straight facts

It's not always easy for journalists to get their facts straight. Even back when papers could afford the salaries of editors and re-write men, they still would sometimes get names wrong, dates wrong, affiliations wrong. Now that money has fled it's much harder for them to get things right. Still, when the New York Times features a front page piece by a reporter named Sulzberger, you expect some extra attention to detail. You expect it the more when highly-contentious politics are involved. Just as much, you expect that when a key "fact" given in the top two paragraphs is shown to be false, the Great Gray Lady will give prominence to the correction so that it will be picked up by the thousands of outlets that have already shown their readers the erroneous information.

Not so.

Here's how the article originally began. I've highlighted the phrase that the Times later corrected.

JANESVILLE, Wis. -- Rich Hahan worked at the General Motors plant here until it closed about two years ago. He moved to Detroit to take another G.M. job while his wife and children stayed here, but then the automaker cut more jobs. So Mr. Hahan, 50, found himself back in Janesville, collecting unemployment for a time, and watching as the city's industrial base seemed to crumble away. Among the top five employers here are the county, the schools and the city. And that was enough to make Mr. Hahan, a union man from a union town, a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker's sweeping proposal to cut the benefits and collective-bargaining rights of public workers in Wisconsin, a plan that has set off a firestorm of debate and protests at the state Capitol. He says he still believes in unions, but thinks those in the public sector lead to wasteful spending because of what he sees as lavish benefits and endless negotiations. "Something needs to be done," he said, "and quickly."

Here's the Times' whoopsie note, published four days later at the bottom of page 2:

Correction: February 26, 2011

A front-page article on Tuesday about reaction among private-sector workers in Wisconsin to Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to cut benefits and collective-bargaining rights for unionized public employees referred incorrectly to the work history of one person quoted, and also misspelled his surname. While the man, Rich Hahn (not Hahan) described himself to a reporter as a "union guy," he now says that he has worked at unionized factories, but was not himself a union member. (The Times contacted Mr. Hahn again to review his background after a United Auto Workers official said the union had no record of his membership.)

As you might expect, the original article achieved much greater reach than the corrected version that's now online. A Google search for the original, uncorrected, text gives close to 3,000 hits while a search for the corrected text gives 119 at the moment.

All this is the more interesting because Wisconsin's Gov. Walker referred to the erroneous text in his notorious phone conversation with the faux David Koch. In it Walker says he wants wide distribution of the Sulzberger piece, particularly among people who have doubts about his union bashing campaign.

A reporter on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Daniel Bice did a nice, succinct blog post on this subject yesterday. It has also drawn a highly-readable tirade from Keith Olbermann.

I haven't found any news hounds who've uncovered how it was that Sulzberger came to be speaking with Rich Hahn in Janesville. It's pretty certain that he and Monica Davey did not just show up and begin interviewing people at random. They might have had a local handler with them and that handler might have had a connection with Wisconsin Republicans, but it's just as likely they used other local sources. The local chamber of commerce is one possibility. It's a fact that the Times article has been rebroadcast via a collection of web sites that all have the domain name "CITYNAMEbusinessvotes.com" and all these sites are affiliated with local chambers of commerce across the U.S. (for example the Ashland OH, C-of-C).

From the article itself it seems pretty clear that neither Sulzberger nor Davey asked for a backgrounding from the Times' premier labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse. As Jason Linkins points out, "just a year ago, Greenhouse wrote a long and excellent investigation of Janesville's GM plant for Granta (Janesville, Wisconsin). In it, Greenhouse looked at the plant closure, the unions, and all the factors at play."

Having been given some front-page real estate for his story, you'd think Sulzberger would be happy to publicize it but you'd be wrong. As Jonathan Schwarz points out, Sulzberger wrote a 733-word article about the Walker prank call and in it, he says A.G.S. unaccountably fails to mention something: "Number of mentions of Walker loving a certain Sulzberger-written New York Times article?" he asks. And "Zero," he answers.

social leakage

Social Leakage

Close to a year ago, two scientists reported a serious violation of privacy policies among prominent social networks. They studied Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LiveJournal, LinkedIn and seven other social networks. Contrary to the privacy policies that each of them adopted, they were leaking personal information to third-party servers that specialize in aggregating internet data for commercial purposes.* The researchers' report is unusually clear and succinct. Its conclusions are damning. Yet, at that time, news organizations paid no attention.

The report is On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks (pdf), Aug 2009, by Balachander Krishnamurthy and Craig E. Wills. The credentials of the authors are good. One works at AT&T Labs in the Research Dept. and other is from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Mass.

Looking back, now, I can find only one instance in which the report was picked up and disseminated: Social network privacy study finds identity link to cookies (Aug 2009). Nine months have gone by and, I guess it's fortunate for us, a major news outlet has finally taken notice: Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole by Emily Steel and Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal, May 21. 2010. And fortunate also that other news sources have begun to play catch-up. My favorite of these: The billionaire Facebook founder making a fortune from your secrets (though you probably don't know he's doing it).

The original report is worth reading. Do spend ten minutes of your time on it. It gives the social networking sites the benefit of the doubt in guessing that poor coding practice rather than devil-may-care greed was the reason personal data became exposed to third parties. It's really not difficult to mask that data so it's disheartening, but I guess not surprising, that the researchers gave their findings to the social networking sites last August and none then responded. Only now, contacted by the authors of the WSJ article, have they, for the most part, claimed to have fixed or be in the process of fixing the problems.

It also doesn't surprise that, as you've no doubt noticed, the press is now reporting that Facebook is expected soon to announce an abrupt about-face in its privacy policies.

{source: the Masalai blog}

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*Notice that the report says

Although we focus on OSNs [online social networks, like Facebook] in this study, it should be obvious that the manner of leakage could affect users who have accounts and PII [personally identifiable information] on other sites. Sites related to ecommerce, travel, and news services, maintain information about registered users. Some of these sites do use transient session-specific identifiers, which are less prone to identifying an individual compared with persistent identifiers of OSNs. Yet, the sites may embed pieces of PII such as email addresses and location within cookies or Request-URIs. We have carried out a preliminary examination of several popular commercial sites for which we have readily available access. These include books, newspaper, travel, micropayment, and e-commerce sites. We identified a news site that leaks user email addresses to at least three separate thirdparty aggregators. A travel site embeds a user’s first name and default airport in its cookies, which is therefore leaked to any third-party server hiding within the domain name of the travel site. By and large we did not observe leakage of user’s login identifier via the Referer header, the Cookie, or the Request-URI. It should be noted that even if the user’s identifier had leaked, the associated profile information about the user will not be available to the aggregator without the corresponding password. Our preliminary examination should not be taken as the final answer on this issue. A thorough understanding of the scope of the problem along with steps for preventing leakage in general remains a primary concern. Any protection technique must effectively ensure de-identification between a user’s identity prior to any external communication on any site that requires logging in—OSN or otherwise.

cruft, dandruff, and predictive models

Facebook and its principle founder, Mark Zukerberg, are taking a good deal of heat lately about changes that affect users' ability to keep things out of public view. Despite some overblown rhetoric, there's some real basis for concern.

Am I worried? Yes, a bit. In FB as in life in general, I try to be cautious but not compulsively private in sharing information about myself. I don't do much FB statusing and adjust my settings every time I hear there's been a privacy change. I realize, must not we all, that there's much available about me which I can't control. I try to surrender my social security number as little as possible and it used to annoy me that my work ID contained an SSN barcode. It concerns me that financial institutions have required I give it to them when I've applied for a credit card, opened an account, or applied for a mortgage. I know that my accounts with utility companies, wireless & landline phone providers, and my ISPs yield up publicly available information about my use of their services. Many companies with which I do business accumulate information about me which they can, and under certain circumstances, freely do share. When I've bought the homes I've lived in, a whole raft of information became publicly available about the transactions.

I used to be amazed at how sloppy some organizations were about account data; quite often I found I could search membership data in unprotected files. That's less common now, but no matter how grand a privacy policy sounds, I know I really can't control what an organization does with the personal information I give it. Despite good intentions, some are inept or maybe just naïve. And any commercial enterprise is liable to be bought out by some other organization which can choose to ignore whatever privacy promises the old org. made. Even nonprofits get absorbed by others or go commercial with resulting nullification of whatever policies they had.

I suspect most of us know that the computer we're using supplies information about itself when we're online. There are a number of web sites that show you this info, this one, for example. You probably also know that programs which put spyware in web cookies can accumulate a whole lot more about your internet sessions.

It's the business of data snoops to accumulate this information along with every thing else they can tag as pertaining to you, your computer, and the use you make of it. Many people now assume that all their email traffic is subject to either machine or human inspection, or both.

These are some of the reasons people are growing increasingly concerned about recent changes in Facebook's privacy policy. Facebook is a huge success and, in using it, its vast numbers of participants give enormous amounts of information about themselves — that's the point of this primo social network. The potential for abusing that information is also very great. I've noticed that Facebook apps are increasingly apt to have invasive elements in them and the recent furore is mostly about FB's policy of making certain info you give FB available to all its users, certain of it accessible to search engines outside FB, and certain of it available to FB advertisers; it's also about the complexity of privacy controls and gaps in what you can keep from public view; and it's about the difficulty of getting off FB and deleting what you've put there.

Columbia law professor Eben Moglen summarized the risk in a speech last February:

The Problem is the Cruft and Data Dandruff of Life: In fact the degree of potential informational inequality, and disruption and difficulty that arises from a misunderstanding, a heuristic error in the minds of human beings about what is and is not discoverable about them, is now our biggest privacy problem. My students ... show constantly in our dialog they still think of privacy as the one secret they don't want revealed. But that's not their problem. Their problem is all the stuff that's the ... data dandruff of life, which they don't think of as secret at all but aggregates to stuff they don't want to know. Which aggregates not just to stuff they don't want other people to know, but to predictive models about them which they would be very creeped out to know exists at all. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data we already know if we know enough things.

This isn't very precise, but captures the main cause of concern. A whole mess of facts, each by itself benign, can be assembled and put to a nasty purpose.

{sources: PCWorld, ipao.org, }

Here are some links about the current noise regarding Facebook.

Has Facebook gone too far this time? (SocialMedia.biz)

Weekly Wrap-up: Deactivating Facebook, Social Oversharing, iPad vs. Netbooks, And More... (ReadWriteWeb)

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (New York Times)

Could a start-up called Diaspora knock Facebook off its perch? (Christian Science Monitor)

Facebook's Washington Problem, The social network is facing a privacy backlash that could prompt congressional hearings (Business Week)

Europe slams Facebook's privacy settings (Agence France Presse)

Facebook Gives Us Statement On Latest Zuckerberg IM And Company Privacy Policy (SFGate)

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (NYT again)

19-Year-Old Facebook CEO Didn’t Take Your Privacy Seriously, Either (Gizmodo)

Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know (Mashable)

Facebook confirms informal company meeting (CNET News)

Mum's the word from all-hands Facebook company meeting on privacy (NetworkWorld)

Facebook downplays privacy crisis meeting (BBC)

Facebook caves in to privacy pressures; Sort of, partly (Inquirer)

Your public Facebook status updates? Now publicly searchable outside Facebook (TechCrunch)

Anti-Facebook project rockets to $120,000 in online donations (VentureBeat)

Blogrunner Facebook news snapshot (NYT)

Facebook downplays privacy crisis meeting

This Is MySpace’s Moment To Shine, But That Obviously Isn’t Going To Happen (TechCrunch)

Facebook Adds Two Privacy Tools (Information Week)

Are privacy concerns causing an about face on Facebook? (MassHighTech.com)

How to delete your Facebook account forever (GeeshuiLiving.com)

NY Times Graphic on Privacy Settings

{click to view full size; source: Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (New York Times)}

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Incidentally:

Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, which is not far east of the path taken by the old Croton Aqueduct, and he was raised in Dobbs Ferry through which the aqueduct passed on its way to Manhattan. The green line marks its route. Click image to view it full size.

{USGS, White Plains, NY Quadrangle, 1938, southwest corner; source: UNH DIMOND LIBRARY
Documents Department & Data Center}

Also, as it happens, my great-uncle Adolph Windmuller and his wife Caroline Hague lived in Dobbs.

I've written a few posts about the aqueduct and Mrs. Hague:

• a river three miles wide
• Beechwood and vicinity
• the resurrection of Sparta
• Croton Water
• Hugo B. Roelker
• at Madame's
• the shame of Madame Thurn
• Caroline Hague

photojournalism

The Boston Globe appears to be in a small class of city papers that isn't afraid to face the future. Case in point the excellent photojournalism blog by its website developer Alan Taylor. This comes from a current post:

Here's a direct link: The sapphire mines of Madagascar
The blog itself:

The blog says: "The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, compiled semi-regularly by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com's Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm's MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting."

Photo by Buster McLeod

The blog's FAQ is here. I think it's significant that the BG hasn't walled off its web developers. I think it's pretty common for papers to treat the web as another piece of equipment (like their presses) and the developers as cerebral mechanics. It might be a better model for the news rooms and the tech rooms to merge, as seems to be the BG model.

There's more here: Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe's The Big Picture

more on the Weng'an, Guizhou riots

Here's a short update to my post just below (a death in Guiyang). (I seem to be the only person refering to the event by the city where the riot took place, Guiyang. I've put the more common reference points in the subject of this post.)

There's still plenty of coverage in the news media, although it's not front page stuff. As Kenneth Tan says on shanghaiist, the best coverage of this story continues to come from the blog eastsouthwestnorth.

The ESWN bloggers are saying that Chinese web portals are deleting posts related to the event as quickly as they show up. On one forum it was estimated that Weng'an-related posts had an avererage lifespan of only 15 seconds. Because of this most discussion of the event appears as comments on the official Xinhua news reports.

Xinhua, the Communist Party news agency, is reporting that a high ranking official is investigating the death of the teenage girl. The report says the "incident was a simple affair that a small number of people with ulterior motives managed to manipulate and leverage, with the direct participation of organized crime forces, to provoke and challenge the Party and the government publicly." The blog comments on the Xinhua article: "The above Xinhua article is just about unreadable because it is just another stream of homilies without content. Is this how people really think and talk?"

ESWN also points out the confusion caused by government efforts to take control of coverage, to put their own spin on it, and give it the frame they wish it to have:

The second phenomenon was the amount of noisy chaff released. On one hand, there is the legendary "50-cent gang." These are supposed to be professional Internet writers who get paid 0.50 RMB for every post favorable to the government position. When yet another version of the Weng'an mass incident gets published as being the ultimate truth, the author is accused of being a member of the "50-cent gang" who is trying to confuse the public. Indeed, if you read through enough versions, you will probably throw up your hands and decide that you don't know what the truth is anymore. Instead, you change your investigation to questioning the motives of the people who are producing these versions.

On the other hand, there is the legendary "Internet special agent (??)." These are supposed to be professional spies who are paid by anti-China hostile forces to publish unfavorable information about China. For example, some of the posts mentioned that the People's Liberation Army has been dispatched to Weng'an with tanks and artillery, with the hint of a Tiananmen-like massacre to follow. Immediately, the other netizens reacted by pointing that these posts are coming from "Internet special agents." The netizens want to draw a very clear line: they may be protesting against what is happening in Weng'an but they will not serve the purpose of the anti-China hostile forces. This is very clear.

ESWN also provides a link to another blog site which gives a quote from a local Communist Party newspaper that is unaffiliated with Xinhua. In an editorial comment, the paper criticizes the response by government leaders and the national press, saying that there wouldn't have been a riot with great property damage and the rest if leaders had addressed the core element in the story. The editorial writer says:

But the actual fuse that led to this incident, the details on the actual case involving the death hasn’t been explained or described. The short description that “some people are dissatisfied with the determination of ’cause of death’” isn’t enough of a conclusion. This is no different than wrapping gunpowder with paper (ed: similar to the English idiom walking on land-mines), and will lead to guesses and assumptions, and the people’s dissatisfaction is completely understandable.

A comment on the posts in this other blog site says that Xinhua has now published a report by editor Yan Liang giving many more facts and indicating for the first time why local residents were so upset. The article says:

But the police account proved difficult to accept for the girl's family and their supporters. Li's classmates and her landlord said she was a good student and couldn't have killed herself.

"She was a quiet and nice child. She seldom hung out or played around. I don't think she killed herself," said landlord Liu Jinxue, who helped pull her body from the river. Li's hometown was a rural township and she lived in a rented apartment in the county.

Liu told Xinhua that the girl's uncle, Li Xiuzhong, had several serious confrontations with the police, and was beaten by unidentified men in the street.

The uncle was in a county hospital last week, but had since been transferred elsewhere, Xinhua learnt.

Li's grandmother Lu Xiuzhen said the girl's father had departed for provincial capital, Guiyang, to petition the government and could not be reached. The mother had "gone mad" since the incident, she said.

"I demand the government thoroughly investigate the incident and give us a justifiable explanation," she said.

What's interesting -- according to other commenters on the blog -- is that Xinhua put this up on the English-language part of its web site. The version of the Chinese-language side of the site is apparently much more bland:

The English one was written by writers working for Xinhua, and contains a fairly reasonable report of the incident with quotes from various parties. The Chinese article, however, comes from local Guizhou news report (????-????), and is, frustratingly, of the typical style of official non-sense and white wash everyone hated so much. That article basically reported that the party boss of Guizhou held meetings with local officials to discuss the incident, already casting it as mostly caused by misguided people incited by a few and laid only light blame on officials who “didn’t do a good enough job” locally.

Here's the blog post in shanghaiist:

More on the Weng'an, Guizhou riots

As usual, Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth is on top of the incident, busy piecing together all the information he can find. He informs us that Weng'an is now a sensitive word, the uncle of the female student is still alive, and the body of the student is still resting in a refrigerated coffin awaiting autopsy despite this popularly-believed story. Soong also observes that the Xinhua story (which all Chinese media are made to carry) opens more questions than it answers, paving the way for all sorts of unsubstantiated rumours to dominate public opinion.

An AP story has some photos by Andy Wong.

Chinese paramilitary police officers patrol in Weng'an county of Guizhou province, China, Monday, June. 30, 2008. Authorities detained hundreds of people suspected of setting fire to police and government buildings in southwest China in protests over a teenage student's death, a human rights organization said Monday.