Search queries in referrer headers: Technical knowledge, privacy, and the status quo
I have been fascinated by Christopher Soghoian‘s complaint to the FTC about Google’s practices of including search query information in the HTTP referrer header.
In summary, Google has taken proactive efforts to ensure that Web site owners that get visitors from Google search receive the search terms entered by Google’s users. Meanwhile, Google has agreed that search query data is personally sensitive information and that it does not disclosure this information, except under specific, limited circumstances; this is reflected in its privacy policy. Note that Google has not just let the URL do the work, but has specifically worked to make the referrer header include search terms (and additional information) when it has adopted techniques that would otherwise prevent these disclosures from being made. (For a fuller summary, see his blog post and this WSJ article. Or this article at Search Engine Land.)
I am not going to discuss the ethics and legal issues in this particular case. Instead, I just want to draw attention to how this issue reveals the importance of technical knowledge in thinking about privacy issues.
A common response from people working in the Internet industry is that Soghoian is a non-techie that has suddenly “discovered” referrer headers. For example, Danny Sullivan writes “former FTC employee discovers browsers sends referrer strings, turns it into google conspiracy”. (Of course, Soghoian is actually technically savvy, as reading the complaint to the FTC makes clear.)
What’s going on here? Folks with technical knowledge perceive search query disclosure as the status quo (though I bet most don’t often think about the consequences of clicking on a link after a sensitive search).
But how would most Internet users be aware of this? Certainly not through Google’s statements, or through warnings from Web browsers. One of the few ways I think users might realize this is happening is through query-highlighting — on forums, mailing list archives, and spammy pages. So a super-rational user who cares to think about how that works, might guess something like this is going on. But I doubt most users would actively work out the mechanisms involved. Futhermore, their observations likely radically underdetermine the mechanism anyway, since it is quite reasonable that a Web browser could do this kind of highlighting directly, especially for formulaic sites, like forums. Even casual use of Web analytics software (such as Google Analytics) may not make it clear that this per-user information is being provided, since aggregated data could reasonably be used to present summaries of top search queries leading to a Web site.1
This should be a reminder why empirical studies of privacy attitudes and behaviors are useful: us techie folks often have severe blind spots. I don’t know that this is just a matter of differences in expectations, but rather involves differences in preferences. Over time, these expectations change our sense of the status quo, from which we can calibrate our preferences and intentions.
Google has worked to ensure that referrer headers continue to include search query information — even as it adopts techniques that would make this not happen simply by the standard inclusion of the URL there.2 A difference in beliefs about the status quo puts these actions by Google in a different context. For us techies, that is just maintaining the status quo (which may seem more desirable, since we know it’s the industry-wide standard). For others, it might seem more like Google putting advertisers and Web site owners above its promises to its users about their sensitive data.
Public once, public always? Privacy, egosurfing, and the availability heuristic
The Library of Congress has announced that it will be archiving all Twitter posts (tweets). You can find positive reaction on Twitter. But some have also wondered about privacy concerns. Fred Stutzman, for example, points out how even assuming that only unprotected accounts are being archived this can still be problematic.1 While some people have Twitter usernames that easily identify their owners and many allow themselves to be found based on an email address that is publicly associated with their identity, there are also many that do not. If at a future time, this account becomes associated with their identity for a larger audience than they desire, they can make their whole account viewable only by approved followers2, delete the account, or delete some of the tweets. Of course, this information may remain elsewhere on the Internet for a short or long time. But in contrast, the Library of Congress archive will be much more enduring and likely outside of individual users’ control.3 While I think it is worth examining the strategies that people adopt to cope with inflexible or difficult to use privacy controls in software, I don’t intend to do that here.
Instead, I want to relate this discussion to my continued interest in how activity streams and other information consumption interfaces affect their users’ beliefs and behaviors through the availability heuristic. In response to some comments on his first post, Stutzman argues that people overestimate the degree to which content once public on the Internet is public forever:
So why is it that we all assume that the content we share publicly will be around forever? I think this is a classic case of selection on the dependent variable. When we Google ourselves, we are confronted with what’s there as opposed to what’s not there. The stuff that goes away gets forgotten, and we concentrate on things that we see or remember (like a persistent page about us that we don’t like). In reality, our online identities decay, decay being a stochastic process. The internet is actually quite bad at remembering.
This unconsidered “selection on the dependent variable” is one way of thinking about some cases of how the availability heuristic (and use of ease-of-retrievel information more generally). But I actually think the latter is more general and more useful for describing the psychological processes involved. For example, it highlights both that there are many occurrences or interventions can can influence which cases are available to mind and that even if people have thought about cases where their content disappeared at some point, this may not be easily retrieved when making particular privacy decisions or offering opinions on others’ actions.
Stutzman’s example is but one way that the combination of the availability heuristic and existing Internet services combine to affect privacy decisions. For example, consider how activity streams like Facebook News Feed influence how people perceive their audience. News Feed shows items drawn from an individual’s friends’ activities, and they often have some reciprocal access. However, the items in the activity stream are likely unrepresentative of this potential and likely audience. “Lurkers” — people who consume but do not produce — are not as available to mind, and prolific producers are too available to mind for how often they are in the actual audience for some new shared content. This can, for example, lead to making self-disclosures that are not appropriate for the actual audience.
- This might not be the case, see Michael Zimmer and this New York Times article. [↩]
- Why don’t people do this in the first place? Many may not be aware of the feature, but even if they are, there are reasons not to use it. For example, it makes any participation in topical conversations (e.g., around a hashtag) difficult or impossible. [↩]
- Or at least this control would have to be via Twitter, likely before archiving: “We asked them [Twitter] to deal with the users; the library doesn’t want to mediate that.” [↩]
Multitasking among tasks that share a goal: action identification theory
Right from the start of today’s Media Multitasking Workshop1, it’s clear that one big issue is just what people are talking about when they talk about multitasking. In this post, I want to highlight the relationship between defining different kinds of multitasking and people’s representations of the hierarchical structure of action.
It is helpful to start with a contrast between two kinds of cases.
Distributing attention towards a single goal
In the first, there is a single task or goal that involves dividing one’s attention, with the targets of attention somehow related, but of course somewhat independent. Patricia Greenfield used Pac-Man as an example: each of the ghosts must be attended to (in addition to Pac-Man himself), and each is moving independently, but each is related to the same larger goal.
Distributing attention among different goals
In the second kind of case, there are two completely unrelated tasks that divide attention, as in playing a game (e.g., solitaire) while also attending to a speech (e.g., in person, on TV). Anthony Wagner noted that in Greenfield’s listing of the benefits and costs of media multitasking, most of the listed benefits applied to the former case, while the costs she listed applied to the later. So keeping these different senses of multitasking straight is important.
Complications
But the conclusion should not be to think that this is a clear and stable distinction that slices multitasking phenomena in just the right way. Consider one ways of putting this distinction: the primary and secondary task can either be directed at the same goal or directed at different goals (or tasks). Let’s dig into this a bit more.2
Byron Reeves pointed out that sometimes “the IMing is about the game.” So we could distinguish whether the goal of the IMing is the same as the goal of the in-game task(s). But this making this kind of distinction requires identity conditions for goals or tasks that enable this distinction. As Ulrich Mayr commented, goals can be at many different levels, so in order to use goal identity as the criterion, one has to select a level in the hierarchy of goals.
Action identities and multitasking
We can think about this hierarchy of goals as the network of identities for an action that are connected with the “by” relation: one does one thing by doing (several) other things. If these goals are the goals of the person as they represent them, then this is the established approach taken by action identification theory (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987) — and this could be valuable lens for thinking about this. Action identification theory claims that people can report an action identity for what they are doing, and that this identity is the “prepotent identity”. This prepotent identity is generally the highest level identity under which the action is maintainable. This means that the prepotent identity is at least somewhat problematic if used to make this distinction between these two types of multitasking because then the distinction would be dependent on, e.g., how automatic or functionally transparent the behaviors involved are.
For example, if I am driving a car and everything is going well, I may represent the action as “seeing my friend Dave”. I may also represent my simultaneous, coordinating phone call with Dave under this same identity. But if driving becomes more difficult, then my prepotent identity will decrease in level in order to maintain the action. Then these two tasks would not share the prepotent action identity.
Prepotent action identities (i.e. the goal of the behavior as represented by the person in the moment) do not work to make this distinction for all uses. But I think that it actually does help makes some good distinctions about the experience of multitasking, especially if we examine change in action identities over time.
To return to case of media multitasking, consider the headline ticker on 24-hour news television. The headline ticker can be more or less related to what the talking heads are going on about. This could be evaluated as a semantic, topical relationship. But considered as a relationship of goals — and thus action identities — we can see that perhaps sometimes the goals coincide even when the content is quite different. For example, my goal may simply to be “get the latest news”, and I may be able to actually maintain this action — consuming both the headline ticker and the talking heads’ statements — under this high level identity. This is an importantly different case then if I don’t actually maintain the action at the level, but instead must descend to — and switch between — two (or more) lower level identities that are associated the two streams of content.
References
Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1987). What do people think they’re doing? Action identification and human behavior. Psychological Review, 94(1), 3-15.
- The full name is the “Seminar on the impacts of media multitasking on children’s learning and development”. [↩]
- As I was writing this, the topic re-emerged in the workshop discussion. I made some comments, but I think I may not have made myself clear to everyone. Hopefully this post is a bit of an improvement. [↩]
Activity streams, personalization, and beliefs about our social neighborhood
Every person who logs into Facebook is met with the same interface but with personalized content. This interface is News Feed, which lists “news stories” generated by users’ Facebook friend. These news stories include the breaking news that Andrew was just tagged in a photo, that Neema declared he is a fan of a particular corporation, that Ellen joined a group expressing support for a charity, and that Alan says, “currently enjoying an iced coffee… anyone want to see a movie tonight?”
News Feed is an example of a particular design pattern that has recently become quite common – the activity stream. An activity stream aggregates actions of a set of individuals – such as a person’s egocentric social network – and displays the recent and/or interesting ones.
I’ve previously analysed, in a more fine-grained analysis of a particular (and now changed) interface element for setting one’s Facebook status message, how activity streams bias our beliefs about the frequency of others’ participation on social network services (SNSs). It works like this:
- We use availability to mind as a heuristic for estimating probability and frequency (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). So if it is easier to think of a possibility, we judge it to be more likely or frequent. This heuristic is often helpful, but it also leads to bias due to, e.g., recent experience, search strategy (compare thinking of words starting with ‘r’ versus words with ‘r’ as the third letter).
- Activity streams show a recent subset of the activity available (think for now of a simple activity stream, like that on one’s Twitter home page).
- Activity streams show activity that is more likely to be interesting and is more likely to have comments on it.
Through the availability heuristic (and other mechanisms) this leads to one to estimate that (1) people in one’s egocentric network are generating activity on Facebook more frequently than they actually are and (2) stories with particular characteristics (e.g., comments on them) are more (or less) common in one’s egocentric network than they actually are.
Personalized cultivation
When thinking about this in the larger picture, one can see this as a kind of cultivation effect of algorithmic selection processes in interpersonal media. According to cultivation theory (see Williams, 2006, for an application to MMORGs), our long-term exposure to media makes leads us to see the real world through the lens of the media world; this exposure gradually results in beliefs about the world based on the systematic distortions of the media world (Gerbner et al., 1980). For example, heavy television viewing predicts giving more “television world” answers to questions — overestimating the frequency of men working in law enforcement and the probability of experiencing violent acts. A critical difference here is that with activity streams, similar cultivation can occur with regard to our local social and cultural neighborhood.
Aims of personalization
Automated personalization has traditionally focused on optimizing for relevance – keep users looking, get them clicking for more information, and make them participate related to this relevant content. But the considerations here highlight another goal of personalization: personalization for strategic influence on attitudes that matter for participation. These goals can be in tension. For example, should the system present…
The most interesting and relevant photos to a user?
Showing photographs from a user’s network that have many views and comments may result in showing photos that are very interesting to the user. However, seeing these photos can lead to inaccurate beliefs about how common different kinds of photos are (for example, overestimating the frequency of high-quality, artistic photos and underestimating the frequency of “poor-quality” cameraphone photos). This can discourage participation through perceptions of the norms for the network or the community.
On the other hand, seeing photos with so many comments or views may lead to overestimating how many comments one is likely to get on one’s own photo; this can result in disappointment following participation.
Activity from a user’s closest friends?
Assume that activity from close friends is more likely to be relevant and interesting. It might even be more likely to prompt participation, particularly in the form of comments and replies. But it can also bias judgments of likely audience: all those people I don’t know so well are harder to bring to mind as is, but if they don’t appear much in the activity stream for my network, I’m less likely to consider them when creating my content. This could lead to greater self-disclosure, bad privacy experiences, poor identity management, and eventual reduction in participation.
References
Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1980). The “Mainstreaming” of America: Violence Profile No. 11. Journal of Communication, 30(3), 10-29.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207-232.
Williams, D. (2006). Virtual Cultivation: Online Worlds, Offline Perceptions. Journal of Communication, 56, 69-87.
Unconscious processing, self-knowledge, and explanation
This post revisits some thoughts I’ve shared an earlier version of here. In articles over the past few years, John Bargh and his colleagues claim that cognitive psychology has operated with a narrow definition of unconscious processing that has led investigators to describe it as “dumb” and “limited”. Bargh prefers a definition of unconscious processing more popular in social psychology – a definition that allows him to claim a much broader, more pervasive, and “smarter” role for unconscious processing in our everyday lives. In particular, I summarize the two definitions used in Bargh’s argument (Bargh & Morsella 2008, p. 1) as the following:
Unconscious processingcog is the processing of stimuli of which one is unaware.
Unconscious processingsoc is processing of which one is unaware, whether or not one is aware of the stimuli.
A helpful characterization of unconscious processingsoc is the question: “To what extent are people aware of and able to report on the true causes of their behavior?” (Nisbett & Wilson 1977). We can read this project as addressing first-person authority about causal trees that link external events to observable behavior.
What does it mean for the processing of a stimulus to be below conscious awareness? In particular, we can wonder, what is that one is aware of when one is aware of a mental process of one’s own? While determining whether unconscious processingcog is going on requires specifying a stimulus to which the question is relative, unconscious processingsoc requires specifying a process to which the question is relative. There may well be troubles with specifying the stimulus, but there seem to be bigger questions about specifying the process.
There are many interesting and complex ways to identify a process for consideration or study. Perhaps the simplest kind of variation to consider is just differences of detail. First, consider the difference between knowing some general law about mental processing and knowing that one has in fact engaging in processing meeting the conditions of application for the law.
Second, consider the difference between knowing that one is processing some stimulus and that a various long list of things have a causal role (cf. the generic observation that causal chains are hard to come by, but causal trees are all around us) and knowing the specific causal role each has and the truth of various counterfactuals for situations in which those causes were absent.
Third, consider the difference between knowing that some kind of processing is going on that will accomplish an end (something like knowing the normative functional or teleological specification of the process, cf. Millikan 1990 on rule-following and biology) and the details of the implementation of that process in the brain (do you know the threshold for firing on that neuron?). We can observe that an extensionally identical process can always be considered under different descriptions; and any process that one is aware of can be decomposed into a description of extensionally identical sub-processes, of which one is unaware.
A bit trickier are variations in descriptions of processes that do not have law-like relationships between each other. For example, there are good arguments for why folk psychological descriptions of processes (e.g. I saw that A, so I believed that B, and, because I desired that C, I told him that D) are not reducible to descriptions of processes in physical or biological terms about the person.1
We are still left with the question: What does it mean to be unaware of the imminent consequences of processing a stimulus?
References
Anscombe, G. (1969). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Bargh, J. A., & Morsella, E. (2008). The unconscious mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(1), 73-79.
Davidson, D. (1963). Actions, Reasons, and Causes. Journal of Philosophy, 60(23), 685-700.
Millikan, R. G. (1990). Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox. Philosophical Review, 99(3), 323-53.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259.
Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of ‘Meaning’. In K. Gunderson (Ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- There are likely more examples of this than commonly thought, but the one I am thinking of is the most famous: the weak supervenience of mental (intentional) states on physical states without there being psychophysical laws linking the two (Davidson 1963, Anscombe 1969, Putnam 1975). [↩]