Try aiming that statement at Dick Cheney and his energy task force, or any other politician who hides behind the state secrets privilege.

In my view, the problem is that human cognition is much more complex than algorithmic prediction and modelling. Your human choices can never be perfectly anticipated by a computer software. The very definition of humanity and of human cognition is that it involves degrees of freedom of action. Computers do not at all have freedom of action, the computer metaphor of the brain is long outdated. But to me it seems like Google and others think that human action and cognition can be modelled by algorithms. So the failure of the automatic post suggestion on Buzz is already the false underlying picture of what it means to be human that is built into the software. On the question why and in which respect humans are different from computer technologies, you might find this text interesting: http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/InternetSelfOrg.pdf

At a practical level what I suggest implies that a certain amount of the posts that Buzz suggest to you, will be uninteresting for you, many other interesting ones will be missing, and that Buzz thereby creates a very reductionistic and one-dimensional communication universe. We do not know how the algorithm is built (which is a problem of missing democratic transparency), so one can speculate whether or not the rich will get richer on Buzz, which means that the algorithm might be built in such a way that the most commented posts are suggested much more frequently than others, which in the end creates a strongly stratified Buzz attention economy.

Another problem that I have with Buzz is its understanding of freedom. The auto-following mode is still not a real opt-in solution, which means that Buzz somehow coerces users into making connections public that users might want to keep private. It is a false assumption that a high frequency of communication with certain persons means that this constitutes a social relation that is based on positive feelings. I found this comment by a blogger that was reported in The Guardian very telling: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/12/google-buzz-stalker-privacy-problems
What this example shows is that an algorithm can never tell which connection is desirable and which one isn’t and that auto-following is therefore a wrong design option. In my view, it should always be fully left to the users to decide themselves whom they want to connect to on a social network on whom they do not want to connect to. But of course auto-following or auto-suggest-following is motivated by economic interests in the case of Buzz and the strong competition that Google is facing by Facebook and Twitter so that it now wants to sky-rocket the numbers of users and the communication traffic of Buzz in no time.

The main problem concerning the algorithimic design of Buzz is in my view the misconception of the essence of being human that is underlying the software and the assumed reduceability of human cognition to deterministic algorithms.

Thank you for your interest in my post and your comment.

If we take a look at the top 100 most accessed web platforms, or even the top 500 platforms (see http://www.alexa.com/topsites), then we find out that most of them are commercial in character and based on personalized targeted advertising. I think that one of the main mechanisms that is causing all of these privacy problems is personalized advertising. Commercial Internet platforms want to accumulate as many users as possible, they encourage users to upload as much data as possible and to publicly share it with as many users as possible, because more traffic, data, and online behaviour means more potential advertising customers. In my view it is no surprise that in most cases turning off advertising options is either not possible, or is only an opt-out option. In most cases, advertising is not an opt-in solution. I think an easy policy design guideline could be to require commericla Internet platforms by law to make advertising always an opt-in option that is auto-disabled. Another policy suggestion is to provide more public funding for non-commercial Internet projects. If Wikipedia works based on a non-commercial project, why should this not also be possible in the realm of social networking platforms, etc? If such projects were strengthened, then it would be likely in my view that less privacy problems would occur. As privacy is a common interest, online privacy should be advanced by state regulation. And this could be done by providing public funding for non-commercial Internet projects. An example of a non-commercial Internet project in the realm of social networking sites is the OpenNetworx Initiative: http://www.opennetworx-stiftung.org/ It is not-yet so well known, but a promising approach in my view.

If we take a look at the results of WSIS 1+2, then it is clear that the discussions about Internet governance were dominated by industry interests and that civil society concerns were not taken that serious. Nonetheless I think that it is of upmost importance that civil society groups and concerned citizens keep on voicing their concerns, although it right now looks like Internet governance is dominated by powerful interests. This could surely change if public counter-power is steadily built up and grows from below.

Personally, I am also interested in research about 1) the problems of the existing Internet, 2) the opportunities that alternative Internet projects can pose. In this context, I use the notion of the “participatory, co-operative, sustainable information society”, which does not-yet exist, but is a vision of how the information society could alternatively develop. Discussions about an alternative Internet are related to this alternative information society concept. A paper by me that discusses this notion has just been published in the journal Information, Communication & Society: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a919192441 (if you can log in from a university server, then you will probably be able to download the paper, if not, I can send you a copy of it, if you are interested and let me know).

My personal view is that the alternative Internet is thus far a vision, a mere potentiality that is anticipated by some already existing projects. For strengthening this vision, I think that 1) discussions at the policy level are needed, and 2) critical research that shows the problems and positive potentials of the Internet.

Best, Christian