When Mashups Go Bad

January 13th 2009 Posted to Mashup, Society

Every couple of months we see a breathless report about how ‘bad guys’ make use of the same tools as the rest of us — cell phones, email, facebook, twitter, and so on and so on. Its a pretty basic, if not eternal story. Technology designed for good, gains a following, used for evil.

Well we can officially add mashups to the list. Yesterday I ran across a new mashup (hat tip: http://sf.curbed.com) that efficiently informs would be vandals and muggers where donors to the Proposition 8 campaign — outlawing same-sex marriage in California — live and work. Like all mashups it does its intended job very nicely. With just a couple of quick mouse clicks I could find out who in my neighborhood donated  and where exactly I could jump them (see below).

prop_8_maps1Now, don’t get me wrong, the creator of this mashup is clearly not doing anything illegal. All the information used is publicly available. But we have to ask: What is the purpose of this mashup? It can’t be for good, that’s for sure.

The bigger issue however is what we as a society do about it. All the rules set down deciding what the public should and should not have access to were established long before mashups, and even the Web as we know it today were around. Would the sponsors of the donation disclosure legislation — designed to clean up government with transparency — have been quite so forthcoming if they knew this would be the result? My gut says no. But to what end? Should any potentially incendiary information be kept from the public because the simple but effective  barrier of having  to get off your couch, go down to city hall during business hours, and request it is now obliterated?

Could it be that mashups are going to quickly become one of the major challenges to a free and open democracy? If you had asked me yesterday I would have said you were crazy. But once the properties listed here — or in the similar mashups sure to come for future debates — are vandalized there will be two effects: An outcry to restrict access to this information and a chilling of political donations and activity (or at the very least a strong incentive to take it all back behind the curtain). In either case our society will be poorer as a consequence.

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  • Zachary Reiss-Davis
    One of the best classes I took in college was a seminar which spent a large portion of its time on privacy issues in the public policy space, and took a close look at issues like this one.

    Basically, there is a idea of privacy through difficulty of access that digital records violates. Many records, including real-estate purchase documentation, have been matters of "public record" for at least fifty years, but were only available if you were willing to go to a moldy records archive in some county office and dig through mountains of boxes of files. (If they were not already, they were made public as a part of Civil Rights laws)

    This was difficult and time consuming, raising a sufficient barrier to entry for the average person.

    Recently, those same records are being digitized, and are available at no cost online. In badly run databases (such as the one the campaign finance information is in) this is fine - access is still sufficiently difficult. However, the newest innovation is mining that data into things like this mashup.

    A hot policy issue is -- for the first time in American history -- reducing access to public documents, especially when they may contain sensitive information that "should" not be placed online.

    Other examples:
    http://zabbasearch.com/ - a database which, for free, provides the home phone number, address, and birthday for almost anyone who has ever owned a home. Very creepy - includes unlisted numbers and other "private" information.

    http://www.mapsexoffenders.com/ - Google mashup of sex offender registrations. May have beneficial uses, but has caused several documented instances of violence.
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