Starting Points

May 30, 2010

Healing by 2-Way Video - The Rise of Telemedicine

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Dr. Jerry Jones uses two-way video at his home in Houston to consult with a patient across town. Dr. Jones is under contract to NuPhysicia, one of the new telemedicine companies.

By MILT FREUDENHEIM

ONE day last summer, Charlie Martin felt a sharp pain in his lower back. But he couldn’t jump into his car and rush to the doctor’s office or the emergency room: Mr. Martin, a crane operator, was working on an oil rig in the South China Sea off Malaysia.

He could, though, get in touch with a doctor thousands of miles away, via two-way video. Using an electronic stethoscope that a paramedic on the rig held in place, Dr. Oscar W. Boultinghouse, an emergency medicine physician in Houston, listened to Mr. Martin’s heart.

“The extreme pain strongly suggested a kidney stone,” Dr. Boultinghouse said later. A urinalysis on the rig confirmed the diagnosis, and Mr. Martin flew to his home in Mississippi for treatment.

Mr. Martin, 32, is now back at work on the same rig, the Courageous, leased by Shell Oil. He says he is grateful he could discuss his pain by video with the doctor. “It’s a lot better than trying to describe it on a phone,” Mr. Martin says.

Dr. Boultinghouse and two colleagues — Michael J. Davis and Glenn G. Hammack— run NuPhysicia, a start-up company they spun out from the University of Texas in 2007 that specializes in face-to-face telemedicine, connecting doctors and patients by two-way video.

Spurred by health care trends and technological advances, telemedicine is growing into a mainstream industry. A fifth of Americans live in places where primary care physicians are scarce, according to government statistics. That need is converging with advances that include lower costs for video-conferencing equipment, more high-speed communications links by satellite, and greater ability to work securely and dependably over the Internet.

“The technology has improved to the point where the experience of both the doctor and patient are close to the same as in-person visits, and in some cases better,” says Dr. Kaveh Safavi, head of global health care for Cisco Systems, which is supporting trials of its own high-definition video version of telemedicine in California, Colorado and New Mexico.

The interactive telemedicine business has been growing by almost 10 percent annually, to more than $500 million in revenue in North America this year, according to Datamonitor, the market research firm. It is part of the $3.9 billion telemedicine category that includes monitoring devices in homes and hundreds of health care applications for smartphones.

Christine Chang, a health care technology analyst at Datamonitor’s Ovum unit, says telemedicine will allow doctors to take better care of larger numbers of patients. “Some patients will be seen by teleconferencing, some will send questions by e-mail, others will be monitored” using digitized data on symptoms or indicators like glucose levels, she says.

Eventually, she predicts, “one patient a day might come into a doctor’s office, in person.”

Although telemedicine has been around for years, it is gaining traction as never before. Medicare, Medicaid and other government health programs have been reimbursing doctors and hospitals that provide care remotely to rural and underserved areas. Now a growing number of big insurance companies, like the UnitedHealth Group and several Blue Cross plans, are starting to market interactive video to large employers. The new federal health care law provides $1 billion a year to study telemedicine and other innovations.

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

From thousands of miles away, Dr. Oscar Boultinghouse checks the eye of a patient.

With the expansion of reimbursement, Americans are on the brink of “a gold rush of new investment in telemedicine,” says Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr., managing partner at Vesalius Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Houston. He has worked on telemedicine projects since he helped build medical systems for NASA during his days as an astronaut in the 1990s.

Face-to-face telemedicine technology can be as elaborate as a high-definition video system, like Cisco’s, that can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or it can be as simple as the Webcams available on many laptops.

NuPhysicia uses equipment in the middle of that range — standard videoconferencing hookups made by Polycom, a video conferencing company based in Pleasanton, Calif. Analysts say the setup may cost $30,000 to $45,000 at the patient’s end — with a suitcase or cart containing scopes and other special equipment — plus a setup for the doctor that costs far less.

Telemedicine has its skeptics. State regulators at the Texas Medical Board have raised concerns that doctors might miss an opportunity to pick up subtle medical indicators when they cannot touch a patient. And while it does not oppose telemedicine, the American Academy of Family Physicians says patients should keep in contact with a primary physician who can keep tabs on their health needs, whether in the virtual or the real world.

“Telemedicine can improve access to care in remote sites and rural areas,” says Dr. Lori J. Heim, the academy’s president. “But not all visits will take place between a patient and their primary-care doctor.”

Dr. Boultinghouse dismisses such concerns. “In today’s world, the physical exam plays less and less of a role,” he says. “We live in the age of imaging.”

ON the rig Courageous, Mr. Martin is part of a crew of 100. Travis G. Fitts Jr., vice president for human resources, health, safety and environment at Scorpion Offshore, which owns the rig, says that examining a worker via two-way video can be far cheaper in a remote location than flying him to a hospital by helicopter at $10,000 a trip.

Some rigs have saved $500,000 or more a year, according to NuPhysicia, which has contracts with 19 oil rigs around the world, including one off Iraq. Dr. Boultinghouse says the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may slow or block new drilling in United States waters, driving the rigs to more remote locations and adding to demand for telemedicine.

NuPhysicia also offers video medical services to land-based employers with 500 or more workers at a site. The camera connection is an alternative to an employer’s on-site clinics, typically staffed by a nurse or a physician assistant.

Mustang Cat, a Houston-based distributor that sells and services Caterpillar tractors and other earth-moving equipment, signed on with NuPhysicia last year. “We’ve seen the benefit, ” says Kurt Hanson, general counsel at Mustang, a family-owned company. Instead of taking a half-day or more off to consult a doctor, workers can get medical advice on the company’s premises.

NuPhysicia’s business grew out of work that its founders did for the state of Texas. Mr. Hammack, NuPhysicia’s president, is a former assistant vice president of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, where he led development of the state’s pioneering telemedicine program in state prisons from the mid-1990s to 2007. Dr. Davis is a cardiologist.

Working with Dr. Boultinghouse, Dr. Davis and other university doctors conducted more than 600,000 video visits with inmates. Significant improvement was seen in inmates’ health, including measures of blood pressure and cholesterol, according to a 2004 report on the system in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In March, California officials released a report they had ordered from NuPhysicia with a plan for making over their state’s prison health care. The makeover would build on the Texas example by expanding existing telemedicine and electronic medical record systems and putting the University of California in charge.

California spends more than $40 a day per inmate for health care, including expenses for guards who accompany them on visits to outside doctors. NuPhysicia says that this cost is more than four times the rate in Texas and Georgia, and almost triple that of New Jersey, where telemedicine is used for mental health care and some medical specialties.

“Telemedicine makes total sense in prisons,” says Christopher Kosseff, a senior vice president and head of correctional health care at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. “It’s a wonderful way of providing ready access to specialty health care while maintaining public safety.”

Georgia state prisons save an average of $500 in transportation costs and officers’ pay each time a prisoner can be treated by telemedicine, says Dr. Edward Bailey, medical director of Georgia correctional health care.

With data supplied by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which commissioned the report, NuPhysicia says the recommendations could save the state $1.2 billion a year in prisoners’ health care costs.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants the university regents and the State Legislature to approve the prison health makeover. After lawsuits on behalf of inmates, federal courts appointed a receiver in 2006 to run prison medical services. (The state now runs dental and mental health services, with court monitoring.) Officials hope that by putting university doctors in charge of prison health, they can persuade the courts to return control to the state.

“We’re going to use the best technology in the world to solve one of our worst problems — the key is telemedicine,” the governor said.

WITHOUT the blessing of insurers, telemedicine could never gain traction in the broader population. But many of the nation’s biggest insurers are showing growing interest in reimbursing doctors for face-to-face video consulting.

Starting in June, the UnitedHealth Group plans to reimburse doctors at Centura Health, a Colorado hospital system, for using Cisco advanced video to serve UnitedHealth’s members at several clinics. And the insurer plans a national rollout of telemedicine programs, including video-equipped booths in retail clinics in pharmacies and big-box stores, as well as in clinics at large companies.

“The tide is turning on reimbursement,” says Dr. James Woodburn, vice president and medical director for telehealth at UnitedHealth.

Both UnitedHealth and WellPoint, which owns 14 Blue Cross plans, are trying lower-cost Internet Webcam technology, available on many off-the-shelf laptops, as well as advanced video.

UnitedHealth and Blue Cross plans in Hawaii, Minnesota and western New York are using a Webcam service provided by American Well, a company based in Boston. And large self-insured employers like Delta Air Lines and Medtronic, a Blue Cross Blue Shield customer in Minneapolis, are beginning to sign up.

Delta will offer Webcam consultations with UnitedHealth’s doctor network to more than 10,000 Minnesota plan members on July 1, says Lynn Zonakis, Delta’s managing director of health strategy and resources. Within 18 months, Webcam access will be offered nationally to more than 100,000 Delta plan members.

Dr. Roy Schoenberg, C.E.O. of American Well, says his Webcam service is “in a completely different domain” than Cisco’s or Polycom’s. “Over the last two years, we are beginning to see a side branch of telemedicine that some call online care,” he says. “It connects doctors with patients at home or in their workplace.”

Doctors “are not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for equipment, so we have to rely on lower tech,” he adds. The medical records are stored on secure Web servers behind multiple firewalls, and the servers are audited twice a year by I.B.M. and other outside computer security companies, Dr. Schoenberg says.

In Hawaii, more than 2,000 Blue Cross plan members used Webcams to consult doctors last year, says Laura Lott, a spokeswoman for the Hawaii Medical Service Association. Minnesota Blue Cross and Blue Shield started a similar Webcam service across the state last November.

Doctors who use the higher-tech video conferencing technology say that Webcam images are less clear, and that Webcams cannot accommodate electronic scopes or provide the zoom-in features available in video conferencing. “If they are not using commercial-grade video conferencing gear, the quality will be much lower,” says Vanessa L. McLaughlin, a telemedicine consultant in Vancouver, Wash.

Last month, Charlie Martin, the crane operator, was back in the infirmary of the Courageous for an eye checkup. In Houston, his face filled the big screen in NuPhysicia’s office.

After an exchange of greetings, Chris Derrick, the paramedic on the oil rig, attached an ophthalmological scanner to a scope, pointed it at Mr. Martin’s eye, and zoomed in.

“Freeze that,” Dr. Boultinghouse ordered, as a close-up of the eye loomed on the screen. “His eyes have been bothering him. It may be from the wind up there on the crane.”

When Patients Meet Online, Are There Side Effects?

Brian Stauffer

By NATASHA SINGER

COULD we cure diseases faster, or at least better control them, through crowd-sourcing?

That is the premise behind social networking sites like CureTogether.com and PatientsLikeMe.com, which offer online communities for patients and collect members’ health data for research purposes.

PatientsLikeMe provides forums where more than 65,000 members with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and more than a dozen other disorders are encouraged to share details about their conditions and the success or pitfalls of specific drug treatments.

“When patients share real-world data, collaboration on a global scale becomes possible,” the site says. “New treatments become possible.”

Moreover, in a world where serious side effects often emerge only years after a new medication enters the market, such real-time information from real-world patients may also provide an early warning signal for drug safety problems.

PatientsLikeMe has an innovative for-profit business model, too. It sells health data, gathered from member profiles but with certain identifying information removed, to drug makers and others for scientific and marketing research.

Jamie Heywood, the company’s chairman, says both patients and drug makers delve into that data to meet their own needs.

Members can seek out patients of the same age, sex, and disease progression, whose profiles are displayed on the site, to see which drugs or doses worked for them. Drug makers can pinpoint subgroups — say, severely depressed middle-aged men — who reported the greatest improvement on a particular medication.

“What we have done is made a system that allows you to think about personalized medicine,” says Mr. Heywood. He co-founded the site in 2004 with his brother Ben and a friend after another brother, Stephen Heywood, developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. (Stephen died in 2006.)

But pharmaceutical crowd-sourcing also raises important questions about the trade-off between the benefits of information sharing and the risk of patient exploitation.

Some people share their health information for the sake of the greater good. Yet they typically have no way of knowing whether their health profiles contribute directly to the development of more effective treatments — or are simply mined to create more effective drug marketing.

“Do we need to protect people who have illnesses from being exploited?” says Cathy Dwyer, an associate professor at Pace University who has studied how advertisers market to consumers based on their online behavior. “It’s a very tricky line because people absolutely need emotional support when they are dealing with illness.”

PatientsLikeMe is one of many sites that promote the idea of the “e-patient,” a health consumer empowered by online information gathering. Along with offering health resources, many of these sites are also engineered to foster an environment where patients effectively promote treatments to other patients, without a doctor as intermediary.

The lines become blurry in these new arenas. There are unbranded “disease awareness” communities — for example, on Facebook or YouTube — where a drug maker may pay people to moderate patient forums or give testimonials but might not prominently display that fact to participants. Other sites collect consumer health data to help drug makers aim at specific kinds of consumers, using psychological cues.

Unlike television viewers, who can immediately spot direct-to-consumer drug ads, consumers on some health sites may not fully understand that they could be subject to marketing or marketing research, even if they have read the site’s privacy policy.

“We are talking about a digital pharma stealth economy that is emerging,” says Jeff Chester, the director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to safeguard user privacy. “You don’t know who is being paid to moderate. You don’t know who’s listening in to your conversation. You don’t know what exactly they are focused on and what they are doing with the information.”

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 restricts the way health care providers use and disseminate patients’ information, but entities like consumer health Web sites are not subject to it. The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, which strictly regulates direct-to-consumer drug commercials and print ads, is still developing a policy on drug marketing through social media.

In many ways, PatientsLikeMe is open and clear about its data collection and how it makes its money.

The site’s privacy policy explains that it shares members’ data, shorn of certain personal identifiers, with drug makers and others. Even as the policy encourages people to share their health information so others can learn from their experiences, it advises members that the more personal details they disclose, the more they risk being publicly identified.

For corporate clients, the site also functions as a sophisticated data-mining tool that allows them to better pinpoint consumers and to develop new or improved drugs. PatientsLikeMe adopts a more bottom-line approach to companies than it does when advocating its greater-good policy to consumers.

“Yesterday, you couldn’t engage with patients because of regulatory conflicts and lack of patient access,” one corporate pitch says on the site. “Today, all that has changed. It’s time to interact directly with your new customers: patients.”

Among the services the site provides to its corporate clients is analysis of members’ conversations, broken down by age, sex, disease progression and treatments, to “learn not only what’s being said about your brand, but by whom.” Another service allows drug makers to conduct market research on 25 to 50 of the most active users on the site — typically those who post messages often and have emerged as opinion leaders — who consent to participate. Afterward, drug makers can refine their marketing efforts based on the effect of the program “on patient dialogues across the entire community,” the site says.

Ms. Dwyer of Pace says she has been “really, really shocked at the blatant manipulative language” that some sites use to describe their corporate services to industry versus how they describe themselves to consumers.

Ben Heywood, president of PatientsLikeMe, says the program for drug makers that focuses on the site’s most active users is not meant to promote specific messages. After participating in the program, he says, members do not disseminate industry ideas on the site. Some members, he says, simply want to share their opinions with drug makers, but they aren’t paid to do so.

Jamie Heywood says that such data analyses provide insight for drug makers on how best to reach patients, but the site itself does not market drugs to its members. Moreover, the Heywood brothers say, the site openly describes its industry services.

“Our objective is to teach the company,” he says, “not teach the patient about the company’s products.”

Still, some of PatientsLikeMe’s competitors have taken a less aggressive approach to how they market patient data.

CureTogether.com, for example, has occasionally earned money by e-mailing advertisements aimed at its members who have certain health conditions on behalf of drug makers seeking participants for clinical trials, says Daniel Reda, who co-founded the site with his wife, Alexandra Carmichael.

But CureTogether does not post a person’s profile for other members on the site to see or give drug makers access to members’ health data in any form, he says. “The best way to protect people,” Mr. Reda says, “is to collect as little information as possible.”

How Computers Know What We Want Before We Do

Image by Drew Olanoff via Flickr

Photo-Illustration by C.J. Burton for TIME

By Lev Grossman

Here's an experiment: try thinking of a song not as a song but as a collection of distinct musical attributes. Maybe the song has political lyrics. That would be an attribute. Maybe it has a police siren in it, or a prominent banjo part, or paired vocal harmony, or punk roots. Any one of those would be an attribute. A song can have as many as 400 attributes — those are just a few of the ones filed under p.

This curious idea originated with Tim Westergren, one of the founders of an Internet radio service based in Oakland, Calif., called Pandora. Every time a new song comes out, someone on Pandora's staff — a specially trained musician or musicologist — goes through a list of possible attributes and assigns the song a numerical rating for each one. Analyzing a song takes about 20 minutes.

The people at Pandora — no relation to the alien planet — analyze 10,000 songs a month. They've been doing it for 10 years now, and so far they've amassed a database containing detailed profiles of 740,000 different songs. Westergren calls this database the Music Genome Project. (See the world's most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.)

There is a point to all this, apart from settling bar bets about which song has the most prominent banjo part ever. The purpose of the Music Genome Project is to make predictions about what kind of music you're going to like next. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to power what's known in the business as a recommendation engine: one of those pieces of software that gives you advice about what you might enjoy listening to or watching or reading next, based on what you just listened to or watched or read. Tell Pandora you like Spoon and it'll play you Modest Mouse. Tell it you like Cajun accordion virtuoso Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin and it'll try you out on some Iry LeJeune. Enough people like telling Pandora what they like that the service adds 2.5 million new users a month. (See the 100 best albums of all time.)

Over the past decade, recommendation engines have become quietly ubiquitous. At the appropriate moment — generally when you're about to consummate a retail purchase — they appear at your shoulder, whispering suggestively in your ear. Amazon was the pioneer of automated recommendations, but Netflix, Apple, YouTube and TiVo have them too. In the music space alone, Pandora has dozens of competitors. A good recommendation engine is worth a lot of money. According to a report by industry analyst Forrester, one-third of customers who notice recommendations on an e-commerce site wind up buying something based on them. (Watch TIME's video "The Brains Behind Pandora Radio.")

The trouble with recommendation engines is that they're really hard to build. They look simple on the outside — if you liked X, you'll love Y! — but they're actually doing something fiendishly complex. They're processing astounding quantities of data and doing so with seriously high-level math. That's because they're attempting to second-guess a mysterious, perverse and profoundly human form of behavior: the personal response to a work of art. They're trying to reverse-engineer the soul.

Image by shawnblog via Flickr

They're also changing the way our culture works. We used to learn about new works of art from friends and critics and video-store clerks — from people, in other words. Now we learn about them from software. There's a new class of tastemakers, and they're not human.

Learning to Love Dolph Lundgren
Pandora makes recommendations the same way people do, more or less: by knowing something about the music it's recommending and something about your musical taste. But that's actually pretty unusual. It's a very labor-intensive approach. Most recommendation engines work backward instead, using information that comes not from the art but from its audience. (See the 50 best websites of 2009.)

It's a technique called collaborative filtering, and it works on the principle that the behavior of a lot of people can be used to make educated guesses about the behavior of a single individual. Here's the idea: if, statistically speaking, most people who liked the first Sex and the City movie also like Mamma Mia!, then if we know that a particular individual liked Sex and the City, we can make an educated guess that that individual will also like Mamma Mia!

It sounds simple enough, but the closer you look, the weirder and more complicated it gets. Take Netflix's recommendation engine, which it has dubbed Cinematch. The algorithmic guts of a recommendation engine are usually a fiercely guarded trade secret, but in 2006 Netflix decided it wasn't completely happy with Cinematch, and it took an unusual approach to solving the problem. The company made public a portion of its database of movie ratings — around 100 million of them — and offered a prize of $1 million to anybody who could improve its engine by 10%.

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The Netflix competition opened a window onto a world that's usually locked away deep in the bowels of corporate R&D departments. The eventual winner — which clinched the prize last fall — was a seven-man, four-country consortium called BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, which included Bob Bell and Chris Volinsky, two members of AT&T's research division. Talking to them, you start to see how difficult it is to make a piece of software understand the vagaries of human taste. You also see how, oddly, software understands things about our taste in movies that a human video clerk never could.

The key point to grasp about collaborative-filtering software is that it knows absolutely nothing about movies. It has no preconceptions; it works entirely on the basis of the audience's reaction. So if a large enough group of people claim to have enjoyed, say, both Saw V and On Golden Pond, the software would be forced to infer that those two movies share some common quality that the viewers enjoyed. Crazy? Or crazy genius? (See the 100 best movies of all time.)

In such a case, the software would have discovered an aesthetic property that we might not even be aware of or have a name for but which in a mathematical sense must be said to exist. Even Bell and Volinsky don't always know what the properties are. "We might be able to describe them, or we might not be able to," Bell says. "They might be subtleties like 'action movies that don't have a lot of blood, don't have a lot of profanity but have a strong female lead.' Things like that, which you would never think to categorize on your own." As Volinsky puts it, "A lot of times, we don't come up with explanations that are explainable."

That makes recommendation engines sound practically psychic, but everyday experience tells us that they're actually pretty fallible. Everybody has felt the outrage that comes when a recommendation engine accuses one of a secret desire to watch Rocky IV, the one with Dolph Lundgren in it. In 2006, Walmart was charged with racism when its recommendation engine paired Planet of the Apes with a documentary about Martin Luther King. But generally speaking, the weak link in a recommendation engine isn't the software; it's us. Collaborative filtering works only as well as the data it has available, and humans produce noisy, low-quality data.

The problem is consistency: we're just not good at expressing our desires in rating form. We rate things differently after a bad day at work than we would if we were on vacation. Some people are naturally stingy with their stars; others are generous. We rate movies differently depending on whether we rate them right after watching them or if we wait a week, and differently again depending on whether we saw a lousy movie or a good movie in that intervening week. We even rate differently depending on whether we rate a whole batch of movies together or one at a time. (See the 50 best inventions of 2009.)

All this means that there's a ceiling to how accurate collaborative filtering can get. "There's a lot of randomness involved," Volinsky admits. "There's some intrinsic level of error associated with trying to predict human behavior."

The Great Choice Epidemic
Recommendation engines are a response to the strange new world of online retail. It's a world characterized by a surplus of something we usually can't get enough of: choice.

We're drowning in it. As Sheena Iyengar points out in her book The Art of Choosing, in 1994 there were 500,000 different consumer goods for sale in the U.S. Now Amazon alone offers 24 million. When faced with such an oversupply of choice, our little lizard brains go straight to vapor lock. "We think the profusion of possibilities must make it that much easier to find that perfect gift for a friend's birthday," Iyengar writes, "only to find ourselves paralyzed in the face of row upon row of potential presents." We're living through an epidemic of choice. We require an informational prosthesis to navigate it. The recommendation engine is that prosthesis: it winnows the millions of options down to a manageable handful.

But there's a trade-off involved. Recommendation engines introduce a new voice into the cultural conversation, one that speaks to us when we're at our most vulnerable, which is to say at the point of purchase. What is that voice saying? Recommendation engines aren't designed to give us what we want. They're designed to give us what they think we want, based on what we and other people like us have wanted in the past.

Which means they don't surprise us. They don't take us out of our comfort zone. A recommendation engine isn't the spouse who drags you to an art film you wouldn't have been caught dead at but then unexpectedly love. It won't force you to read the 18th century canon. It's no substitute for stumbling onto a great CD just because it has cool cover art. Recommendation engines are the enemy of serendipity and Great Books and the avant-garde. A 19th century recommendation engine would never have said, If you liked Monet, you'll love Van Gogh! Impressionism would have lasted forever.

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The risk you run with recommendation engines is that they'll keep you in a rut. They do that because ruts are comfy places — though often they're deeper than they look. "By definition, we keep you in the same musical neighborhood you start in," says Westergren of the Music Genome Project, "so you could say that's limiting. But even within a neighborhood, there is a ton of room for discovery. Forty-five percent of the people who use Pandora buy more music after they start, and only 1% buy less." And not being based solely on data from its audience, Pandora isn't as vulnerable to peer pressure as most recommendation engines are. It doesn't follow the crowd.

Pandora is unusual, though. The general effect of recommendation engines on shopping behavior is a hot topic among econometricians, if that's not an oxymoron, but the consensus is this: they introduce us to new things, which is good, but those new things tend to be a lot like the old things, and they tend to be drawn from the shallow pool of things other people have already liked. As a result, they create a blockbuster culture in which the same few runaway hits get recommended over and over again. It's the backlash against the "long tail," the idea that shopping online is all about near infinite selection and cultural diversity. It has a bad habit of eating its own tail and leaving you back where you started. (See the latest geek culture stories at Techland.com.)

But this isn't just about retail. The Web has transformed how we shop. Now it's transforming our social lives too, and recommendation engines are coming along for the ride. Just as Netflix reverse-engineers our response to art, dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony and OKCupid use algorithms to make predictions about that equally ineffable human phenomenon, love; or, failing that, lust. The idea is the same: they break down human behavior into data, then look for patterns in the data that they can use to pair up the humans.

Even if you're not into online dating, you're probably on Facebook, currently the second most visited site on the Web. Facebook gives users the option of switching between a straight feed, which shows all their friends' news in chronological order, and an algorithmically curated selection of the updates Facebook's recommendation engine thinks they'd most like to see. And in the right-hand column, Facebook uses a different set of algorithms to recommend new friends. If you loved Jason, why not try Jordan?! (See pictures of Facebook headquarters.)

And as for the first most trafficked site on the Web, if you cock your head only slightly to one side, Google is, effectively, a massive recommendation engine, advising us on what we should read and watch and ultimately know. It used to return the same generic results to everyone, but in December it put a service called Personalized Search into wide release. Personalized Search studies the previous 180 days of your searching behavior and skews its results accordingly, based on its best guess as to what you're looking for and how you look for it.

The principle is almost endlessly generalizable. Anywhere the specter of unconstrained choice confronts us, we're meeting it by outsourcing elements of the selection process to software. Largely unconsciously, we radiate information about ourselves and our personal preferences all day long, and more and more recommendation engines of all shapes and sizes are hoovering up that data and feeding it back to us, reshaping our reality into a form that they fondly hope will be more to our liking — in an endless feedback loop. The effect is to create a customized world for each of us, one that is ever so slightly childproofed, the sharp edges sanded off, and ever so slightly stifling, like recirculated air. (See 25 websites you can't live without.)

How far will it go? Will we eventually surf a Web that displays only blogs that conform to our political leanings? A social network in which we see only people of our race and religion? Our horizons, cultural and social, would narrow to a cozy, contented, claustrophobic little dot of total personalization.

Let's hope not. People weren't built to play it safe all the time. We were meant to be bored and disappointed and offended once in a while. It's good for us. That's what forces us to evolve. Even if it means watching Rocky IV, with Dolph Lundgren. Who knows? You might even like it.

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May 29, 2010

South Korea Expands Aid for Internet Addiction

Park Jin-Hee for the International Herald Tribune

Teenagers at online game parlor in Gwangmyeong, Seoul.

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SUWON, South Korea — Neither had a job. They were shy and had never dated anyone until they met through an online chat site in 2008. They married, but they knew so little about childbearing that the 25-year-old woman did not know when her baby was due until her water broke.

But in the fantasy world of Internet gaming, they were masters of all they encountered, swashbuckling adventurers exploring mythical lands and slaying monsters. Every evening, the couple, Kim Yun-jeong and her husband, Kim Jae-beom, 41, left their one-room apartment for an all-night Internet cafe where they role-played, often until dawn. Each one raised a virtual daughter, who followed them everywhere, and was fed, dressed and cuddled — all with a few clicks of the mouse.

On the morning of Sept. 24 last year, they returned home after a 12-hour game session to find their actual daughter, a 3-month-old named Sa-rang — love in Korean — dead, shriveled with malnutrition.

In South Korea, one of the world’s most wired societies, addiction to online games has long been treated as a teenage affliction. But the Kims’ case has drawn attention to the growing problem here of Internet game addiction among adults.

Sa-rang, born prematurely and sickly, was fed milk two or three times a day — before and after her parents’ overnight gaming and sometimes when her father woke up during the day, prosecutors said. The baby died “eyes open and her ribs showing,” said the couple’s lawyer, Kim Dong-young.

After six months on the run, they were arrested in March and charged with negligent homicide. On Friday they were sentenced to two years in prison, but the judge suspended Ms. Kim’s sentence because she was seven months pregnant and he said she needed some “mental stability.”

“I am sorry for being such a bad mother to my baby,” Ms. Kim said, sobbing, during the couple’s trial.

Thanks partly to government counseling programs, the estimated number of teenagers with symptoms of Internet addiction has steadily declined, to 938,000 in 2009, from more than a million in 2007, the Ministry of Public Administration and Safety said in April.

But the number of addicts in their 20s and 30s has been increasing, to 975,000 last year. Many of these adult addicts grew up with online games and now resort to them when they are unemployed or feeling alienated from society, said Dr. Ha Jee-hyun, a psychiatrist at Konkuk University Hospital.

This development and a recent string of cases like that of the Kims have prompted the government to announce plans to open rehabilitation centers for adult addicts and expand counseling for students and the unemployed, groups considered the most vulnerable to compulsive gaming.

“Unlike teenagers, these grown-ups don’t have parents who can drag them to counselors,” Dr. Ha said. He treats an average of four adults a month for an addiction to online games, he said. Two years ago, it was one a month.

More than 90 percent of South Korean homes are fitted with high-speed Internet connections. Nearly every street corner has a computer parlor with computers available for a fee. In these dim, 24-hour-a-day establishments, “the line blurs between reality and the virtual world,” said Jung Young-chul, a psychiatrist at Yonsei University.

Especially popular among adult players are large multiplayer online role-playing games.

In these games, players form alliances and wage battles that can last for days, with players operating in shifts to keep the action. The more time a player spends online, the more powerful the game character — and the player’s online status — becomes.

Cyberbattles can spill into the real world. There have been several reports of players tracking down and attacking others for killing the online characters they had identified with for years.

If the games are addictive, they are also highly commercial. “Items” — cyberweapons, outfits and special abilities acquired through gaming that strengthen their owners’ combat prowess — are traded for real money online. Such trades were valued at more than $1.2 billion last year.

Park Ki-hoon and his wife, Choi Jin-hee, both 37, run a swimsuit shop by day and play online games at night. During the winter off-season, Mr. Park said, he has played up to 18 hours a day and won up to $2,400 a month, enough to cover the rent on the couple’s shop.

If Mr. Park knows how to juggle his offline and online lives, many do not.

In February, a 22-year-old man was arrested and accused of killing his mother for nagging him about his obsessive playing. In the same month, a 32-year-old man dropped dead of exhaustion in a computer parlor after playing through the five-day Lunar New Year holiday. “Some jobless men come here in hope of a financial breakthrough,” said Hong Seong-in, the owner of a computer parlor.

South Korea promotes online games, with exports growing by 50 percent, according to the government, to $1.5 billion last year — by far South Korea’s single largest cultural export item. Its games are hugely popular in China and other Asian countries.

Although the country has become one of the first to address Internet addiction, little help is available for adults.

Computer parlor owners and game buffs assert that compulsive playing has actually been decreasing as the prices of items fall.

Enterprising players in South Korea and China have been running “item factories,” where hundreds of computers are programmed to play the games without human users for the sole purpose of generating items for cash.

“Online games are a culture,” Mr. Park said. “To me, people who hike or fish are as crazy as they think I am.”

Strike at Honda Plant Highlights Pay Gap in China

Joe Tan/Reuters

A security guard on Friday at a Honda manufacturing plant in Foshan, Guangdong Province, that was shut due to a labor dispute at a parts facility.

By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA

FOSHAN, China — After years of being pushed to work 12-hour days, six days a week on monotonous low-wage assembly line tasks, China’s workers are starting to push back.

A strike at an enormous Honda transmission factory here in southeastern China has suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a symbol of this nation’s struggle with income inequality, rising inflation and soaring property prices that have put home ownership beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.

And perhaps most remarkably, Chinese authorities let the strike happen — up to a point.

In the kind of scene that more often plays out at strikes in America than at labor actions in China, print and television reporters from state-controlled media across the country have started covering the walkout here, even waiting outside the nearly deserted front gate on Thursday and Friday in hope of any news. All the Chinese reporters disappeared on Saturday morning, however, as the government, apparently nervous, suddenly imposed without explanation a blanket ban on domestic media coverage of the strike.

A worker at a factory dormitory said on Saturday afternoon that the strike continued, and police were nowhere in sight at the factory or the dormitory. The authorities have been leery of letting the media report on labor disputes, fearing that it could encourage workers elsewhere to rebel. The new permissiveness, however temporary, coincides with growing sentiment among some officials and economists that Chinese workers deserve higher wages for their role in the country’s global export machine.

And without higher incomes, hundreds of millions of Chinese will be unable to play their part in the domestic consumer spending boom on which this nation hopes to base its next round of economic growth.

“This is all because there is a major political debate going on about how to deal with the nation’s growing income gap, and the need to do something about wages,” said Andreas Lauffs, a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie who specializes in Chinese labor issues.

If wages do rise, that could bring higher prices for Western consumers for goods as diverse as toys at Wal-Mart and iPads from Apple.

The Chinese media may also have found it a little easier, politically, to cover this strike because Honda is a Japanese company, and anti-Japanese sentiment still simmers in China as a legacy of World War II. Certainly, the strike is hitting Honda hard, as the resulting shortage of transmissions and other engine parts has forced the company to halt production at all four of its assembly plants in China.

Honda has an annual capacity of 650,000 cars and minivans in China, like Jazz subcompacts for export to Europe and Accord sedans for the Chinese market. Because Honda’s prices in China are similar to what it charges in the United States, the cars tend to be far out of reach financially for most of the workers who make them.

A Honda spokeswoman declined to discuss specific issues in the strike negotiations.

The intense media coverage may evoke historical memories of the 1980 shipyard strike in Gdansk, Poland, that gave rise to the Solidarity movement and paved the way for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But the reality here is much different.

Instead of tens of thousands of grizzled and angry shipyard workers, the Honda strike involves about 1,900 mostly cheerful young people. And the employees interviewed say their goal is more money, not a larger political agenda.

“If they give us 800 renminbi a month, we’ll go back to work right away,” said one young man, describing a pay increase that would add about $117 a month to an average pay that is now around $150 monthly. He said he had read on the Internet of considerably higher wages at other factories in China and expected Honda to match them with an immediate pay increase.

Many workers at other factories in southeastern China already earn $300 a month, but they do so only through considerable overtime. And even that higher income is not enough to embark on the middle-class dream in China of owning a small apartment and subcompact car. Officially, though, the government is discouraging heavy reliance on overtime, and workers here said that Honda was not assigning much.

The strikers said that Honda mainly hired recent graduates of high schools or vocational schools. And so, most are in their late teens or early 20s, representing a new generation of employees, many of whom had not been born when the Chinese authorities suppressed protests by students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — a watershed event whose 21st anniversary falls next Friday.

The profile of striking workers seems to run more along the lines of slightly bookish would-be engineers — perhaps without the grades or money to attend college — rather than political activists. Besides their low wages, the workers seem focused on issues like the factory’s air-conditioning not being cool enough, and the unfairness of having to rise from their dormitories as early as 5:30 for a 7 a.m. shift.

Workers said that in addition to their pay, they also received free lodging in rooms that slept four to six in bunk beds. They also get free lunches, subsidized breakfasts for the equivalent of 30 cents and dinners for about $1.50.

The striking employees said that some senior workers, known as team leaders, had allied themselves with management. But they insisted that the rank-and-file workers were solidly in favor of walkout — a claim impossible to verify.

Although China is run by the Communist Party and has state-controlled unions, the unions are largely charged with overseeing workers, not bargaining for higher wages or pressing for improved labor conditions. And they are not allowed to strike, although China’s laws do not have explicit prohibitions against doing so.

Workers at the Honda factory dormitory said that the official union at the factory was not representing them but was serving as an intermediary between them and management. Li Jianming, the national spokesman for the All China Federation of Trade Unions, declined to comment.

The workers here have been on strike since May 21, with no resolution in sight. But the strike did not come to broader notice until Thursday and Friday as Japanese media began reporting the shutdown of Honda assembly plants, and as Chinese media and Internet sites were allowed to report extensively on those activities.

The unusually permissive approach of the authorities toward media coverage of the strike follows a decision to tolerate extensive coverage this month of suicides by workers at the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn factory complex in nearby Shenzhen that supplies Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

The official China Daily newspaper ran a lead editorial on Friday that cited the Honda strike as evidence that government inaction on wages might be fueling tensions between workers and employers. The editorial criticized the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security for not moving faster to draft a promised amendment to current wage regulations because of what the newspaper described as opposition from employers.

Zheng Qiao, the associate director of the department of employment relations at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, said the strike was a significant development in China’s labor relations history and that “such a large-scale, organized strike will force China’s labor union system to change, to adapt to the market economy.”

Keith Bradsher reported from Foshan, China, and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei contributed research.

Muslim radio show talks up the taboo

Image by Ian Hayhurst via Flickr

By Raja Abdulrahim
Saturday, May 29, 2010; B02

LOS ANGELES As jazz music played, setting a relaxed mood, radio hosts Amir Mertaban and Mohamad Ahmad chatted casually with guest Isaac Yerushalmi.

The show could have dissolved into a heated argument between two Muslims and a Jew, but during the inaugural run of "Boiling Point" on what's billed as the nation's first Muslim talk-radio station, Mertaban was absorbed with more mundane matters.

Still wearing his burgundy Fairplex shirt from his day job as a manager for the Los Angeles County Fair, Mertaban looked over the show's introduction. He glanced at Yerushalmi's biography and a few reminders he had jotted down.

"Okay, I can't use the word 'freakin,' " he said to no one in particular.

In the control room, Nour Mattar, one of the founders of One Legacy Radio, clicked off some of the banned words. "I mean we're cool, but we still have Islamic character and morals, especially since we have a lot of kids, 16, 17, listening in. We don't want them to think this is okay." The hosts of "Boiling Point" -- a show that purports to take "taboo topics to the boiling point" -- are allowed one "What the heck" a show, said Ahmad, a UCLA law school graduate.

One Legacy Radio is an online broadcast that officially launched on http://www.onelegacyradio.com in November from a nondescript studio in an office park off the 5 Freeway in Irvine, Calif., with four weekly shows. Its three founders -- Muslims in their late 20s and early 30s who grew up in Britain and the United States -- have slowly increased the station's programming while trying to strike a balance between religious sensibilities and a more edgy, youth-driven conversation.

Although some of the programming is conventional, such as a show about converts and one devoted to parenting, "Boiling Point" and the religiously challenging "Face the Faith" are more provocative. The station owners are even working on a Muslim version of "Loveline," the often sexually charged syndicated call-in show.

It's an area the American Muslim media largely avoid and one the station owners' parents have shied away from or deemed un-Islamic.

"One Legacy is the fingerprint of the young Muslim ummah [community] -- it basically personifies the kind of ummah that we have right now," said Yasmin Bhuj, 31, a founder and marketing director who is married to Mattar. "If the generation before us did a radio station, it would be unrecognizable to what One Legacy is." Mattar said the station receives e-mails daily from young Muslims thanking them for tackling issues that are relevant to them.

"These are taboo topics that people don't talk about, but in Islam, you are allowed to talk about it," said Mattar, 32.

Taboo is a word heard often around the studio. The goal of the station and its founders isn't to ruffle religious feathers -- although that might happen -- but to create an outlet for the younger generation of Muslims in the United States whose parents mostly emigrated from parts of the Middle East and South Asia in the 1970s and '80s.

Saeed Khan, a history professor at Wayne State University who specializes in Muslim identity in the West, said many first-generation immigrants believed that Islam would act as a sort of divine shield against such societal ills as drug abuse and infidelity within the Muslim community.

Outlets like One Legacy, he said, have cropped up because of the limits of existing Muslim media.

During a January taping of "Objection!" -- about political issues and civil rights -- Reem Salahi interviewed a man whose brother, a U.S. citizen, has been held for several years in solitary confinement awaiting trial by the U.S. government. In the control room, Mattar and his brother Sami Matar (who spells his last name differently) sat at the console while browsing an online store for better radio equipment.

The studio has a slightly thrown-together look: prayer rugs draped over regular office tables and mismatched chairs. Most of the walls are painted deep purple and covered with sound-absorbing foam. Electric guitars, two ouds (Middle Eastern guitars) and a Middle Eastern drum lean against a rack.

On a wall there's a print by British street artist Banksy of a smiley-faced grim reaper, which with a long black veil pulled over its head resembles a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.

In an adjacent office, Mattar runs his online company, which sells laptop computer parts and funds the station's slim $7,000-a-month budget -- enough to pay for three part-time employees. They hope to begin selling radio ads soon. Someday, they hope, the station will be profitable.

Mattar, Bhuj and Mohammad Harake formed One Legacy Media in 2008 to publish Islamic books, CDs and DVDs, and hold educational seminars, the first of which was about marriage.

That's when they came up with the idea of a Muslim radio station. Years ago, they considered broadcasting from a low-frequency radio station with a maximum radius of 40 miles but then decided it wasn't practical. In early 2009, they decided to take advantage of the rising popularity of online broadcast and cellphone radio apps.

For much of the first year, the station streamed only Koran and religious lectures.

"Seven to 10 listeners a day, max," said Harake, 26, the sales and promotional director.

"A day? A month," Mattar said.

Since then, they have added iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps. Mattar wouldn't disclose listenership numbers but said that the figure has doubled each month and that about 4,000 people have downloaded one of their cellphone apps.

The boldest addition to their lineup is likely to be what Harake likes to call "Muslim Loveline." The show would be far less raunchy that the syndicated show but would address such topics as pornography and premarital sex, both banned by Islam.

The hosts have a laundry list of topics to get their listeners riled up: polygamy, temporary marriages, Shiite and Sunni relations, and finding a spouse.

They had expected listeners to object to their pro-Israeli guest on their first show, but the feedback was entirely positive. The conversation mostly revolved around recent events at the University of California at Irvine between Muslim and Jewish students but ended in a non sequitur.

"Before you go, we talk about all the differences, we took it to the boiling point, the house is burning down right now -- I have to call the fire department, but let's talk about something that is very similar," Ahmad said to Yerushalmi.

"You're not doing this, for crying out loud," interjected Mertaban.

"I am doing this, I am gonna go there," Ahmad said, launching into a long-winded, meandering introduction that ended with a simple question to Yerushalmi: "Is your mother trying to find you a good Jewish girl?"

Mertaban jumped in: "Check it out, actions to words. You should marry a crazy Palestinian woman that is hard-core anti-Israel just to make a statement."

-- Los Angeles Times

Iranian artists, musicians give voice to opposition amid censorship

Image via Wikipedia

By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 29, 2010; A10

TEHRAN -- Nearly a year after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed election victory led to wide-scale protests and a fierce government crackdown, members of Iran's thriving and internationally acclaimed cultural scene have emerged as a driving force for the opposition.

Filmmakers, singers and rappers are, in their own way, pushing for social and political changes, and many are paying the price of speaking out against a government that brooks little dissent. In response to films, songs and paintings inspired by the largest grass-roots opposition movement the country has seen since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the government has arrested artists and markedly increased censorship.

Although some artists have left the country to escape restrictions, others remain in Iran and have turned their work into tools of activism. But the protest message has to be subtle or indirect, and even then the work is often produced secretly, using legal loopholes or underground distribution networks to evade the notice of authorities.

When world-renowned director Jafar Panahi decided to make a film about a family caught in the turmoil after last June's election, he did not ask for permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Instead, the filmmaker turned his apartment into a film studio, with his wife cooking for the crew and friends playing the leading characters.

In March, security forces raided the home and arrested Panahi, the cast and his family.

"According to the law, nobody needs permits to film in their own house," he said in an interview. "But the government does not obey its own rules." Panahi was held for nearly three months; top directors such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami called for his release. State media reported that he had been making an "illegal movie."

On Tuesday, Panahi was released on $200,000 bail, pending the start of his trial.

"They arrest individuals to set an example to others," Panahi said Wednesday as his apartment slowly filled with guests, including actors and writers who gave him a hero's welcome. "My interrogators accused me of working for foreign intelligence agencies and said I was trying to make a movie highlighting problems in Iran. But I believe the rights and demands of millions who demonstrated have been ignored. I want to give them a voice."

He isn't the only one. The latest song by popular underground rapper Hich Kas, "Nobody," has become an instant hit, often blasting from cars on Tehran's busy streets. Hich Kas sings:

Good days will come when we do not kill each other

Do not look badly upon each other

A day we are friends and hug each other like in our school days

The song might sound conciliatory, but it ends with sounds of strife from the protests. Hich Kas, whose real name is Soroush Lashkari, left Iran before the song was distributed through the Internet and street peddlers. He is now touring in Dubai and Malaysia, where many Iranians live.

Within Iran, the opposition movement has lost steam in recent months as the government has used increasingly forceful methods, including executions, to discourage protesters from taking to the streets. Government supporters now confidently proclaim that the opposition movement is dead. But there are still signs of discontent from those who believe Ahmadinejad's supporters rigged an election that should have been won by opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

On Tuesday evening, 3,500 fans cheered, clapped and gave victory signs -- a popular opposition symbol -- when pop singer Alireza Assar sang a famous tune about corruption and dishonesty.

"People shouted 'Mousavi,' and almost everybody gave the 'V' sign," a witness said. "There would be immense cheering when the lyrics discussed corruption. Everybody interpreted the song as being against the government."

In a recent interview with Australian television, Iran's top performer of traditional songs, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, criticized Ahmadinejad for referring to the anti-government demonstrators as "dust and weeds."

"I announce that I am the voice of these dust and weeds," Shajarian said. "This voice always was and is for dust and weeds, and I do not let your radio and TV broadcast my voice."

His comments were widely repeated by foreign-based Farsi-language stations. Shajarian has said he will return to Iran within days.

Music, books, poetry and films filled with metaphors and irony played a significant role in the collapse of the Western-backed shah's government during the 1979 revolution. Books by the author Sadegh Hedayat were banned then because of their political content; during the annual Tehran book fair this month, his books and those of six other popular writers and poets -- some of whom died long ago -- were declared illegal by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Government officials say censorship efforts will continue. "I promise that within a couple of years, our cinema will be mostly making appropriate films. We will try to enforce restrictions so that we can get rid of problematic films in the future," said Mohammad Javad Shamaghdari, the deputy minister, according to the semiofficial Web site Khabaronline.ir.

But filmmakers such as Panahi say they don't intend to bend to the government's will. "In the end, they want artists like me to leave, but I will never go," Panahi said. "This is my land. I will remain here and make independent movies and support what is just."

What sites such as Facebook and Google know and whom they tell

Image via Wikipedia

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 29, 2010; A01

When Disa Powell's husband and brother were badly burned in an electrical explosion while conducting maintenance at a Wal-Mart store and the family sued, the defense went after something she never expected: her online life.

Through a subpoena seeking information about the men's injuries, Wal-Mart was able to gain full access to her Facebook and MySpace social-networking accounts -- every public and private message, contact and photo for the previous 2 1/2 years.

There were the pictures of Powell's newborn baby lying in a hospital bed after heart surgery (Label: "The hardest day of Mommy and Daddy's life"). The messages detailing problems with her pregnancy ("I got a bladder infection, which has moved to my kidneys"). And the messages dissing on friends ("Brad is a big fat BABY, and can't do anything by himself. The whole issue is that he's lazy").

"I was livid," said Powell, 35, a former hospital administrator who a few years ago moved from Maryland's Eastern Shore back to her home town in Oklahoma. "I felt like I had been seriously violated."

The case, which was settled out of court in January, offers a window into an issue that in recent weeks has riled members of Congress, consumer advocacy groups and tens of thousands of account holders: what your social-networking sites know about you and whom they share it with.

Many online service providers over the past few years have been building huge dossiers with minute details of each user's online activities -- a practice that isn't usually mentioned in privacy policies. Some companies anonymize the data, while others do not. Some store detailed data for a month, while others keep it for years.

At the same time, the ease with which outsiders can access the data is increasing, as corporations, insurance companies and parties in divorces or employment disputes make widespread use of subpoenas.

David Hersh, the attorney who represented the Powells and Disa's brother Joel Ledbetter, said such subpoenas have become standard practice in litigation and are "meant to discover information that would be embarrassing or might be used adversely even if it has nothing to do with the claim."

Companies own the data

Because your account information is stored on a company's servers, on the "cloud" that is the Internet rather than on your personal laptop, the company owns it, not you. While accessing your laptop may require a difficult-to-obtain search warrant, getting certain data on Facebook, MySpace, Meetup, LinkedIn and other social-networking sites' servers may require only a simple subpoena.

"The law in this area is really outdated. It's pre-'www,' " Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said of the 1986 act that was designed to introduce privacy controls to electronic communications. "Back then nobody could even figure out whether an e-mail was more like a letter or a phone call."

Efforts to give consumers more control over their private information have accelerated in Washington over the past month, in the wake of a furor over privacy policy changes at Facebook in particular. (Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is on the board of directors at Facebook.) Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg tried to quell the outcry this week by making it easier for users to control how they share data.

On Friday, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to Facebook and Google to demand that they cooperate with congressional investigators looking into privacy practices. Google has drawn scrutiny for accessing information including e-mails and surfing from open WiFi networks while photographing streets for its mapping service.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called on the Federal Trade Commission to provide guidelines for use of private information and prohibit access without user permission. The ACLU is part of a coalition of advocacy groups and tech companies that is pushing for a major overhaul of the 1986 act.

Meanwhile, software developers are working on a way to prohibit access using technology. Four New York University students recently made headlines for a project they call Diaspora that they say will allow users to keep control over their social-networking information. The group was seeking $10,000 for its startup but has raised $190,000 since the Facebook controversy broke out in late April.

In the 15 years since the World Wide Web brought the Internet to the masses, the most successful companies have been those that collect information about users and use it to sell things. Google, for instance, has confirmed that it keeps track of search queries sent from a particular IP address. (A spokesman said the company anonymizes IP addresses associated with search queries after nine months and cookies after 18 months.)

Extensive data collection

Companies are loath to talk about what information they track, but internal compliance manuals for law enforcement for Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft reviewed by The Washington Post show that their data collection is much more extensive than users might believe based on what they themselves can access.

For example: Microsoft tracks the Xbox LIVE start and end dates and times for game-playing and notes the game played, such as "SW: Jedi Academy." Yahoo keeps chat and instant messenger logs for 45 to 60 days and notes the time/date and IP address for when content is added or deleted to someone's profile or to its Flickr photo service.

Facebook's data collection is among the most detailed.

For every user id, Facebook keeps a log of the IP address that accessed the account, the date and time, and what exactly the user did -- clicking on an advertisement, looking at someone else's profile, posting a photo or sending a message to a friend, etc.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes declined to comment on specific data-gathering and retention policies but said the privacy policy makes clear that the company may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders or other requests.

However, Noyes said, "We scrutinize every single information request; require a detailed description of why the request is being made; and, if it is deemed appropriate, share only the minimum amount of information."

Facebook says in its compliance manual that it generally retains information about activity by IP address for 90 days, but in the Ledbetter-Powell case it's clear that other information, such as her private messages to and from friends, had been kept since her account was opened in 2007.

Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and director of Software Freedom Law Center, calls Facebook "one big database of hundreds of millions of people containing the kind of information far beyond what the secret police in 20th-century totalitarian regimes had."

The company knows which social contacts are closest to you and can guess your moods, he said. And if you're obsessively checking another person's profile at the same time he or she is doing the same with yours, Moglen claims, "Facebook can even tell you're going to have an affair before you do."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Most Guantanamo detainees low-level fighters, task force report says

Image via Wikipedia

By Peter Finn
Saturday, May 29, 2010; A03

About 10 percent of the 240 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when President Obama took office were "leaders, operatives and facilitators involved in plots against the United States," but the majority were low-level fighters, according to a previously undisclosed government report. About 5 percent of the detainees could not be categorized at all.

The final report by the Guantanamo Review Task Force recommends that 126 of the detainees be transferred either to their homes or to a third country; that 36 be prosecuted in either federal court or a military commission; and that 48 be held indefinitely under the laws of war. A group of 30 Yemenis was approved for release if security conditions in their home country improve.

The report was completed in January but sent to select committees on Capitol Hill just this week. The administration sat on the report in the wake of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day because there was little public or congressional appetite for further discussion of its plan to close the military detention center.

The figures are in line with previous estimates, but the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, could have important political implications. There is deepening bipartisan congressional opposition to the closure of Guantanamo, and the administration is attempting to show that it has conducted a rigorous review process and been attentive to security risks.

It remains unclear whether the administration can gain enough support on Capitol Hill to move forward with its plan to buy a state prison in Illinois to replace Guantanamo, where 181 detainees remain. Key House and Senate committees introduced language this month into defense bills that would bar funding for any such facility in the United States.

According to the task force report, more than 60 career professionals -- including intelligence analysts, law enforcement agents and prosecutors -- compiled files on each detainee. The files included capture information, interview reports, record searches by the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency, and Guantanamo Bay files on behavior, disciplinary infractions and mental health.

Before the review, there was no single repository of information for each detainee. The task force determined that there "were more than a thousand pieces of potentially relevant physical evidence (including electronic media) seized during raids in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks that had not yet been systematically catalogued."

Apart from the 10 percent implicated in plots against the United States, a group of about 20 percent of detainees had significant roles with al-Qaeda or associated groups. Fewer than 10 percent were Taliban leaders or members of groups opposed to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.

The task force's recommendations were reviewed and largely approved by senior officials from six agencies, including the departments of Defense and Homeland Security. If there was disagreement among senior officials, cases went to agency heads.

"These weren't all easy calls," said a government official involved in the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "But in the end, these were unanimous decisions among all six agencies."

The decision to hold 48 detainees without trial remains the most controversial part of the review process for key parts of Obama's constituency, including human rights activists. The task force said prosecution was not feasible for some detainees because the focus at the time of their capture was the "gathering of intelligence," not evidence. But these detainees still posed "a high level of threat."

The report says that obstacles to prosecution "typically did not stem from concerns over protecting sensitive sources or methods from disclosure, or concerns that evidence against the detainee was tainted."

The report says those recommended for indefinite detention had significant roles in al-Qaeda or the Taliban and advanced training or expertise. It notes that "some detainees designated for detention have, while at Guantanamo, expressly stated or otherwise exhibited an intent to reengage in extremist activity upon release."

For a handful of detainees cleared for transfer, there was scant evidence of any involvement with terrorist groups, the report says. Most were low-level fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda or other groups in Afghanistan.

"It is important to emphasize that a decision to approve a detainee for transfer does not reflect a decision that a detainee poses no threat or no risk of recidivism," the report says. "The review participants nonetheless considered those detainees appropriate candidates for transfer from a threat perspective, in light of their limited skills, minor organizational roles, or other factors."

Of the of 779 detainees held at Guantanamo since it opened in January 2002, about 70 percent, or 530, were released by the Bush administration. It had cleared 59 more for release by the time Obama took office.

Since January 2009, the Obama administration has resettled 33 detainees in third countries, repatriated 24 and sent two to Italy for prosecution. Of the remaining detainees cleared for release, 28 are Yemeni, 17 are candidates for repatriation and 22, including five Uighurs from China, have been approved for resettlement in third countries.

In a letter this month, seven Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee asked James L. Jones, the president's national security adviser, to recommend to Obama "an immediate prohibition on the transfer of any detainee out of Guantanamo Bay, and a halt to any action related to the closure of the facility."

Jones replied to the letter this week, saying that "Guantanamo has compromised our standing in the world, undermined our core values, and diminished our moral authority." He said that the Pentagon spends $150 million a year for detention operations at Guantanamo and that costs at a possible facility in Thomson, Ill., would be $70 million to $80 million.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.