The panopticon in the SNS: Zephyr
In the upcoming months, Mypsace plans to release a product named Zephyr that will enable parental tracking of teenagers in Myspace. The Wall Street Journal, the Register, CBS News and Mashable have coverage.
From what I’ve pieced together, Zephyr will work like spyware. Parents will install Zephyr on their home computer, which will then capture the Myspace identities of those who use the computer to log into Myspace. It will then remotely track those identities, notifying parents of access, changes to some profile information, or movement of account names. For example, a teenager who signs on to a Zephyr-enabled computer will have their profile tracked if they later log in from a school computer via a proxy.
In some respects, a system like Zephyr sounds useful - parents have a notoriously hard time finding the profiles of their children, and this could aid them in this process. However, when the ability to spy on and track each other becomes a fundamental part of the system, what prevents abuses? For example, what prevents someone from installing Zephyr on a public computer, capturing and subsequently tracking the profiles that appeal to him/her? I see no safeguard in this process, unless Zephyr limits the amount of profiles someone can track.
Zephyr walks a fine line with regards to privacy, as it does not record all elements of the teenager’s profile. However, the tracking of “actions” such as log in/out, location of access, changes to profile information is a substantial privacy challenge. I see this type of surveillance as similar in nature to the government’s illegal surveillance of our cell phone networks - while they were not recording our calls, they were recording all accesses, dials, etc. This is very valuable information, especially in the hands of those who wish to do harm.
Is Zephyr a bottom-line-pleasing, media-friendly “solution” for parents, or does it simply introduce new privacy concerns into the system? Do we really need to track our children, monitoring their logins on computers around the world? And what does it really get us? In a sense, this is just an escalation in the Myspace arms race. The question becomes: What will the young people do to get around Zephyr?
Also interesting is that 33 state attorneys general are pressuring Myspace to integrate its account system with identity verification databases. From the WSJ article:
But a group of 33 state attorneys general led by Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal are investigating taking legal action against MySpace if it doesn’t raise the age limit to join the site to 16 (from 14 currently) and begin verifying MySpace members’ ages against public databases.
Unfortunately, they’ve got it backwards. Myspace is the public database.
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