Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

And so are the cellphone records of everyone else, says the Chicago Sun-Times, which quotes $160 as the price for full phone records of an FBI agent.

Well, this is an uh-oh moment for whistleblowers–but good news for stalkers, your boss, and politcal smear-mongers.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) .. has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use…”Though this problem is all too common, federal law is too narrow to include this type of crime,” Schumer said last year in a prepared statement.”

Aldo Castañeda and I had an interesting talk at last week’s Dave Winer blogdinner about the huge buzz around digital identity. My view: “emerging transparency” is a huge unstoppable freight train headed our way.

I just didn’t know it was moving this fast.

On Slashdot, your public reputation boils down to one word–in the best case, that word is “Excellent.”

On Wikipedia, your readers can make more nuanced judgments–are you scholarly, helpful, or trollish?–assuming they take time to read your entire contribution history.

This informal reputation system may soon change, according to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who recently told the NYT:

“…he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site’s strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems. In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.”

Big companies are racing into “identity” and “reputation” software systems–I hope Wikipedia will take this opportunity to debut and test many open-source alternatives, if only to create prior art and save useful methods from disappearing behind a wall of preemptive copyright.* Good reputation systems promote collaboration, something the world really needs.

I drank non-virtual coffee with real Lisa Williams this morning. She told me some fascinating things about improvised communities, and I told her I’m thinking about lightweight solutions to online “reputation.” Reputation avatars, if you will.

My Slashdot avatar has a gender-neutral name and excellent “karma.” My #joiito avatar uses my name and writes funny limericks. In Wikipedia, Betsythedevine writes about glacial movement and landforms (I’m from NH.) The reputation systems in these three arenas differ greatly in style and degree of formality.*

In our real lives too, we have lots of different personas for different occasions:

Lisa: And when two of our avatars collide, that’s the stuff of situation comedy.
Betsy: Yes, and of stories about “I got fired for blogging.”

Yours for more and better and funnier avatars that don’t get entangled with our credit card histories and college transcripts,
Betsy, my still-typing-darn-it avatar

Pity poor “airnxtz,” who got more than he bargained for when he asked MetaFilter’s advice on this sad story:

i bought a $3,000 item on ebay a laptop, i never recieved it, i paypaled him the money, and he transfered those funds to his bank account, and then withrdrew it. He then informed me that on the day he was going to ship it out, his car was robbed, and everything (including the laptop and $3,000 cash) was stolen…is this guy going to get away with it?

This question raised a red flag at MetaFilter, however, because airnxtz’s eBay profile showed he hadn’t recently bought a laptop. In fact, he’d recently sold one, and the buyer was complaining it never arrived.

MetaFilterians soon found that airnxtz been asking lots of questions about computer sales gone wrong. In October alone, he claimed, thieves had stolen two laptop computers he was shipping, replacing one with “a rock wrapped in bubble wrap” (October 8 posting) and another with “a jug of water” (October 15 posting).

These events gave extra meaning to airnxtz’s hypothetical question (October 30):

lets say i list an item for x amount of dollars, offering no shipping insurance. in the item description i state ‘by bidding on this auction buyer agrees that seller is not responsible for lost items or errors made by USPS’ now lets say the item gets lost in the mail, am i still obligated to refund the buyer, even though by bidding he agreed i would not be held liable for lost items in the mail?

Not surprisingly, airnxtz has received very bad eBay feedback as a seller. So why is his net feedback rating on eBay so high? Because his feedback as a buyer is good–he has bought many, many small-ticket items on eBay and paid for them promptly.

Long ago, in a trouble-free galaxy far away where fairies in flannel shirts played Donkey Kong with dinosaurs in Doc Martens, we happily posted our email addresses all over the web.

In today’s world of bots and spammers, the question arises–how can we declare our own ownership of our own web pages, while providing a way for real readers to get in touch.

Dave Winer proposes a simple and standardized way to solve the problem. He’s asking for comments and feedback, so go check it out.

Nigerian spam email. Slashdot trolling. Search engine spam–even ping spam.

Wherever you might expect to find information, spammers will be eager to insert some disinformation.

Consider the various online reputation systems–for example eBay’s feedback system or just about anyone’s list of popular bloggers.

Positive spam attempts to raise reputation scores in some deceptive way–maybe creating a bunch of fake eBay transactions, then giving yourself very positive ratings.

Negative spam has a much higher cost to the commons. Trolls who take pleasure in “gratuitous vituperation, scurrilous disparagement and malignant calumny,” (to quote the online Britannica on defamation) drive productive group members away from the commons.

Some quotes that should inspire or constrain us when we try to improve online reputation systems:

“Knowing your neighbors is more important than knowing karate. And in both the real and virtual world, nothing improves security more than gentrification. “

Bruce Schneier

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“It remains to be seen whether folksonomies will implode under the weight of immense numbers of users, or flame or spam out under the malignant attacks of free riders and rip-off artists.”

Bruce Sterling

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“Closing a security hole is like dodging a bullet.”

Dave Winer

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“As we put more and more good stuff up on the web, and democratically encourage folks around the world to get out there and find it–maybe we should take some responsibility for the risks they’ll encounter. “

Betsy Devine

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“I think that identifying which social needs ought to have priority over others should be a key driving force in the discussion about technology and law.”

Joi Ito

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“Fairness means knowing when to make exceptions…That requires being sensitive to individual needs, understanding the larger context, balancing competing values, and forgiving transgressions when appropriate. “

David Weinberger

Suppose it’s true that mathematically speaking, a trustworthy reputation system is exactly as good as genetic kinship in promoting prosocial behavior by group members.

Boiling that down into an online model, reputation systems are critical to social software, which depend on their users behaving in positive ways.
The motivation of A to add value to an online commons depends critically on A’s belief that good users are labeled as good and bad users as bad.*

It also follows that any social software can benefit simply by publicizing its reputation system.

The fact that eBay’s reputation system is digital and public while wikipedia’s reputation system is complex and unevenly enforced may account for the more frequent trollish disruptions at wikipedia.* *

A portable online reputation system could be somewhat like the “online citizenship” model proposed by
Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster, and expanded at today’s Symposium on Social Architecture by Kaliya Hamlin. I look forward to re-seeing Kaliya tonight, to ask her about it.

* * The reputation systems used by eBay, wikipedia, Amazon, SlashDot, etc. are very different. (So are the kinds of behavior each hopes to promote.) The type of reputation system doesn’t matter, however–just its accuracy, as perceived by users. The only detail of desired behavior that matters is its cost-to-benefit ratio.

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“I make a point of going to other people’s funerals because otherwise they won’t come to mine.”

Yogi Berra

I’ve been reading a fascinating article in Nature*, “Evolution of indirect reciprocity.” It gives mathematical models where reputation systems provide a very good substitute for genetic kinship. That is, it benefits me to behave altruistically toward someone who’s adding value to the commons, even if I don’t get my own direct payback from that specific person.

The article is by Martin Nowak, a friend from our Princeton days and Karl Sigmund, whose many benefits to our common commons include feeding 3 year-old Sergei Brin his first guglhupf.