Many start our digital age with the invention of the computer. The device materializes Alan Turing’s concept of universal machine capable of executing any finite sequence of unambiguous instructions on any data.

Such “universal” capability has political implications each time some digital application supports human interactions.

We know that with words we can compose a near-infinite number of legislative texts from the most emancipating to the most subjugating. The very same is possible with digital devices. We can think up countless algorithms, standards and designs to manage relations between human and legal persons.

Thus, any set of design, data and programming for such purpose involves decisions of social, ethical and political nature.

And once imparted to machines, digital rules and instructions are automatically implemented with remarkable efficiency. Definitely more than legislative texts, regulations and contracts which can easily remain symbolic, gathering dust on shelves.

From the intimate…

Recently, U.K. and U.S. health authorities approved commercial pilots of wireless microchip pills. Those tablets transmit the time we take them or live results of the medical tests they carry out.

We can imagine beneficial uses: helping patients to manage multiple medications, or physicians to fine-tune diagnostics and prescriptions.

Conversely, we can envision contentious scenarios: doctors trailing patients who adjust medication on their own; or insurers suspending coverage for non-compliance to prescriptions.

Who then decides which automatic interactions between whom are permitted or prohibited through such devices? We the patients, with or without our physicians? Health professional corporations through standardized protocols? Pharmaceutical companies? The digital device’s manufacturers? The government agency approving their commercialization? Public or private insurers reimbursing their costs? Our elected representatives through legislation?

It is the highly adaptable effectual communications offered by digital devices that unavoidably opens such unfamiliar questions and issues.

To the global…

Internet has become a key societal infrastructure. However, Edward Snowden’s revelations proved how much it facilitates mass surveillance.

Yet, it is possible to redesign the Internet with default end-to-end encryption and “onion” rerouting of our communications and uses. Such features would still allow targeted surveillance of suspected individuals or organizations. But they would make mass surveillance of entire populations economically impracticable.

But again, who decides? Is it, for instance, the few thousand self-appointed members of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international group with no legal status, nor formal membership procedure? If so, where are we, billions of Internet users, in those deliberations that directly concern us all?

We barely are even spectators of these decisions since such arcane stories often escape mass media’s attention.

Indeed, democratic governance of digital infrastructures such as the Internet remains to be devised.

To everywhere

Digital applications work best in integrated standardized settings.

Thus, future “smart” pills’ standards set in U.S. and U.K. could impose themselves as global medical norms.

As much as India’s controversial biometric standards for identification of its 1.3 billion citizens could become worldwide citizens/customers relationships management norms.

We already saw how cottage start-ups such as Google and Facebook rapidly got their undisclosed algorithms to custom-filter contents and relationships of the billions of users we are.

Soon, manufacturers might well leave us no choice but to use “smart” light bulbs that automatically link up to the Internet and our digital appliances and devices. Exactly as we recently discovered that some “smart” TV sets were built to spy on us.

As the “Internet of Everything” emerges, social norms under technical guises will be imposed upon us. Or not. It depends on who decide among all the possibilities offered by technology.

The new legislators

Currently, such digital decision making is increasingly exercised by technocrats, engineers and entrepreneurs outside traditional democratic institutions. All the more easily since they use formal languages incomprehensible by most citizens, processes largely imperceptible by human senses and standards applicable across jurisdictions.

I was a direct witness of one troubling instance: the development of the Quebec Health Record (QHR). Over a decade, the provincial government conducted several public consultations which confirmed a consensus on the long-standing principle of patients’ consent over communication of their medical information. Except that once QHR’s deployment begun, it became obvious that the device did not allow workable exercise of this right.

Hence in 2012, the adoption of a bill abolishing consent when information goes through QHR. It’s now all or nothing: either all care facilities and professionals have access to all your QHR contents; or nobody has.

They were existing or conceivable health records systems that maintain, even enhance, patients’ control over such communications. Unfortunately, once a large infrastructure such as QHR is in place, overhaul becomes quite expensive.

Recently, the Quebec Minister of Health admitted that the 1.6 billion dollars system is a failure, even from a strictly clinical standpoint, and that fixing it would cost at least another billion.

Design, standards and algorithms picked years before by a handful of technocrats, once embedded in costly circuitries and systems can force an entire society to give up on an undisputed fundamental right or principle. Or even on basic public service efficiency.

The democratic challenge

In order that democracy does not wane, but reinforces itself through the digitization of human interactions, we must collectively:

• learn torecognize whichIT innovationsinvolve some exerciseofsocial power;
• compel their designersto document such features in understandable and verifiable ways; and
• democratizetheinnovation processes by deliberating them, eitherinexisting democratic venues or in new, often transnational, ones to be developed.

This requires:

• better understandingby populations of the social and political dimensionsof IT;
• internationally networked citizenry from local to global levels;
• publicly availableexpertise on key technologies and issues; and
• preferencefor open sources technologies permitting :
  • examination of which social interactions they actually permit,require orprohibit; as well as
  • their modification to democraticallydefined – and changing – needs.

Digitization of our societies has barely begun. Being able to decide about their future among all the many possible ones requires us to renew our democratic culture, practices and institutions.

In its original 1990 version, the theory of interpersonal information processes refers to collection as one of information’s logical phases. The term collection is borrowed from protection of personal information law, which itself borrowed it from the lexicon of public and private bureaucracies. However, the word collection (action to pick a pre-existing object) masks the presence of a production of new informational artifacts. The result is that several implications are veiled, particularly those related to the intellectual property of the new information objects and to their pragmatic dimension.

The question then is: should collection really be considered as a logical phase of information? Or is it the chosen term that is inadequate? (more…)

Since January 2013, I started a new research project. A big project that will monopolize most of my energy in the coming years. And on the developments of which I will report on this site.

Its title is Beyond “Privacy”: General Theory of Interpersonal Information Processes.

This project’s aims it to equip actors, practitioners and researchers with tools for identifying and resolving issues and legal issues, social and ethical issues raised by the interpersonal information applications and systems that are increasingly present in our lives.

At this stage, I’m still setting up the project whose objectives are summarized below.

See you soon.

Objectives

1. to test the concepts and propositions of the original version (1990) of the legal theory of interpersonal information processes, including:

• the intra-theoretical consistency of its concepts, definitions and propositions;
• its trans-theoretical consistency with the Portrait of Interpersonal Information Processes visual modelling;
• the empirical applicability of its statements to the analysis of interpersonal information handlings;
• the empirical adequacy of its statements to reveal the legal, social and ethical implications of interpersonal information handlings;
• its inter-theoretical correspondence with other models and approaches used by practitioners for analyzing information systems;
• its inter-theoretical correspondence with other theories dealing with the same objects that have been developed in law, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, information management, IT & Society Studies.

2. to verify the realization of the predictions of the 1990 theory about the coevolution of law and process interpersonal information;

3. to produce from the results of the two previous objectives:

• a new trans-disciplinary version of the theory of interpersonal information processes, and
• a corresponding update the Portrait of Interpersonal Information Processes visual modelling;

4. to develop additional analytical tools or manuals that could help researchers, practitioners and stakeholders to make use of the theory and the visual modeling.

1990 Theory

Here are the three texts founding the original version (1990) of the theory of interpersonal information processes (that was amended at numerous times afteward) :

Pierrot Péladeau, «Esquisse d’une théorie juridique des procès d’information relatifs aux personnes», (1989) 34 McGill Law Journal 952

Pierrot Péladeau, «L’informatique ordinatrice du droit et du procès d’information relative aux  personnes», (1989) 1 Technologies de l’information et société 35

Pierrot Péladeau, «The Informational Privacy Challenge: The Technological Rule of Law», dans R. I. Cholewinski (dir.), Human Rights in Canada: Into the 1900s and Beyond, Ottawa, Human Rights Research and Education Centre – University of Ottawa, 1990, p. 93

Since January 2013, I started a new research project. A big project that will monopolize most of my energy in the coming years. And on the developments of which I will report on this site.

Its title is Beyond “Privacy”: General Theory of Interpersonal Information Processes.

This project’s aims it to equip actors, practitioners and researchers with tools for identifying and resolving issues and legal issues, social and ethical issues raised by the interpersonal information applications and systems that are increasingly present in our lives.

At this stage, I’m still setting up the project whose objectives are summarized below.

See you soon.

Objectives

1. to test the concepts and propositions of the original version (1990) of the legal theory of interpersonal information processes, including:

• the intra-theoretical consistency of its concepts, definitions and propositions;
• its trans-theoretical consistency with the Portrait of Interpersonal Information Processes visual modelling;
• the empirical applicability of its statements to the analysis of interpersonal information handlings;
• the empirical adequacy of its statements to reveal the legal, social and ethical implications of interpersonal information handlings;
• its inter-theoretical correspondence with other models and approaches used by practitioners for analyzing information systems;
• its inter-theoretical correspondence with other theories dealing with the same objects that have been developed in law, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, information management, IT & Society Studies.

2. to verify the realization of the predictions of the 1990 theory about the coevolution of law and process interpersonal information;

3. to produce from the results of the two previous objectives:

• a new trans-disciplinary version of the theory of interpersonal information processes, and
• a corresponding update the Portrait of Interpersonal Information Processes visual modelling;

4. to develop additional analytical tools or manuals that could help researchers, practitioners and stakeholders to make use of the theory and the visual modeling.

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Many probably have seen the Map of a Twitter status object below. Produced by Raffi Krikorian, from Twitter’s engineering department, this one-page chart quickly became popular. This was because it illustrated in a single image that a Twitter message was not a mere line of text up to 140 characters.

Although this document and its annotations are addressed primarily to API developers, it had a strong educational value. I have used it often. You had to see how wide the eyes of information law students opened in surprise and curiosity! That chart made easy to pass on the message we must do our homework when assessing informational practice. That we not be satisfied with only the visible information items and processes. That we must understand what actually happens in the black box. Even ask a hand to computer technologists.

I was writing a new book chapter entitled “Production Inputs“. It explains that handling of information objects allows us to produce new ones. However, this task requires, often without our realizing, the production of even further information objects, either to carry it out, or to describe it. The example of the 140 characters tweet which, in fact, features thousands of characters of code lines seems great to illustrate this point.

So I undertook to produce a new chart that would be updated, clearer as well as, more easily readable and understandable by non-specialists.

The result is this chart spreading over two pages. But it would have taken three to be exhaustive. Please, click the following to access :

• the single full size image;
• the 2 pages PDF document version; or
• the long description text of the image content (longdesc).

Among many things, this exercise revealed to me the existence of fields for blocking messages or entire users’ accounts at the request of public authorities, of holders copyright, or of others. It also revealed that this map is not only that of a tweet, but also of all the information items coproduced with it. To the extent that all these items are available in practice, the distinction is perhaps only one of nuance. From a pedagogical point of view however, this is worth mentioning.

Further revelation, I also found a few syntax, description and field’s status typos in the original chart from Krikorian. Far from being a Twitter engineer, I would be very grateful if you would signal to me any typo or error in the new chart proposed here.

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Utility vehicles

Information objects allow us to interact across time and space. This capability varies depending on the physical support. The difference becomes obvious between solid matter and electromagnetic waves.

How would it feel for you to pull out a banknote and burn it?

If a twinge of lost, the source is not the combustion of a fraction of a gram of matter. If pleasurable excitement, it does not result that much from the momentary flame.

The emotion comes mainly from the irreversible loss of information items. Not just any ones! The vaporized in smoke writing conveyed a unit of value that we could share with others.

The destroyed information allowed us to get from other persons a good or a service. Or to repay them a debt. Or to hand them an assistance. Or offer them a gift.

Also vanished is the ability to offer to ourselves a gift.

Hence the emotion produced. We have forever destroyed information items representing a fragment of power in the human world.

(more…)

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Firstly, a big thank you for the comments received so far!

Noteworthy detail: people who have commented so far all are women. Not a single man…

Each of your comments is valuable. Some have already resulted in several decisions, including:

• to divide the Introduction into short chapters of less than 75 lines as in other parts of the book, in order to clarify and simplify the narrative;
• to open the book with the Table of notions rather than with the Table of Contents so that one can see from the first pages what topics will be covered;
• to add the following illustrations to the Prologue to make it clearer that its focus is the “links” that information objects weave between individuals, groups and communities, rather than information objects themselves.

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Glossary

Information : The word receives quite different definition depending on the uses and the fields of practice. In this book, this word designates a material support for the conservation, communication and processing of knowledge or signals, particularly one those that give a form to an interpersonal relation.

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Bibliography

Cross, R. C, and M. S Wheatland. “Modeling a Falling Slinky.” arXiv:1208.4629 (August 22, 2012). http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4629

Floridi, Luciano. Information: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press,

Le Grand dictionnaire terminologique. Office de la langue française du Québec. http://www.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/

Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford, United Kingdom. Oxford University Press. 2010. http://www.oed.com/

Trésor de la langue française informatisé. Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue française, Centre national de la recherche scientifique & Université Nancy-II. http://atilf.atilf.fr/

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Chapter from Part One: Alignment: Objects Called “Information”

Material Strength

Digital information items are objects of which we entrust the handling to machines. Often microscopic, such information objects and handlings then can become invisible to us.

Many have claimed that we are witnessing a dematerialization of human activities.

Dematerialization of the economy? It is true that increasing shares of production and commerce consume less matter and energy. One share consists of “intellectual” services: marketing, research and development, consulting, training. Another share deals with digital products which may be transported electronically.

Dematerialization of money? Of finance? Or of information in general? Also true. Everywhere, paper is being replaced by powerful electronic media.

Unfortunately, many are those who thought that it was literal dematerialization. Complete disappearance of matter. Such dematerialization would imply that information items are immaterial entities. The huge Internet infrastructure would be a sort of intangible cloud. Some cyberspace would be developing in some parallel universe whose properties fall outside those of the physical world. State legislation would be practically unenforceable there. Information flows would be insensitive to national borders. Any ambition to control these flows would prove illusory. (more…)

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Chapter form Part One: Alignment: Objects Called “Information”

High Definition

The word “information” is part of our everyday language. But it means too many different things. A careful exploration demands that we first settle on a common definition.

Literally, to inform means “to give a form” to something. This was the sense of its 2000 years old Latin ancestor, informare. It was also used to say “to get an idea of” something or someone. (more…)

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Writing and Illustration

Pierrot Péladeau

First Reading

Pierrette Lavoie

Comments

Karine Clément

Anne-Marie Théoret

Valerie Steeves

Andrée Côté

Monique Chartrand

Cynthia Chassigneux

Hélène Bergeron

Alain Bellemare

Icons Libraries

PIP-L (Picture of Interpersonal Information Process – Language) by Caroline Cyr

PICOL (PIctorial COmmunication Language) by Melih Bilgil

Images

Wood types photograph used for book project’s cover: “gothic san serif lower case – FUTURA!” by Kyle Van Horn

Cover of Voyager Golden Disk: courtesy of NASA / JPL – Cal Tech

Hosting of  pierrot-peladeau.net web site 

Michel Dumais

Promotion of the Work-in-Progress 

Robert Ellis Smith, Privacy Journal

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This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Life Lines

Let us imagine Sarah, a teenager who muses about how numerous information items link her to others. Shouldn’t we offer ourselves and our kids such an education?

My births

My foetal life was a pampered one. My mother closely watched over it. Both she and I enjoyed the support of caring relatives as well as of modern medicine. Thus long before my birth, my mother’s medical records already had stored up about me more than a hundred lines of text. Notes about observations, test results, diagnostic findings, prescriptions and medical procedures. Not to mention the thousands of lines of ultrasound images. Images of me which my Mom proudly displayed on her social networks’ pages. Sites that also displayed hundreds of lines of encouragements and advices from the people she meets there as well as from her obstetrician.

Barely out of the womb, the confirmation of my vital signs resulted in the opening of my very own medical record. I must admit that, for a time, it was identified by the bland first name of… “Baby”. Still, it was through the creation of this file that I finally became a “patient” in my own right, even after months of medical follow up.

My noisy and exhausting delivery was quickly followed by another birth. A more subtle but decisive one: that of a new citizen. It took place by writing of a few lines on a form for vital statistics registration. A seemingly minor gesture. But this act immediately made me the bearer of many legal rights and benefits – and later of obligations – among this society where accidents of history and genetics made me entered life.

And from “Baby”, I officially became “Sarah”.

(more…)

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,

please do not hesitate to comment!

Every input is precious to help improve it.

Table of Contents

Open Work in Progress

Prologue: Life Lines

My births

My education

My trainings 

Our participations

My life, our lives

Introduction: Societies in Lines

Information, you say?

Money for example

Familiar newness

This book

(more…)

LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES

information society through our personal information

Invitation

This post launch the open work-in-progress drafting of a book  intended for a broad audience: as much curious citizens as specialists in various fields and educators. Its aim: to help understand our information societies from an exploration of the closer reality of our own personal information. Its main challenge: to present useful, but often technical knowledge in clear and simple language. Hence the idea of an open work-in-progress.

The name of the project and the book’s working title: “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.

Chapters will be published as and when they are produced. You are invited to comment. Your comments and suggestions are valuable. They will help improve the discussed contents and the way they are communicated. (more…)

An Open Work-in-Progress

Invitation

Here is a book project intended for a broad audience: as much curious citizens as specialists in various fields and educators. Its aim: to help understand our information societies from an exploration of the closer reality of our own personal information. Its main challenge: to present useful, but often technical knowledge in clear and simple language. Hence the idea of an open work-in-progress. The name of the project and the book’s working title: “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information. Chapters will be published as and when they are produced. You are invited to comment. Your comments and suggestions are valuable. They will help improve the discussed contents and the way they are communicated. Chapters are first published in the work-in-progress blog on pierrot-peladeau.net. Following each chapter, you will find a discussion space to receive your comments. A parallel version in Frenchis systematically offered. Waiting for your comments. I wish you an enjoyable reading.

State of the project

October 22, 2012: Launch of the open drafting process and posting of the Table of Contents, the Table of Notions and the Introduction (Societies In Lines);

October 28, 2012: Posting of the Prologue (Life Lines);

November 2, 2012:  Posting of the chapters High Definition and Material Strength from Part One: Alignment: Objects Called “Information” and the Credits page;

November 8, 2012:  Posting of the Glossary and Bibliography pages;

November 20, 2012: Posting of A Few Decisions Following Your Comments;

December 3, 2012: Posting of the chapter Utility Vehicles from Part One: Alignment: Objects Called “Information”;

December 16, 2012: Posting of a Map of a Twitter Status Object for Dummies for a coming chapter.

All posts related to this project can be found under the “Beyond Privacy” Project category.

History of the project

In 2004, I was scientific advisor to a documentary project for which Radio-Canada had agreed to be the first broadcaster. To feed the script, I produced a list of notions useful to understand the properties and roles of personal information. The first list well exceeded 80 notions. Too long for a movie or even a mini-series. I was able to reduce this number to 21. Unfortunately, the documentary was never shot. Because the producers preferred to make an author film rather than scientific popularization one. However, the list of 21 notions was used in an adults’ education pilot experiment. This project, funded by the Canadian Council on Learning, was carried out in 2008 by Communautique. This trial demonstrated the feasibility of transmitting these ideas from any adult’s personal experiences. Including to people unfamiliar with the use of computer or with low literacy. The experiment continued in 2008-2010 as part of a regular column on the Citoyen numérique (Digital Citizen) radio show on CIBL 101,5 Montreal. A parallel written column was published on a blog of the National Film Board’s CITIZENShift site. Then in 2011, with bachelor of laws degree students in an Information & Law course at UQAM. In 2012, the project continues with this open book drafting exercise.

A sudden tug of war between the Charest government and journalists caused a shock wave the echoes of which have rippled through throughout the Canadian journalistic profession. A jolt that could help realize how the “lawful access” bill introduced this Monday, Feb. 13 also concerns journalists and media organizations.

A threat

Last week, the Charest government announced that the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions and the Sureté du Québec (provincial police force) would investigate on leaks to media related to the Ian Davidson case, a retired Montreal police officer suspected of attempting to sell lists of police informants to organized crime. Neither the Minister of Public Safety Robert Dutil, nor Premier Jean Charest have agreed to guarantee that journalists would not be investigated or wiretap. (more…)

Are there actions we could start today in a decisive campaign against the adoption of so called “lawful access” bills by Canada? I came to answer “yes” while listening to a presentation by Antoine Beaupré, system administrator at Koumbit. It was during a public meeting entitled ” ‘Illegal access’ and the attack of internet freedoms”, on February 3, 2012, in Montreal.

Let’s remind us that the “lawful access” bills that already died three times because of dissolution of Parliament have not been tabled again yet. However, it is expected that the Harper government will go ahead. The latest versions of the legislation gave the police new powers to access data held by Internet services providers (ISPs). They allowed the mandatory disclosure of customer information without judicial oversight, as well as real-time monitoring across ISPs’ networks. All measures deemed unnecessary and dangerous, not only by civil libertarians, but by many police forces also. A detailed legal analysis was published recently by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

The meeting was organized by Koumbit an IT workers coop that offers several services including web hosting: thus, it has already had its share of searches for information and of servers. Like many other businesses it that field, Koumbit fears the effects of the “lawful access” initiatives on the civil liberties of its customers and of all the citizens who use the Internet from anywhere in the world. Indeed, the opening presentation of Antoine Beaupré dealt with less the legal aspects of the bills as of their technical and political dimensions. (more…)

Now a grandfather, I had to revise my will and mandate in case of incapacity. Except that this time, I found out that I must ask my potential agents and testamentary executors to deal with the ubiquity of digital media. That does complicate their task.

Only a few years ago, one could easily find the documents of an incapacitated or deceased person. It was enough to systematically round the various places where the person lived and worked. The nature of the documents generally jumped in the eyes: contracts, invoices, private correspondence, books, recordings, professional documents, etc. In the absence of specific instructions, one could apply certain customs: such as delivering private correspondence items to their authors, distribution of content libraries, records shelves, photo albums or collections to interested close ones; retention of fiscal documents for some six years before destroying them.

Digitalization of assets

As more and more people around me, I hold less and less documents on paper or other macroscopic media. Already, most of my documents are to be found in digital forms: private correspondence, files, invoices, contracts, tax documents, banking and accounting, books, music, photos, work documentation, etc. (more…)