This case has interesting implications. Originally, Justice Steve Rares said, effectively, that someone using a recorder-in-the cloud was still making a personal copy for domestic purposes. The fact that they’re using a recording device that’s provided as a service rather than sitting on the shelf under their television is irrelevant. The Full Court is saying, effectively, that the cloud provider is complicity in the action, which means it’s no longer personal, and in some cases may even be the sole actor.

This interpretation could have massive implications for providers of other cloud services. Could they be found to be copying data that they’re not entitled to? I’m no lawyer, so don’t ask me. But I can at least see that the law is having to deal with situations that are very different from the circumstances imagined when it was written.

Paragraph 100 of the Full Court’s decisions does say:

We should emphasise that our concerns here have been limited to the particular service provider-subscriber relationship of Optus and its subscribers to the TV Now Service and to the nature and operation of the particular technology used to provide the service in question. We accept that different relationships and differing technologies may well yield different conclusions to the “who makes the copy” question.

Will this decision be appealed? You bet.

Last night I spoke about the decision and its implications with Dom Knight on ABC Local Radio nationally — well, except for the analog transmitters that were broadcasting the cricket. I also spoke about the material I presented yesterday at DigitalMe in Perth.

[Update: I just noticed that there's a couple of little audio gaps. I was recording off the stream, y'see. I'll fix them later.]

Personally, I stand by what I said in the opinion piece I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald in February: Sport has to think outside the box.

If you’re in Perth today, the DigitalFamily event starts at 1000 local time at Northbridge Piazza. It’s free.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here as an archive.

Even before Google controversially demolished the privacy walls between its various products, we were already living in the total surveillance society. With every keystroke we are voluntarily telling companies, governments and heaven knows who else an awful lot about ourselves. Should we be worried about the uses to which this information could be put? Technology writer Stilgherrian discusses the implications of what we share with social media consultant Thomas Tudehope.

I daresay I’ll be covering material like that in my Sydney Morning Herald story You are what you surf, buy or tweet, and the more recent ZDNet Australia story The Facebook experiment, but the conversation will be up to you, the audience.

The theme for SWF this year is “the line between the public and the private”. As artistic director Chip Rolley says in his welcome message:

The question of the limits of what is personal is one of the hottest subjects around.

“Privacy is for paedos,” ex-News of the World journalist Paul McMullan told the UK Leveson Inquiry into the media. Now, via Facebook and Twitter, we voluntarily tell the world things we previously might not have told even our loved ones. Investigative journalists thrive on leaks and finding out what others don’t want us to know. And the state knows few boundaries (personal or political) in its need to prevent another 9/11.

(If you want a high-powered discussion of these issues, Sydney Town Hall discussion on Friday 18 May with former High Court judge Michael Kirby, former director general of MI5-turned-thriller writer Stella Rimington, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle, media and news blogger Jeff Jarvis and investigative journalist Heather Brooke.)

iSpy is on Sunday 20 May 2012 at 2.30pm at the Bangarra Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay. It’s free, and you don’t need to book — but I’m told that it can sometimes get busy at SWF.

Before that I have speaking engagements on 27 April at DigitalMe in Perth and 11 May at the Saasu Cloud Conference 2012.

(These events are part of the City of Perth’s Innovation Month. It looks like there’s some good stuff happening, including the screening of some classic futuristic films.)

DigitalMe is a full day of activities that “takes the individual on a journey through the digital landscape of blogging, video, personal privacy, personal reputation, mobile web and social media helping to demystify the digital world and understand more about your personal digital footprint.”

My half-hour session at 2pm is “Destroying your world, tweet by tweet, like by like”:

Facebook, Twitter and social mobile applications encourage you to share your life. But what happens when you share too much? Every time you share, tweet, email or browse a website you leave a digital footprint that reveals far more than you may realise — or want. Find out what Facebook, Twitter and the secretive online advertising companies know about you and take control.

I covered some related themes in a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks back.

DigitalMe is being held at Northbridge Piazza. It’s free, but you’ll need to register online.

I’m flying into Perth on Thursday 26 April around lunchtime and leaving on Sunday 29 April in the mid-afternoon. My schedule is fairly open so far, so other diversions are welcome.

Computers can tell when your daughter is pregnant. Sometimes they know even before you do. In a recent feature for The New York Times, Charles Duhigg describes how Target in the US analyses everything it knows about its customers. A young woman buying unscented lotion, a large handbag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a brightly coloured rug is likely to be pregnant. So Target dispatches coupons for baby clothes.

When a father stormed into a store complaining that his teenage daughter had received the coupons, Target was forced to apologise. But days later, he realised the store was right…

You can click through to read the whole thing. But since it was written for the dead-tree paper and not the website there are no links.

Here’s the links to my sources:

• The New York Times feature by Charles Duhigg, How companies learn your secrets.
• A Forbes summary of that piece, How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. It’s a good summary, but I do recommend reading the full NYT version.
• An article explaining how Forbes capitalised on the NYT article in web traffic terms.
• A 2006 piece from The Guardian explaining how much could be gleaned from the AOL web search logs, even though they were supposedly anonymous.
• An article in Wired explaining similar things.
• The 2010 academic paper Myths and fallacies of ‘personally identifiable information’ [PDF] by computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov. I reckon if you look for more papers from these guys you’ll discover a lot more of interest.

You might also enjoy some of my more recent articles on related topics:

• Hacked or not, Ludlam’s a target of spies, ZDNet Australia, 25 January 2012.
• Aus becoming surveillance state: Ludlam, ZDNet Australia, 20 January 2012.
• Hey Facebook, we want to share, but this is ridiculous, Crikey, 23 September 2011.
• Yet another free pass for Aussie spooks, CSO, 16 September 2011.
• Has Facebook killed the undercover cop?, CSO, 25 August 2011.

While Apple’s iMessage isn’t new, extending the application to the Mac’s OS X desktop is, as are some of the iCloud-linked services. In part that’s shoring up Apple’s cloud services. And it’s certainly part of the threat to mobile telcos’ revenue that I wrote about for CSO Online yesterday.

The Path thing is just arsehattery of the first water.

Anyway, here’s the audio. The presenter is Tim Webster and you’ll also hear his regular guest Trevor Long.

The audio is ©2012 Radio 2UE Sydney Pty Ltd, of course, but as usual I’m posting it here in case they don’t post it at their own website.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. I have no further explanations to add.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 117, “Is anonymity online your right?” A conversation with Scott Shipman, eBay’s global privacy leader, about online reputation and trust, data breach-notification laws, the behavioural targeting of advertising, eBay’s AdChoice technology for controlling that targeting, some of the clever things you can do by data mining eBay’s sales data, and how you might create the online equivalent of an untraceable cash transaction.

Articles

• Want data? Scoop up those lost USB keys, CSO, 7 December 2011.
• When is a journalist not a journalist?, ABC Drum Opinion, 9 December 2011.
• Turnbull overstating the uncommercial NBN case … mostly, Crikey, 9 December 2011.
• Govt’s DisasterWatch: the ’9/11 of apps’, ZDNet Australia, 9 December 2011.

Media Appearances

• I was a panellist on the Technology Spectator “webinar” [ugh!] “Board with security?”, which looked at why company directors need to understand information security a bit better and how they might go about it. The recording hasn’t been posted online yet, but I’ll put a link here when it is.
• On Thursday night I was interviewed by ABC Radio News about a report by the Australian Government Competitive Neutrality Complaints Office, part of the Productivity Commission, into claims that the National Broadband Network’s grenfields fibre rollouts breached certain government policies. Exciting stuff. Sound bites were used on Friday’s morning’s AM program in a story headlined Government brushes off NBN criticisms.

Corporate Largesse

None. And I thought there’d be a bunch of corporate parties this week. But I spent most of the week at Wentworth Falls instead.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: A slender-billed cuckoo-dove, photographed at Bunjaree Cottages in the Blue Mountains. There's a lot of bird life up here.]

The audio of last Thursday’s media140+ panel discussion on Digital Anonymity is now online — and you have a choice of listening.

• The full thing, almost two hours long.
• My 30-minute edited highlights with a technical focus, this week’s Patch Monday podcast.

Panellists were (left to right in the photo) Jessica Hill from ABC Radio current affairs; me; lawyer David Stewart from Wrays; Karalee Evans, senior director & APAC digital strategist from PR firm Text 100; and moderator John Kerrison from Sky News Australia.

Note that I could have embedded playable audio directly into this web page, but why should I give Audioboo and CBS Interactive the ability to track visitors to my website, whether they play the audio or not?

Embedding may be convenient, but that convenience is paid for with the privacy of your website visitors.

[Photo: The media140+ panel discussion as photographed by Neerav Bhatt. Image turned to black and white by me, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.]

The Media140 folks are running a panel discussion in Sydney this Thursday 24 November on Digital Anonymity: Do we have a right to anonymity online?

As Google and Facebook try by force to remove anonymity from the web, is privacy no longer seen as a fundamental right? Will it become a commodified product we will have to purchase? We take a look at the legal, social and media perspectives and ask the question is it really that important?

The moderator is John Kerrison from Sky News Business, and the panel includes Anne Hurley, the interim head of the Internet Industry Association Karalee Evans, senior director & APAC digital strategist, Text 100; Jessica Hill from ABC Radio current affairs; lawyer David Stewart from Wrays; and [coughs] me.

It’s at the Hotel Clarendon, 156 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills. 6.30pm for a 7pm start, $10m admission, and I’m told you’d better book.

Mr Kerrison seems to be taking it very seriously, with scenarios to discuss and all sorts of actual planning. We should be able to derail him pretty quickly, I should imagine.

[Update 22 November: Edited to reflect the change in line-up.]

Here’s my conversation with Richard Margetson on ABC 105.7 Darwin about the Facebook changes, broadcast on the afternoon of Tuesday 27 September 2011.

Again, this bounces off last week’s Crikey piece, Hey Facebook, we want to share, but this is ridiculous, but Mr Margetson was also aware that I’d just come from a lunchtime briefing with a bunch of information security people so he explored that angle too.

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presented here as always because the ABC doesn’t generally post these live interviews and it’s a decent plug for them.

As I mentioned on Monday, I was scheduled to do more radio spots this week about Facebook’s changes and what they meant for privacy. Here’s another of them, and there’ll be a third posted shortly.

For most of the presenters, the kick-off was my Crikey piece from last week, Hey Facebook, we want to share, but this is ridiculous — and I’ll have more to write about that before the weekend is finished.

This conversation with Nicole Dyer from ABC Gold Coast was broadcast on the morning of Monday 26 September 2011.

It’s interesting to hear how different presenters explore different aspects of the issue, I think. Earlier the same morning I spoke with Katya Quigley on ABC Mid North Coast NSW, and she was much more interested in the idea of being always-connected and whether that gave people enough down time, as it were.

Alas, that radio station isn’t streamed online so I couldn’t record it.

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presented here as always because the ABC doesn’t generally post these live interviews and it’s a decent plug for them.

So, there’s a reason Google is being so stubborn over this “real names” policy. Google+ isn’t a social network at all, despite the fact that it looks like one. It’s actually the core of an identity service.

I wrote about this for Crikey today, a piece that includes Google chair Eric Schmidt’s confirmation of that plan and some observations that suggest Google+ is failing to reach critical mass.

The continuing bad press over what’s been dubbed #nymwars won’t help. Yet I suspect that Google’s need and desire to prevent Facebook Connect becoming the planet’s default identity service will override most concerns.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Schmidt has always been the go-for-profits guy. Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page is reportedly aware of the problem, although an informative post by Stephen R van den Berg says it’s unclear whether he’s being properly informed about the criticism. That post was written a week ago, however, so I daresay Page has seen at least some of the news reports since. And the other co-founder, Sergey Brin, has been notably silent.

It feels like things have come a long way since my original expletive-filled rant.

Oh, and thank you to everyone who said they liked the Patch Monday podcast on this topic. That’s especially pleasant given my fears over the rushed recording.

Google’s disaster of a “real names” policy was the subject of today’s Patch Monday podcast. How could it not be, after my own experiences and the attention that scored globally?

Australian developer Kirrily “Skud” Robert, a former Google employee currently resident in San Francisco, has been compiling Google’s name failures, so she was a natural guest for the podcast.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

There’s been a few developments this week in my battle with Google over my name. More communication. And more media coverage.

On 18 August I responded to Google’s boilerplate email thusly:

Hi folks,

My full, legal name is a mononym, “Stilgherrian”. It has been so for 30 years. This name has been used consistently throughout that time on every official document, in every credit line in print, on radio and on television, in everyday use… everywhere.

Dare I say it, a Google Search will soon reveal that.

My only photo ID is my passport, and I am unwilling to send a copy because I have security concerns.

I can’t edit my name in Google Profiles to match my “real” name, because it won’t let me leave the surname field blank.

How do we fix this?

Cheers,

Stilgherrian

Google’s reply arrived on 20 August.

Hi Stilgherrian,

Thank you for your appeal. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

In order to help us in verifying your name, we would appreciate you providing any of the official documentation to which you refer that show Stilgherrian to be your name and not a pseudonym or pen name. This can include documents which feature FNU as the first name. While helpful to avoid impersonation, we do not require a photo to be associated with any submitted documentation.

If verified, we will update your profile name to be your mononym followed by a dot (.). We are looking into how to improve the process for mononyms moving forward.

Sincerely,
Brian
The Google Profiles Support Team

FNU stands for “first name unknown”, and it’s how the US government copes with mononyms in official documents like my US travel visa. Your mononym goes in the surname field, “FNU” in the given name field, problem solved.

Except that it looks bloody ugly.

And except that “FNU” and “LNU” are apparently how US law enforcement agencies record the names of suspects under surveillance before their real identities are known.

I have yet to gather any evidence for Google, because it’s actually not urgent and I’ve got plenty on my plate at the moment.

Meanwhile my friend and colleague Richard Chirgwin wrote a piece for The Register. And Information Week ran a story, 5 Reasons Google+’s Name Policy Fails, but they were too gutless to link to me. And in Germany, DRadio Wissen ran the story.

Please add your comments on the original post.

[Photo: Google Ice Sculpture, by Melanie Phung. Used under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.]

My expletive-ridden blog post about Google’s fucked-up “real names” policy and their brain-dead implementation has gone global.

While my editor at Crikey commissioned an article, To Google, we are data fodder, and I am an unperson, the story was picked up by an American political blog and linked to by The Wall Street Journal.

The post has been viewed at least 6000 times, probably many more. So far.

I’ve just written a lengthy response to the 127 comments so far. I do think that people who say “It’s only a beta” and “It’s just a bug” and “Well it is a free service” and “What do you expect with a weird name?” have entirely missed the point.

That, too, will probably offend people.

And now my work here is done.

Please add your comments on the original post.

[Photo: Logo from Google Developer Day 2007 by meneame comunicacions, sl, used under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.]

I knew this would happen sooner or later. Google, a data mining company in the United States, has the ignorant arrogance to tell me, a citizen of Australia, that my name — my legal name — doesn’t fit their scheme for how names “should” work. Well fuck you, arseholes!

What’s worse, this is how they tell you.

They suspend your profile, tell you your name is wrong, and tell you to change it.

Your profile has been suspended.

It appears that the name you entered doesn’t comply with our Names Policy.

The Names Policy requires that you use the name that you are commonly referred to in real life in your profile. Nicknames, maiden names, and so on, should be entered in the Other Names section of the profile. Profiles are currently limited to individuals; we will be launching a profile for businesses and other entities later this year.

Your profile will be suspended until you do edit your name to comply with the Names Policy: you will not be able to make full use Google services that require an active profile, such as Google+, Buzz, Reader and Picasa. This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail.

We understand that Google+ and it’s [sic] Names Policy may not be for everyone at this time. We would hate to see you go, but if you choose to leave, make a copy of your Google+ data first. Then, click here to leave Google+.

Listen, Googlecunts. This name precisely fits your Names Policy.

This is the name I’m “commonly referred to in real life”.

Did you even look to see if that were true before acting? No. Slack cunts.

Not only that, it’s the name that I have consistently used on every legal document, from passport to Medicare card, from property leases to witness statements, for thirty… fucking… years!

Oh, you’re worried about me putting a “.” in the surname field? That’s because I had to put something in there because your stupid fucked-up data verification code demanded that I not leave that field empty, even though that would be the morally and legally correct thing for me to have done.

What’s wrong is not my name. What’s wrong is your fucked-up Names Policy.

You stupid, stupid bastards clearly have no fucking idea how names work in the real world. For all your cleverness in building huge data centres to mine every scrap of personal information imaginable, somewhere along the line you’ve failed to Hoover up the fact that names don’t always fit into your neat Americo-centric first name / middle initial / last name pattern.

They never have, and they never will.

And don’t give me some bullshit excuse about how this is “unusual”. You’ve been in business for a decade. You’re one of the richest corporations on the planet. I know damn well there’s lots of good research on naming practices out there. Are you seriously suggesting that you build stuff without first reviewing the basics? Are you seriously suggesting that you’re incapable of dealing with the merely “unusual”?

What you also seem not to have figured out is how to open a conversation with someone about something as personal as their name.

You don’t fucking well start off by asserting they’re wrong and you’re right and they need to change. Show a bit of goddam humility, you cunts, and gently enquire whether things are as they seem. And then, only after there’s been a reasonable period for people to respond, do you start suspending services.

I’ve already written about how only fools would rush in and pour their lives into Google+. Seems I was right.

So here’s what I reckon should happen.

• Forward me a copy of the email from last week where you indicated that there might be a problem. That seems to have gone astray. Note here that I’m giving you the opportunity to lie and pretend that you did actually send such an email and that you didn’t simply act like cunts and suspend service.
• Apologise. Profusely. Your behaviour is offensive and you need to make amends. Yes, my behaviour is offensive too, but I’m the aggrieved party. Your first customer service challenge is to reduce my anger. It’s about time Google learned how to do customer service anyway.
• You fix the entire workflow for notifying people about name problems.
• For a start, that first suspension notice should offer more choices than just “Edit your name”. You know, maybe the name is right and you’re wrong.
• Actually, before that, suspension should not be your first action. Fix that. Cunts.
• Get rid of this stupid “must have two names” rubbish.

Now there’s this other whole thing about not allowing people to use screen names and other pseudonyms. That’s pretty fucked up too. But I reckon we’ve given you enough for one day, eh?