A national association of Latino clergy recently announced a campaign to persuade a million of its members to boycott the 2010 U.S. Census.  They hope their boycott puts pressure on the federal government to pass legalization legislation, but they also claim that they don’t want federal money allocated and used to harass illegal immigrants.

Republican Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota also announced she and her family will be boycotting the census.  In her case, she’s refusing to answer questions because she thinks it’s outrageous that the government wants to know how long it takes you to get to work, and that ACORN, along with many other organizations and businesses, is involved in helping to carry out the 2010 census.  Also, she’s angry that the census doesn’t ask you if you’re a U.S. citizen.  (Which isn’t quite right.  It does ask you if you’re a U.S. citizen; it doesn’t ask you if you have legal status or not.)

In contrast, one group got their wish to be counted.  The Census Bureau recently announced the 2010 U.S. Census will release data on same-sex marriage.  Data on same-sex marriages has been collected for a long time, but the last administration interpreted the Defense of Marriage Act as prohibiting the release of that data.  The initial plans for the 2010 census were to “edit” the responses to recategorize same-sex marriages as “unmarried partners.”  In 1990, the bureau simply changed the gender of one person.  So the new policy means responses will be accepted as they are.

Some people want to be counted.  Some people don’t.

I’m firmly in the “count me” camp.

As Republican Representatives Patrick McHenry, Lynne Westmoreland and John Mica pointed out to Rep. Bachmann, refusing to respond to the Census is “illogical, illegal, and not in the best interest of our country.” The League of United Latin American citizens, in contrast to the Latino clergy group, is participating in a coalition of media, community groups, labor unions, and churches to urge participation in the census.  Clearly, being on the same side of the political spectrum or sharing a specific policy agenda doesn’t mean you’ll agree about the census.

It’s not that numbers are apolitical.  The Census determines how apportion federal funds and representatives for the House.  The LA Times article cites a study that argues the illegal population in California led to California gaining 3 seats in the House of Representatives, while Indiana, Mississippi, and Michigan to lose seats.  It’s all about power, which means it’s all about politics.

But political debates shouldn’t be about whether or not to be counted.  Debates should be about whether certain proposals will do what they claim, or even about whether the numbers are accurate.  To refuse to be counted altogether, when the numbers will determine so much?  It’s like refusing to vote.

For one thing, people make more errors where there are bullets, and therefore lose a feeling of trust for the page they’re using. That means less business for websites that use bullets.

Furthermore, bullets make people more likely to pick simple, easy-to-steal passwords, and to cut-and-paste their passwords. That means a loss of security.

Nielsen doesn’t want to do away with bullets altogether – they can be useful if you really think there’s someone looking over your shoulder. But he suggests that web pages make them optional.

Some more thoughts on this from Bruce Schneier.

Social Network Users Reportedly Concerned About Priacy, But Behavior Says Otherwise (ReadWriteWeb)

Bloomberg Releasing City Data Online in Hopes Developers Will Create New and Better Mobile Apps (NY Daily News)

Ad industry groups agree to privacy guidelines (CNET News)

Using an elaborate fake online persona, Cuban exile and activist Luis Dominguez scored an invitation to Cuba from none other than Antonio Castro (son of Fidel).

Dominguez introduced himself  as “Claudia Valencia”, a beautiful Colombian woman who “met” Castro at a baseball game in Colombia (apparently there really were a lot of foxy ladies at that stadium in Cartagena). A months-long correspondence ensued, including online chats that lasted as long as six hours, ABC News reports.

Although “Claudia” usually kept her chats with Castro focused on romantic topics, Dominguez told ABC that he was able to use “Claudia” to get insight on Fidel Castro’s health, information he then shared with officials in Miami.

“On Jan. 15, in Miami, the rumors were huge that his father was dying,” Dominguez said. “That night, he spent over an hour and a half talking to me. To me, that meant that his father was alive and that proved to be correct.”

Dominguez didn’t actually gather much valuable intel, but the propaganda value of the correspondence should be considerable, at least outside of Cuba.  (Inside, internet access is limited.) Dominguez has posted much of it online (in Spanish).

It’s not exactly live-tweeting the revolution in Iran, but “Claudia Valencia” is a modest example of how global electronic communications can be used to rattle sclerotic regimes.

Basic background: FERPA or the Family Educational and Rights Privacy Act generally prohibits schools from disclosing students’ “education records” without written permission from the student (if 18 and older) or the student’s parent.  But interpretations of FERPA vary widely from school to school.

The Columbus Dispatch discovered that many schools cite FERPA as a reason to withhold documents that arguably don’t fit into the definition of an “education record.”  In response to the Dispatch’s requests, FERPA was cited as a reason not to disclose reports of NCAA violations, lists of people designated to receive athletes’ complimentary admission to football games, and football players’ summer employment documents.  Without such records, it is “virtually impossible to decipher what is going on inside a $5 billion college-sports world that is funded by fans, donors, alumni, television networks and, at most schools, taxpayers.”

The article didn’t just ask you to be shocked and horrified on principle that the university was keeping secrets.  It told you exactly who is being hurt and in what ways:

1.  Other students and the public. In addition to potential misuse of taxpayer funds, “some universities are covering up criminal behavior in the name of student privacy.”

2.  The athletes themselves.

When news that a quarterback at OSU had accepted $500 from a booster went public, the Columbus lawyer and Ohio State fan was “swamped with e-mails from current or former collegiate athletes across the country.”

“They all were saying thank you, that it was out of hand at their school, too,” Webster said.

Before giving money to Smith, booster Robert Q. Baker had tripped up at least two other Ohio State football players. But those problems didn’t become public until after the Smith incident.

If not for Webster’s intervention, it’s impossible to know how many other players might have been approached by Baker, now banned by Ohio State from his luxury suite at Ohio Stadium. Baker was not banned until after public disclosure of the facts.

And ultimately, the universities are hurting

3. The schools themselves and their athletic programs.

All of those schools deleted names and many details of such violations from public records.

Those violations resulted in financial losses, damaged reputations and, in some cases, forfeiture of athletic victories.

The Final Four banners were removed from Ohio State’s Value City Arena because of NCAA rule-breaking. That violation involved former men’s basketball coach Jim O’Brien’s gift of money to a potential recruit and illegal benefits and academic help given to another player. Those violations cost the school more than $1.3 million in legal fees and NCAA penalties.

Florida State currently is spending about $200,000 to appeal one sanction of its numerous NCAA penalties in the cheating scandal. It is trying to preserve football victories so that Bobby Bowden might retire as the winningest football coach in college history.

The story illustrates a difficult but really important truth about information and disclosure.  In the end, we’re all better off when we have more information, even those of us who think we have something to lose.  This might not be true all the time, but it’s true most of the time.  People who think they’re protecting their own interests by withholding information are often taking a rather dim, short-term view of their situation.  And certainly, “privacy” isn’t what gets protected in the end.

The Day Facebook Changed Forever. (ReadWriteWeb)

Unhealthy Accounting of the Uninisured. (Wall Street Journal)

Congress Looks Into How Online Companies Track Consumers (Media Decoder Blog NYT)

Verified Identity Pass Shuts Down “Clear” Operations (Slashdot)

Typing in an Email Address, and Giving Up Your Friends’ As Well (NY Times)

It reminds me of something my friend Sharon said when she bought a house last year.  She Googled her new neighbors, and when she found nothing about them online, she started to wonder if they were spies, or maybe in the Witness Protection Program.

We’re all freaked out when we type our own names into 123people or pipl and find our home addresses staring back at us.  But it’s sort of gratifying to know that all that information out there is also authenticating us, and conversely, helping to detect potential fraud.  Would Clark Rockefeller, otherwise known as Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, have been as successful conning people all these years if his ex-wife had Googled him in 1995?

The “Hidden Cost” of Privacy.  (Schneier on Security)

Google Fusion Tables.  (Official Google Research Blog)

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen an unprecedented amount of online data collection that’s happened largely surreptitiously.  We can’t say that we, as users, haven’t gotten something in return.  The “free” services on the internet have been paid for with our personal information.  But the way the information has been collected has prevented us negotiating with the benefit of full information.  In other words, we haven’t gotten a good deal.  The data we’ve provided is so valuable, we should have struck a harder bargain.

And I think more and more people are starting to feel that way.  Even though most only feel a vague discomfort at this point, it’s unlikely that companies like RealAge will be able to continue what they’ve been doing.

For us at CDP, the fear is that we’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater.  We don’t want to shut down data collection altogether—we just want companies to stop thinking of our data as their data and their data alone.  We want to be able to share in the incredible value that this data has, so that we as a society can all benefit from the data collection and analysis capabilities we’ve developed.  Of course, that’s only possible with stronger privacy protections than are available now, which is why privacy is such an important issue for us to understand.

So what would it look like for us to “share” in the value of data?  It might sound crazy that companies collecting all this data would ever share data with their users, but it’s already happening.

Google, as a company that believes it’s in the business of information rather than advertising, does make some sincere efforts to provide data to the public.  Google Trends may be intended for advertisers, but it also provides the whole world with information on what people are searching for.  Google Flu Trends is a natural outgrowth of that, and some researchers believe this data can be helpful in determining where flu outbreaks are going to occur faster than reporting by clinics.

Some companies, like eBay and Amazon, have built their data collection into the service they provide to their customers.  Some of the information they collect on transactions and ratings can be viewed by all users.  Anyone looking to bid on an item on eBay can see how other buyers have rated that seller.  A user of Amazon looking to buy a new digital camera can view what other buyers considered.

Although Wikipedia is a bit different as a nonprofit, the service it provides also actively incorporates public disclosure of the data collected.  The contributions of any one editor can be seen in aggregate and aggregate stats on website activity are also available to the general public.  This information is important in the self-policing that is essential for Wikipedia to maintain any credibility.

Although the amount of data these companies are sharing with their users and the public is miniscule compared to the amount of data they’ve actually collected from us, it raises the possibility that data collection could happen in a completely different way than it does now.  Companies could make more obvious that data collection is happening, and instead of scaring users away, give users some reason to participate in the collection of data.  The whole process could be one in which users are openly engaged, rather than one in which users feel hoodwinked.

So this is our goal at CDP: what do we need to do in terms of privacy protection, both in terms of technologies and social norms, to make this model of data collection possible?