated. 

Tracking tools fall into several categories, as discussed in my article last week on the 105 companies tracking me on the web. In some cases, the tracking code is used to serve an ad. In others, it verifies the ad was sold. Still others measure the audience and provide data for ad targeting. And then there are scores of middlemen that gather data and sell ads all over the web, knitting together the various other players.

Reverse engineering exactly what's happening with even a single website's advertising machinery is harder than it sounds. There are an order of magnitude more characters of code on Drudge dedicated to advertising and tracking than there are words for humans on the page, Sudbury told me. 

"When you go to Drudge Report, you load a whole bunch of their code. It's 160,000 characters of Javascript that you're loading," Sudbury told me. "It reads and sets all kinds of cookies based on what you know and they already know about you."

Before you know it, 18 companies have been daisychained in. And all this can happen between when you hit enter on Drudge and when the ads show up.

Why are so many tracking tools deployed on the site? It's actually a kind of emergent effect. Basically, Drudge can sell an advertising space to some advertising company, who can, in turn, resell that space to someone else, who again, can resell that space. At each step, the data about who you are has to be passed on down the line, so that prospective advertisers can decide how much they'd like to pay to show you an ad. Before you know it, 18 companies have been daisychained in. And all this can happen between when you hit enter on Drudge and when the ads show up.

We created a document of all the code that is called when your browser heads to DrudgeReport.com. We found tracking technologies from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. In addition, we found several complex scripts from The Rubicon Project, a real-time advertising sales platform. We also discovered tracking by audience research firms like Quantcast, the plain vanilla ad server AdTech, and advertising marketplaces like OpenX. Every niche in the online ad ecosystem seemed to be filled.

Intermarkets has a commendably simple and readable privacy policy in which it discloses that it might not only collect its own data on your visits, but will connect its information with other third-party sources. Here is the most relevant snippet:

We may augment our click stream data with non-personally-identifiable behavioral and demographic data from third party Services Providers (defined below) to target and serve some of the advertisements you see on the pages of our Site and those of our Portfolio publishers. This anonymous data may include such things as zip code, age, gender, and income range...

As I noted in a previous article, the online advertising world has a very particular definition of anonymity. What they mean is not that they don't know anything about you. In fact, they know, within reasonable bounds: your probable income, roughly where you live, your gender, your ethnicity, and your age. They pair this data with what you read, so they can sell advertising segments like: roughly 40 year old white men who are interested in gun rights. You are "anonymous" but anonymous in name only; all those tracking companies know whom they are dealing with, even if they can't put a face to the data.

There is another key provision in Intermarkets' privacy policy. Namely, that they do not control what third-parties do with the data they collect on the Drudge Report. "The use and collection of information by our third-party advertising Service Providers is governed by the individual privacy policies of those providers," the policy reads. That means that to truly understand what might happen with the data that your visits to Drudge Report generate, you'd have to read 18 different privacy policies. In addition, as the policy itself notes, not all of Drudge's third-party partners are members of the Network Advertising Initiative, which is the main self-regulatory body for ad firms.

While Drudge Report itself may not do anything strange with your data, some other company collecting data could sell it to another business that does, in fact, do something weird. That's one reason that the bare fact of data collection is problematic, especially as long as third-parties are able to set privacy policies that users will never see. Any sort of consumer feedback breaks down when there is this little transparency.

While there are some obvious differences, the structure of the problem is similar to what we see in the ethical debates about companies' supply chains. Apple, for example, relies on Chinese suppliers, who themselves rely on other suppliers, who themselves rely on even more suppliers. This has the effect of distancing Apple from the primary responsibility for the health and safety of the workers who build their products. In the online advertising ecosystem, Drudge passes responsibility down the daisychain, too.

Among the uses of user data that we do know about, Drudge's commercial partner, Intermarkets, is particularly fascinating because they sell ads primarily on conservative websites. That makes them a particularly good place for Republican campaigns. Intermarkets specifically sells campaign strategy services, including database building. As they explain:

We'll target your specific audience in your district or state based upon demographic, psychographic, and behavioral parameters, using our secure platform, reaching more than 185 million unique U.S. visitors, in a single access point, with unified reporting and campaign management for your convenience.

During the recent health care debate, Intermarkets helped the Senate Conservatives Fund target likely fundraisers and activists right after the House voted to approve the bill.

The boundary between business and politics, between the commercial and civic spheres, is porous.

"SCF launched an ad campaign urging the immediate repeal of the Government's takeover of health care.  Intermarkets' expert knowledge about conservative websites ensured that SCF was getting their message in front of the right audience, before anyone else had a chance to react," a case study on Intermarkets reads. "The results of this campaign were astounding.  SCF tripled their email list in one week, and saw a nearly 200% net ROI.  While results like this are not common, this campaign does demonstrate that working with Intermarkets provides powerful tools to mobilize American citizens and identify likely supporters."

The point of laying all this out is that the boundary between business and politics, between the commercial and civic spheres, is porous. The data that can be used to sell you a car can also be used to sell you a candidate. And while some may not worry about targeted advertising for cars, which allows each and every person to remain in his individual filter bubble, it strikes me as something different when all political advertising becomes targeted, too.

Eli Pariser argued in his touchstone book, The Filter Bubble, that the public could be made irrelevant by the increasing personalization of the web. What does it mean to have a public discourse when every demographic and psychographic slice of the country is receiving different information?

The rise of ideologically aligned media helped people sort themselves into different knowledge communities. Sophisticated targeting tools will now reinforce those initial positions, automatically providing ads that have been designed to keep people within the boundaries of the things they once read and thoughts they once had.

The Modern Language Association likes to keep up with the times. As we all know, some information breaks first or only on Twitter and a good academic needs to be able to cite those sources. So, the MLA has devised a standard format that you should keep in mind. Its form is:



It's simple. Also, I just love the "Tweet" at the end. However, it's curious that no URL is required, especially given the difficulty of Twitter search for anything not said in the past day or two.

Here's a deeper look at the instructions:

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author's real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)." 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader's time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet.

Via Thomas, Matt (mattthomas). "This. RT @JenHoward How do you cite a tweet? The MLA is glad you asked. (You did ask, didn't you?) bit.ly/ykLfcQ." 2 March 2012, 2:21pm. Tweet.

A new tablet works well for customers and saves restaurants money, but could it mean the beginning of the end for the waitstaff?



This story has been corrected and updated. See note at the bottom of the story for details.

PALO ALTO -- Walk through the doors of Palo Alto's Calafia, located in a shopping center across the street from Stanford, and you're retracing the footsteps of giants. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were once spotted talking shop there. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all frequent the place. Even James Franco, who admittedly is everywhere, has made an appearance at the restaurant run by Google employee number 53, the chef, Charlie Ayers. Ayers' book, Food 2.0, sits on a short pedestal near the front host's table.

When I sat down across from Rajat Suri, who dropped out of an MIT doctoral program in chemistry, so he could tell me about his startup, I could practically smell the Next Big Thing in the air. This is, of course, why he wanted me to meet me at this place, but we're not just there for the ambiance.

Suri gestures to a device that I've never seen that's sitting on our table. It sort of looks like a small iPad, maybe a thick Kindle Fire. Presto is its name. The screen shows an animation that says, "Touch me!" with half a dozen different animations. It's a menu and a way to order food and a method for paying the check all in one. The Presto functions like a better, more responsive version of the touchscreen food ordering system on Virgin America.

"I really like the pork buns," he tells me. "I'm a big fan of pork." I ask for another recommendation from Ayers' selection of rice bowls. He suggests the fiery bottom pork bowl with a quail egg on top, one of the restaurant's signature dishes. I love a quail egg, so I agree to order that.

With no instructions, I order the two items through the Presto. Beautifully lit photos let me see what I'm going to get. The UI is intuitive. Within 20 seconds, I've sent my order to the kitchen. Before we'd even finished eating, I swiped my card slightly awkwardly into the built-in payment slot, added a tip, and settled up. I would not say that this machine will blow your mind with its technical capabilities, but that's exactly the point: It just works.

I cannot say for sure that this will be The Future of your restaurant experience, but after talking with Suri, I'm convinced that some sort of automated ordering system will make its way into your dining experiences. And it's not because the technology is cool or whizbang or will draw customers. The real reasons are completely economic.

"It costs about a dollar a day per table, it can even go lower depending on if you have sponsors involved because all the alcohol companies want to get involved," Suri says. "For that, they get about $6 a day per tablet in increased sales. That's extra desserts, appetizers, drinks. They get about another $5 in extra table turns. If you can fit in one more table per night, that's worth a lot of money. And some restaurants, though not Calafia, get about $45 $4, $5* extra because they choose to save labor."

So, at the minimum, we're talking about $10 a day more money coming in per table. And, if the restaurants choose to cut some employees because they have an automated ordering system, that trims a bunch of costs, too. 

Those margins have meant good things for E La Carte, which is Suri's company. "A lot of our growth has been in the last six months just because awareness of the technology has grown a lot," Suri says. They now have tablets in 300 restaurants and he expects to be in 1000 by the end of the year, and 3000 the year after that.

In the past, automated ordering systems like this haven't made economic or social sense. Before the iPad, people didn't really get touchscreens. Now, most people are familiar with how to operate one. The costs of tablets' components have also come down, which benefits E La Carte. Suddenly, Suri's idea, which he hatched three years ago in Cambridge, is becoming a viable business.



I watch as two women a few tables away poke and prod the machine. They seem to be enjoying or at least tolerating the interaction, but then a waiter arrives at their table and they order from him. After I finish up with Rajat and Ayers, I sidle up to their table and interrupt them as gently as I can.

Margo Will and Lisa Jafferies are affable and willing to talk about their experience with the Presto. They were first-timers with the Presto.

"We started to order through it, even though we're so old," Jafferies laughs. "But then Josh, our waiter came up, and we just talked with him."

"But then we played a game on it," Will says, "And that was fun."

Both women agreed that the main advantage of the Presto was that the digital menu featured photographs and extended descriptions of the food items. They could really know what they were getting. "It's a good way to learn about what the food looks like," Will said. "It's visual."

They did worry, though, about the labor implications of the device: if you don't need waitstaff for taking orders, what do you really need them for? "There'll be no more waiters and I don't know who will be cooking back there. Probably some robot," Will says. "It'll be back to the Automats."

I tried to present a more hopeful scenario. Perhaps the paperwork would get automated and then the servers could concentrate on knowing the food and wine better, solely doing the service and explanation without the hassle of keying in orders. The duo weren't buying it.
 
"I don't want people losing their jobs of because of something like this," Jafferies says. "That's the main thing I think about. The bottom line for the restaurant could be that they don't have to staff as many people per schedule. So what happens to those people?"

Ayers, for his part, is careful to note that he keeps his restaurant staffed precisely as it would be without the tablets. But in general, if a restaurant can save money per table by cutting staff, do we really think that they won't?

"In San Francisco, the cost of labor is $10 an hour, the highest in the country for staff," Suri tells me, "So if you can reduce 10 percent of your staff, it's just a huge win."

Well, for the restaurant owner anyway. It is impossible to ignore that this technology threatens a job class, which through its flexibility and unusual hours, has supported many people trying to pull themselves up through school or a creative career.

But the employees that remain, Suri argues, are actually better off. Their data shows that after their tablets are deployed, the staff's per-night tips tend to go up both because servers cover more tables but also because, for whatever reason, people tip better through the machine than they do otherwise.

In any case, be on the lookout for a tablet coming to a table near you. Whether it's a dedicated piece of hardware like the Presto or some kind of smartphone or iPad-based solution, the next round of automation is already on its way to this corner of the service industry.

One simple answer to our privacy problems would be if everyone became maximally informed about how much data was being kept and sold about them. Logically, to do so, you'd have to read all the privacy policies on the websites you visit. A few years ago, two researchers, both then at Carnegie Mellon, decided to calculate how much time it would take to actually read every privacy policy you should.

First, Lorrie Faith Cranor and Aleecia McDonald needed a solid estimate for the average length of a privacy policy. The median length of a privacy policy from the top 75 websites turned out to be 2,514 words. A standard reading rate in the academic literature is about 250 words a minute, so each and every privacy policy costs each person 10 minutes to read.

Next, they had to figure out how many websites, each of which has a different privacy policy, the average American visits. Surprisingly, there was no really good estimate, but working from several sources including their own monthly tallies and other survey research, they came up with a range of between 1,354 and 1,518 with their best estimate sitting at 1,462.

So, each and every Internet user, were they to read every privacy policy on every website they visit would spend 25 days out of the year just reading privacy policies! If it was your job to read privacy policies for 8 hours per day, it would take you 76 work days to complete the task. Nationalized, that's 53.8 BILLION HOURS of time required to read privacy policies.

To put a dollar amount on this massive time suck, Cantor and McDonald followed some standard procedures that the economics literature suggests could be used to calculate the opportunity cost of tasks. First, they split up web surfing between work and home visits. For work visits, they valued the time spent reading privacy policies at two times that worker's wages to take into account overhead and salary. For home visits, they multiplied the time spent reading at home by one-quarter of average wages. (A simpler hours multiplied by wages calculation would yield a higher cost than the one the researchers calculate here.)

The net effect of all this complicated figuring is that the researchers calculated the hypothetical opportunity cost to the nation of actually reading the Internet's privacy policies. The number they came up with is stunning:



That's greater than the GDP of Florida, which has the fourth largest state economy in the US.

It's also worth noting that this calculation was made in 2008, so undoubtedly, the number would be larger today, given the growth of the U.S. Internet population and the number and diversity of websites. Of course, no one is actually going to read all those privacy policies. What that massive number tells us is that the way we deal with privacy is fundamentally broken. The collective weight of the web's data collection practices is so great that no one can maintain a responsible relationship with his or her own data. That's got to change.

Who are these companies and what do they want from me? A voyage into the invisible business that funds the web.

This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you.

There's nothing necessarily sinister about this subterranean data exchange: this is, after all, the advertising ecosystem that supports free online content. All the data lets advertisers tune their ads, and the rest of the information logging lets them measure how well things are actually working. And I do not mean to pick on The New York Times. While visiting the Huffington Post or The Atlantic or Business Insider, the same process happens to a greater or lesser degree. Every move you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized.

Even if you're generally familiar with the idea of data collection for targeted advertising, the number and variety of these data collectors will probably astonish you. Allow me to introduce the list of companies that tracked my movements on the Internet in one recent 36-hour period of standard web surfing: Acerno. Adara Media. Adblade. Adbrite. ADC Onion. Adchemy. ADiFY. AdMeld. Adtech. Aggregate Knowledge. AlmondNet. Aperture. AppNexus. Atlas. Audience Science.

And that's just the As. My complete list includes 105 companies, and there are dozens more than that in existence. You, too, could compile your own list using Mozilla's tool, Collusion, which records the companies that are capturing data about you, or more precisely, your digital self.

While the big names -- Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. -- show up in this catalog, the bulk of it is composed of smaller data and advertising businesses that form a shadow web of companies that want to help show you advertising that you're more likely to click on and products that you're more likely to purchase.

To be clear, these companies gather data without attaching it to your name; they use that data to show you ads you're statistically more likely to click. That's the game, and there is substantial money in it.

As users, we move through our Internet experiences unaware of the churning subterranean machines powering our web pages with their cookies and pixels trackers, their tracking code and databases. We shop for wedding caterers and suddenly see ring ads appear on random web pages we're visiting. We sometimes think the ads following us around the Internet are "creepy." We sometimes feel watched. Does it matter? We don't really know what to think.

The issues the industry raises did not exist when Ronald Reagan was president and were only in nascent form when the Twin Towers fell. These are phenomena of our time and while there are many antecedent forms of advertising, never before in the history of human existence has so much data been gathered about so many people for the sole purpose of selling them ads.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," my old friend and early Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher once said. "That sucks," he added. But increasingly I think these issues -- how we move "freely" online, or more properly, how we pay one way or another -- are actually the leading edge of a much bigger discussion about the relationship between our digital and physical selves. I don't mean theoretically or psychologically. I mean that the norms established to improve how often people click ads may end up determining who you are when viewed by a bank or a romantic partner or a retailer who sells shoes.

Already, the web sites you visit reshape themselves before you like a carnivorous school of fish, and this is only the beginning. Right now, a huge chunk of what you've ever looked at on the Internet is sitting in databases all across the world. The line separating all that it might say about you, good or bad, is as thin as the letters of your name. If and when that wall breaks down, the numbers may overwhelm the name. The unconsciously created profile may mean more than the examined self I've sought to build.

Most privacy debates have been couched in technical. We read about how Google bypassed Safari's privacy settings, whatever those were. Or we read the details about how Facebook tracks you with those friendly Like buttons. Behind the details, however, are a tangle of philosophical issues that are at the heart of the struggle between privacy advocates and online advertising companies: What is anonymity? What is identity? How similar are humans and machines? This essay is an attempt to think through those questions.

The bad news is that people haven't taken control of the data that's being collected and traded about them. The good news is that -- in a quite literal sense -- simply thinking differently about this advertising business can change the way that it works. After all, if you take these companies at their word, they exist to serve users as much as to serve their clients.

Before we get too deep, let's talk about the reality of the online display advertising industry. (That means, essentially, all the ads not associated with a web search.) There are a dizzying array of companies and services who can all make a buck by helping advertisers target you a teensy, weensy bit better than the next guy. These are companies that must prove themselves quite narrowly in measurable revenue and profit; the competition is fierce, the prize is large, and the strategies are ever-changing. Here's the coral-reef level diversity of corporate life in display advertising, as cataloged by Luma Partners a little over a year ago:

Don't get too caught up in all of that, though. There are three basic categories: Essentially, there are people who help the buyers (on the left), people who help the sellers (on the right), and a whole lot of people who assist either side with more data or faster service or better measurement. Let's zoom in on three of them -- just from the As -- to give you an idea of the kinds of outfits we're talking about.

Let's look at three companies from our list of As. Adnetik is a standard targeting company that uses real-time bidding. They can offer targeted ads based on how users act (behavioral), who they are (demographic), where they live (geographic), and who they seem like online (lookalike), as well as something they call "social proximity." They also give advertisers the ability to choose the types of sites on which their ads will run based on "parameters like publisher brand equity, contextual relevance to the advertiser, brand safety, level of ad clutter and content quality."

It's worth noting how different this practice is from traditional advertising. The social contract between advertisers and publications used to be that publications gathered particular types of people into something called an audience, then advertisers purchased ads in that publication to reach that audience. There was an art to it, and some publications had cachet while others didn't. Online advertising upends all that: Now you can buy the audience without the publication. You want an Atlantic reader? Great! Some ad network can sell you someone who has been to The Atlantic but is now reading about hand lotion at KnowYourHandLotions.com. And they'll sell you that set of eyeballs for a fifth of the price. You can bid in real-time on a set of those eyeballs across millions of sites without ever talking to an advertising salesperson. (Of course, such a tradeoff has costs, which we'll see soon.)

Adnetik also offers a service called "retargeting" that another A-company, AdRoll, specializes in. Here's how it works. Let's say you're an online shoe merchant. Someone comes to your store but doesn't purchase anything. While they're there, you drop a cookie on them. Thereafter you can target ads to them, knowing that they're at least mildly interested. Even better, you can drop cookies on everyone who comes to look at shoes and then watch to see who comes back to buy. Those people become your training data, and soon you're only "retargeting" those people with a data profile that indicates that they're likely to purchase something from you eventually. It's slick, especially if people don't notice that the pairs of shoes they found the willpower not to purchase just happen to be showing up on their favorite gardening sites.

There are many powerful things you can do once you've got data on a user, so the big worries for online advertisers shift to the inventory itself.  Purchasing a page in a magazine is a process through which advertisers have significant control; but these types of online ads could conceivably run anywhere. After all, many ad networks need all the inventory they can get, so they sign up all kinds of content providers. And that's where our third company comes into play.

AdExpose, now a comScore company, watches where and how ads are run to determine if their purchasers got their money's worth. "Up to 80% of interactive ads are sold and resold through third parties," they put it on their website. "This daisychaining brings down the value of online ads and advertisers don't always know where their ads have run." To solve that problem, AdExpose claims to provide independent verification of an ad's placement.

All three companies want to know as much about me and what's on my screen as they possibly can, although they have different reasons for their interest. None of them seem like evil companies, nor are they singular companies. Like much of this industry, they seem to believe in what they're doing. They deliver more relevant advertising to consumers and that makes more money for companies. They are simply tools to improve the grip strength of the invisible hand.

And yet, the revelation that 105 different outfits were collecting and presumably selling data about me on the Internet gives me pause. It's not just Google or Facebook or Yahoo. There are literally dozens and dozens of these companies and the average user has no idea what they do or how they work. We just know that for some reason, at one point or another, an organization dropped a cookie on us and have created a file on some server, steadily accumulating clicks and habits that will eventually be mined and marketed.

The online advertising industry argues that technology is changing so rapidly that regulation is not the answer to my queasiness about all that data going off to who-knows-where. The problem, however, is that the industry's version of self-regulation is not one that most people would expect or agree with, as I found out myself.

After running Collusion for a few days, I wanted to see if there was an easy method to stop data collection. Naively, I went to the self-regulatory site run by the Network Advertising Initiative and completed their "Opt Out" form. I did so for the dozens of companies listed and I would say that it was a simple and nominally effective process. That said, I wasn't sure if data would stop being collected on me or not. The site itself does not say that data collection will stop, but it's also not clear that data collection will continue. In fact, the overview of NAI's principles freely mixes talk about how the organization's code "limits the types of data that member companies can use" with information about the opt-out process.

After opting out, I went back to Collusion to see if companies were still tracking me. I found that many, many companies appeared to be logging data for me. According to Mozilla, the current version of Collusion does not allow me to see precisely what companies are still tracking, but Stanford researchers using Collusion found that at least some companies continue to collect data. All that I had "opted out" of was receiving targeted ads, not data collection. There is no way, through the companies' own self-regulatory apparatus, to stop being tracked online. None.

After those Stanford researchers posted their results to a university blog, they received a sharp response from the NAI's then-chief, Chuck Curran.

In essence, Curran argued that users do not have the right to *not* be tracked. "We've long recognized that consumers should be provided a choice about whether data about their likely interests can be used to make their ads more relevant," he wrote. "But the NAI code also recognizes that companies sometimes need to continue to collect data for operational reasons that are separate from ad targeting based on a user's online behavior."

Companies "need to continue to collect data," but that contrasts directly with users desire "not to be tracked." The only right that online advertisers are willing to give users is the ability not to have ads served to them based on their web histories. Curran himself admits this: "There is a vital distinction between limiting the use of online data for ad targeting, and banning data collection outright."

But based on the scant survey and anecdotal data that we have available, when users opt out preventing data collection is *precisely* what they are after.

In preliminary results from a survey conducted last year, Aleecia McDonald, a fellow at Stanford Center for Internet and Society, found that users expected a lot more from the current set of tools than those tools deliver. The largest percentage of her survey group (34 percent) who looked at the NAI's opt-out page thought that it was "a website that lets you tell companies not to collect data about you." For browser-based "Do Not Track" tools, a full 61 percent of respondents expected that if they clicked such a button, no data would be collected about them.

Do Not Track tools have become a major point of contention. The idea is that if you enable one in your browser, when you arrive at The New York Times, you send a herald out ahead of you that says, "Do not collect data about me." Members of the NAI have agreed, in principle, to follow the DNT provisions, but now the debate has shifted to the details.

There is a fascinating scrum over what "Do Not Track" tools should do and what orders websites will have to respect from users. The Digital Advertising Alliance (of which the NAI is a part), the Federal Trade Commission, W3C, the Internet Advertising Bureau (also part of the DAA), and privacy researchers at academic institutions are all involved. In November, the DAA put out a new set of principles that contain some good ideas like the prohibition of "collection, use or transfer of Internet surfing data across Websites for determination of a consumer's eligibility for employment, credit standing, healthcare treatment and insurance."

This week, the White House seemed to side with privacy advocates who want to limit collection, not just uses. Its Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights pushes companies to allow users to "exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it." The DAA heralded its own participation in the White House process, though even it noted this is the beginning of a long journey.

There has been a clear and real philosophical difference between the advertisers and regulators representing web users. On the one hand, as Stanford privacy researcher Jonathan Mayer put it, "Many stakeholders on online privacy, including U.S. and EU regulators, have repeatedly emphasized that effective consumer control necessitates restrictions on the collection of information, not just prohibitions on specific uses of information." But advertisers want to keep collecting as much data as they can as long as they promise to not to use it to target advertising. That's why the NAI opt-out program works like it does.

Let's not linger too long on the technical implementation here: there may be some topics around which compromises can be found. Some definition of "Do Not Track" that suits industry and privacy people may be crafted. Various issues related to differences between first and third-party cookies may be resolved. But the battle over data collection and ad targeting goes much deeper than the tactical, technical issues that dominate the discussion. 

Let's assume good faith on behalf of advertising companies and confront the core issue head on: Should users be able to stop data collection, even if companies aren't doing anything "bad" with it? Should that be a right as the White House contends, and more importantly, why?

Companies' ability to track people online has significantly outpaced the cultural norms and expectations of privacy. This is not because online companies are worse than their offline counterparts, but rather because what they can do is so, so different. We don't have a language for talking about how these companies function or how our society should deal with them.

The word you hear over and over and over is that targeted ads can be "creepy." It even crops up in the academic literature, despite its vague meaning in this context. My intuition is that we use the word "creepy" precisely because it is an indeterminate word. It connotes that tingling-back-of-the-neck feeling, but not necessarily more than that. The creepy feeling is a sign to pay attention to a possibly harmful phenomenon. But we can't sort our feelings into categories -- dangerous or harmless -- because we don't actually know what's going to happen with all the data that's being collected.

Not only are there more than 100 companies that are collecting data on us, making it practically impossible to sort good from bad, but there are key unresolved issues about how we relate to our digital selves and the machines through which they are expressed.

At the heart of the problem is that we increasingly live two lives: a physical one in which your name, social security number, passport number, and driver's license are your main identity markers, and one digital, in which you have dozens of identity markers, which are known to you and me as cookies. These markers allow data gatherers to keep tabs on you without your name. Those cookie numbers, which are known only to the entities that assigned them to you, are persistent markers of who you are, but they remain unattached to your physical identity through your name. There is a (thin) wall between the self that buys health insurance and the self that searches for health-related information online.

For real-time advertising bidding, in which audiences are being served ads that were purchased milliseconds *after* users arrive at a webpage, ad services "match cookies," so that both sides know who a user is. While that information may not be stored by both companies, i.e. it's not added to a user's persistent file, it means that the walls between online data selves are falling away quickly. Everyone can know who you are, even if they call you by a different number.

Furthermore, many companies are just out there collecting data to sell to other companies. Anyone can combine multiple databases together into a fully fleshed out digital portrait. As a Wall Street Journal investigation put it, data companies are "transforming the Internet into a place where people are becoming anonymous in name only." Joe Turow, who recently published a book on online privacy, had even stronger words.

If a company can follow your behavior in the digital environment -- an environment that potentially includes your mobile phone and television set -- its claim that you are "anonymous" is meaningless. That is particularly true when firms intermittently add off-line information such as shopping patterns and the value of your house to their online data and then simply strip the name and address to make it "anonymous." It matters little if your name is John Smith, Yesh Mispar, or 3211466. The persistence of information about you will lead firms to act based on what they know, share, and care about you, whether you know it is happening or not.

Militating against this collapse of privacy is a protection embedded in the very nature of the online advertising system. No person could ever actually look over the world's web tracks. It would be too expensive and even if you had all the human laborers in the world, they couldn't do the math fast enough to constantly recalculate web surfers' value to advertisers. So, machines are the ones that do all of the work.

When new technologies come up against our expectations of privacy, I think it's helpful to make a real-world analogy. But we just do not have an adequate understanding of anonymity in a world where machines can parse all of our behavior without human oversight. Most obviously, with the machine, you have more privacy than if a person were watching your clickstreams, picking up collateral knowledge. A human could easily apply analytical reasoning skills to figure out who you were. And any human could use this data for unauthorized purposes. With our data-driven advertising world, we are relying on machines' current dumbness and inability to "know too much."

This is a double-edged sword. The current levels of machine intelligence insulate us from privacy catastrophe, so we let data be collected about us. But we know that this data is not going away and yet machine intelligence is growing rapidly. The results of this process are ineluctable. Left to their own devices, ad tracking firms will eventually be able to connect your various data selves. And then they will break down the name wall, if they are allowed to.

Your visit to this story probably generated data for 13 companies through our website. The great downside to this beautiful, free web that we have is that you have to sell your digital self in order to access it. If you'd like to stop data collection, take a look at Do Not Track Plus. It goes beyond Collusion and browser based controls in blocking data collection outright.

But I am ultimately unclear what I think about using these tools. Rhetorically, they imply that there will be technological solutions to these data collection problems. Undoubtedly, tech elites will use them. The problem is the vast majority of Internet users will never know what's churning beneath their browsers. And the advertising lobby is explicitly opposed to setting browser defaults for higher levels of "Do Not Track" privacy. There will be nothing to protect them from unwittingly giving away vast amounts of data about who they are. 

On the other hand, these are the tools that allow websites to eke out a tiny bit more money than they otherwise would. I am all too aware of how difficult it is for media businesses to survive in this new environment. Sure, we could all throw up paywalls and try to make a lot more money from a lot fewer readers. But that would destroy what makes the web the unique resource in human history that it is. I want to keep the Internet healthy, which really does mean keeping money flowing from advertising.

I wish there were more obvious villains in this story. The saving grace may end up being that as companies go to more obtrusive and higher production value ads, targeting may become ineffective. Avi Goldfarb of Rotman School of Management and Catherine Tucker of MIT's Sloan School found last year that the big, obtrusive ads that marketers love do not work better with targeting, but worse.

"Ads that match both website content are obtrusive do worse at increasing purchase intent than ads that do only one or the other," they wrote in a 2011 Marketing Science journal paper. "This failure appears to be related to privacy concerns: the negative effect of combining targeting with obtrusiveness is strongest for people who refuse to give their income and for categories where privacy matters most."

Perhaps there are natural limits to what data targeting can do for advertisers and when we look back in 10 years at why data collection practices changed, it will not be because of regulation or self-regulation or a user uprising. No, it will be because the best ads could not be targeted. It will be because the whole idea did not work and the best minds of the next generation will turn their attention to something else.

Images: Shutterstock.

With the revenue and profit generating success of its iOS products, Apple's market value has passed half a trillion dollars in after hours trading. This is truly astonishing. Look at just a few of these comparisons:

• Car companies used to be the pillar of national economies. Now, Apple is worth as much as Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Honda, Ford, Nissan, GM, Renault, Peugeot, Renault, and Tesla combined. 
  
• Or take media. If you add up Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Viacom, Time Warner, Time Warner Cable, CBS, Liberty Global, Dish Network, Charter, and Cablevision, you can only get to $350 billion of market capitalization. 
  
• Apple is worth more than Google ($200 billion) and Microsoft ($267 billion) combined.
• Apple is worth 16 times more than Dell ($31 billion) and almost 6 times as much as HP ($51 billion).
• Apple makes more profit in two weeks than AOL's entire market cap.
  
• Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Adobe, HP, Dell, and Lenovo are worth almost $600 billion to Apple's $500 billion.  

With a run like this, it's difficult to do much more than wait and watch. It's hard to compare their success with any technology company, including Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

We can't all be Buzz Aldrin, but nothing can keep you from being an astronaut in the solar system of your mind!

Is one mustache representative too much to ask from our space program?

NASA needs a few good volunteers to hole up in Hawaii for 180 days and try out the food that prospective travelers to Mars might eat.

It may sound crazy, but it's one of many "analog" experiments that NASA and our Russian counterparts run to get a handle on the impacts of space travel. Before we go zipping off across the solar system, we need to know how our bodies and minds might fare under the stresses of strange food and zero-gravity.

Luckily, there is no shortage of people willing to pretend to be astronauts for a little while, subjecting themselves to experiments that come with real physical risks and that make equally real contributions to off-world science. And there are even more people who want to help NASA out in other ways, too. Here's a list of the many ways you can pretend to be an astronaut without ever actually heading into space.

Option 1: Lay in Bed for Months at a Time to Simulate Microgravity

I first ran across analog studies reporting a story for Wired Science in which participants were paid $5,000 a month to lie in bed with for 90 days. To simulate the effects of microgravity on muscles and bones, NASA scientists have discovered they can tilt people slightly head down and keep them that way for a few months. People can do whatever they'd like as long as they retain that posture, but that doesn't make it easy.

"When they first put me head down that first day -- part of it is mental -- I had a little bit of a moment right before they put the head at minus six degrees. I thought, 'Oh my god, my feet aren't going to touch the floor for 90 days,'" one participant told me. "But I had committed to it. Once I was head down, what's immediate is the blood rush. All the blood rushes up to your face and you get a little headachey, nauseous."

If you'd like to participate in said studies, they are actively recruiting for two right now.

Hard at work for space science. (Note: this is a lunar analog study, so the subject's body is actually in a different configuration than that used to study microgravity.)

Option 2: Cook and eat food designed for trips to Mars in a simulated Martian environment.

Turns out that planetary missions would encounter an unexpected problem: cooking. For short space missions, dehydrated food is fine, but researchers at Cornell and the University of Hawaii are raising serious questions about whether that strategy would work for Martian missions. For one, dehydrated food doesn't usually have the three to five year shelf life that such a mission would need. And can you imagine eating that stuff for years? So, they are running an experiment to see if cooking on Mars makes more sense than sending astronauts with a bunch of food packets.

On a planetary surface mission, the presence of gravity makes cooking possible. Properly packaged food ingredients typically last longer and require less packaging mass than individual rehydratable meals. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence indicates that menu fatigue may be less significant when food is cooked fresh on site rather than simply rehydrated. With the right ingredient set and some skill and creativity in the kitchen, an almost infinite variety of foods can be produced, providing planetary explorers with a nutritionally balanced diet customized to their evolving needs and likes. Moreover, preparation of food is an important part of every human culture, with psychological value for both the crew and the cook.

They'll be rigging people up in spacesuits and sticking them in a mocked-up Mars analog environment with only delayed electronic communication to the outside world. They'll be piloting the experiment with a two-week version this year and then extending that to 120 days in 2013.  

Option 3: Hang Out in a Mock Martian Craft at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Biomedical Problems for 520 Days

This one was a bit of a commitment, we must admit. But beginning in June 2010 and ending in November 2011, six people spent 520 days together in a simulated Martian environment. The citizens of Russia, China, Italy, and France apparently came out of the endeavor in fine mental and physical health, which  one can only attribute to the development of Netflix streaming is surprising.

Astronauts? More like asbronauts.

Option 4: Take on a Citizen Science Project for NASA

Popular love for NASA has made the agency a hotbed for citizen science projects in which thousands of cosmophiles do hard science for free. The menu of projects is always changing, but right now you can spot lunar impact craters and/or help improve Martian maps.

Option 5: Purchase a $5,000 Ride on a 'Vomit Comet'

If you have more spare cash than free time, perhaps you could direct some of it to the Zero G Corporation, which offers special flights that allow people to experience weightlessness because they fly in big parabolic arcs. NASA has had a similar research plane for quite some time -- popularly nicknamed the Vomit Comet -- but Zero G makes it easy for anyone to see what it feels like to be weightless. To be clear, these flights don't go to space, but they simulate the feeling of zero gravity.

When I go to space, I'm going to play with bubbles, too.

Option 6: Dress Up in a Homemade Astronaut Suit

And if all else fails, and you do not end up in any of the official pretending sessions, you can always sew your own suit and walk around England. That's what David Wilson did for the video below, and it really seemed to work out for him.

Apple's labor solution isn't perfect, but it's more than other tech companies are willing to do to improve factory workers' lives.

The electronics industry copies everything Apple does from its products' features to its marketing's feel. So, more than a month after Apple announced that it would tie-up with the controversial, corporation-friendly Fair Labor Association, it's a little bit surprising that not one other electronics-maker has even tried to sign on with the FLA. What gives? Bloomberg's Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows dug in to see if they could find out.

The answers to their quest should not surprise you. The companies do not want to give any even quasi-independent authority access to their supply chains. For all the real and legitimate criticism of the FLA, the reality is that they are a rock of something in a sea of nothing when it comes to labor protections for overseas workers. And gadget-makers want to maintain their freedom to operate in those open waters.

Some companies' spokespeople claimed that electronics companies didn't need the FLA because they have the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, which carries out some of the duties that the FLA is supposed to.

The EICC, however, is not exactly a real regulator. Instead, as Infiniera's CEO Tom Fallon put it, the EICC is "absolutely toothless." Fallon said, "I don't think they do meaningful work," and gave his reason why. There is no record of any manufacturing facility "losing business, permanently or temporarily, for failing to live up to the group's code of conduct."

Other companies say that they do their own internal audits, though nothing they turn up is ever made public and few look further down the supply chain at where the parts for their products come from. Microsoft, Dell, and Samsung all said they had internal procedures to check up on suppliers. HP's internal audits found "excessive working hours" at more than half of the factories the corporate social responsibility team sampled.

The last excuse Bloomberg found for electronics' firms not following Apple's lead was simply that Chinese workers do not want to not be exploited. Some executives claimed that young workers wanted to work extra-long weeks. A former head of Flextronics said that, particularly in the past decade, "Most Chinese workers at that point in time wanted as much overtime as they could get."

As usual, though, only the labor camp could say what is obvious to everyone who looks at the situation. Until the companies are willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of profit margin for better working conditions, nothing is going to happen.

And audits and factory inspections can only go so far. If technology companies are serious about improving conditions, they need to accept lower profit margins and slower production times, Worker Rights Consortium's [Scott] Nova said.

"As long as the company is not willing to demand change from suppliers, and adjust prices and delivery deadlines to implement that change, we're not going to see it," he said.

And right now, only Apple may feel that it has some profit margin to spare.

You know who is happy about Facebook's IPO, aside from its investors and fanboys? The state of California. The Golden State has been plagued by bad news about its budget, but a new estimate from the state of California's Legislative Analyst's Office suggests that the Palo Alto company's move to public markets could drop an extra $2.5 billion into the state's coffers, including a whopping $1.5 billion in 2012-2013.

The LAO made sure to caveat its estimate with all detailed notations of the uncertainties in their model. "As we discussed in the Overview of the Governor's Budget, the Facebook impact on state revenues cannot be predicted in advance and will never be known retrospectively with any degree of precision," they wrote. "Yet, given that an IPO clearly would benefit state revenues, we believe it is appropriate for policymakers to incorporate this into their budgetary discussions."

Even if it will be hard to quantify the impact of a Facebook IPO, the bottom line is clear to the LAO: Facebook going public will be great for a state that needs to close a multi-billion dollar budget gap over the next couple of years.

In a reminder of just how fragile this web we've weaved across the globe is, a ship dropped anchor outside the Kenyan port of Mombasa and happened to hit a bundle of undersea fiber optic cables connecting east Africa to the Internet. Now, the BBC reports, six countries -- Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and a piece of South Sudan -- are going to experience Internet slowdowns as less pipe is available to carry the same amount of traffic.

The slowdown, which could take two weeks to repair, could be particularly tough for Kenya's burgeoning tech scene, which locals felt was going to be at its strongest yet in 2012.

As much as Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was mocked for calling the Internet "a series of tubes," the Internet's physical manifestation looks a lot like (surprise!) a series of tubes.

It's difficult to find great photos or descriptions of laying undersea cable (i.e. tubes), but Alcatel-Lucent released a video of one of its ships being loaded up with cable to an epic soundtrack. The most mindblowing shot comes about 1:45 into the video in which we get to look at the GIGANTIC spool off which the cable is pulled. It's 20 feet tall and wound many feet deep.



The art and science of laying underwater cable have been around since the days of the telegraph, when Americans tried desperately to connect themselves to Europe via an underwater link. Here's what the old apparatus used to look like.



Since then, cables running under the ocean have been improved and better armored and -- like all cables -- made to carry far more data. The ships carrying them are much larger and carry a lot more cable. Nonetheless, as you can see in the video below, some things haven't changed much in the century and a half we've been sending messages under the sea. In essence, cable is fed onto a spool and dropped into the water. Nowadays, the cables are buried under the ocean bed. But still, everyone has to hope that nothing heavy enough to damage the cables falls into the depths. And these undersea cables are still one of the most vulnerable pieces of our information infrastructure, as millions of east Africans just found out.