.ca -> .fr

Here’s the news: Jenna and I are packing up, leaving Toronto, and moving to France. For an entire year. Starting in January 2012.

If you’re family or a close friend, this is probably not news. We’ve been planning this for almost three years, and though we haven’t kept it a secret, we also haven’t widely publicized the fact that we’re moving. Until now.

With less than five months to go, I suspect I’ll be writing more about our plans here on this blog, and I bet Jenna will do the same over at ahbon.ca

Why are you doing this?

Because we can. We’re child-less, mortgage-less, car-less, and for the most part, responsibility-less. Which won’t always be the case. If there was ever a time in our lives to pick up and skip town, it’s now.

I’ve lived in Toronto for seven years now, and Jenna’s been here for more than a decade. Part of the goal is to escape the scale of a city like Toronto, and simply to live somewhere else for a change. Right now, the plan is to move to Lyon, about two hours (by train) southeast of Paris.

How are you doing this?

France and Canada have this thing called the France-Canada youth exchange agreement. We’re eligible for 12-month “Working Holiday” visas (2E), which are for “Canadians wishing to travel to France for touristic and cultural purposes, all the while being authorized to work for financial sustenance.”

Neat, huh? It’s great being a “youth.”

So, why France? Why Lyon?

First off, we’re moving to France to learn French. Right now, my French isn’t great, but it’s halfway passable. I can order food and get directions, but I’m can’t have deep conversations about philosophy and literature. Jenna’s French is much better than mine, but we could both stand to improve. We figure immersion will help, and where better to immerse ourselves?

We chose Lyon for a few reasons. First, because it’s not Paris, and thus, we can afford to live there. It’s the third largest city in France, and feels not too big, and not too small. Plus, it’s la capitale gastronomique française, so chances are we’ll eat well.

Lyon is decently well-connected to other parts of Europe by rail and air, and we’re really hoping it’ll be a good home base for a bit of travel.

What about your jobs?

One of the perks of a staff job at the CBC is the Deferred Salary Leave Plan (schoolteachers have something similar, which they call “4 over 5”). Essentially, I’ll be on an unpaid leave of absence for one year, after which I come right back to the job I left. Appropriately enough, 2012 will be my seventh year with the CBC, so I’m calling this “roll your own sabbatical.”

As for Jenna, she’ll be leaving her plum position at the HDI. She’s done a lot there over the past few years, and it’ll be tough for her to leave. But with so many successes under her belt (2500+ WWII veteran interviews!) and fluent bilingualism by the time we return to Canada, she’ll be unstoppable.

While we’re in France, we’ll probably both do a little bit of work. Financially, we won’t have to worry too much about housing and food (we’ve been squirrelling cash away for a few years now), but the degree to which we’re able to travel will depend on how much part-time or freelance work we’re able to pick up.

Personally, I’m also planning to spend part of the year doing some serious self-directed study in the service of becoming a programmer-journalist.

What about your super-awesome apartment in Toronto that you really love and would hate to give up?

Um, yeah, we’re working on that.

Know anyone who wants to sublet a super-awesome apartment in downtown Toronto for 12 months starting in January 2012?

Wait a second, is this really a good idea?

We really think so. A few weeks ago, we did a short scouting trip to Lyon, and loved it. We met so many nice, friendly, helpful people, and the city itself is beautiful.

I’m sure there will be challenges, but that’s part of the point. For example, as we work through the visa application process, I’m getting a small taste of French bureaucracy’s love of paperwork. The language will be tricky, I’m sure (especially for me). Getting set up with an apartment and bank account may be tricky. But if it means we can live abroad for a year, expand our horizons, and get some perspective, it’ll be worth it.

The past few years of my life have become very comfortable. The same city. The same apartment. The same job. There’s nothing wrong with comfortable, of course, but increasingly, I feel the need to shake things up. To do something that makes me feel uncomfortable. To get outside of the ordinary.

This is an opportunity to do exactly that, and I can’t wait.

I spy with my little ISP

This week’s CBC tech column and podcast is all about lawful access legislation. The podcast features a special extended interview with Tamir Israel of CIPPIC. It’s online now in written and audio form [mp3 download].

===

“Stop spying.”

That’s the message from OpenMedia.ca, a Vancouver-based internet advocacy group, to government and law enforcement officials. They’ve set up an online petition at stopspying.ca to protest something called “lawful access legislation.”

I’ll admit, it’s an unfortunate name. When you say “lawful access legislation” out loud, it sounds like pretty much the most boring thing ever. But it’s not. I promise.

When Parliament resumes in September, the debate surrounding this controversial legislation will start to heat up, and it’s well worth paying attention.

In a nutshell, lawful access has to do with how law enforcement can access your communications. That includes activities like wiretapping, and obtaining access to your email or your web surfing history.

Of course, right now, police can get access to any of that stuff, but it requires legal authority (like a warrant) and reasonable grounds to believe you’ve done something wrong. But proposed new lawful access legislation could change things, making it easier for police to get detailed information about you from your internet service provider, your social networking accounts, or from your cellphone company (in some cases, without a warrant or without reasonable grounds to believe you’ve done something wrong).

Understandably, these proposed changes freak some people out.

So why are we hearing about this now? There are a couple of reasons.

First, because new legislation is expected soon. Over the past several years, there have been a number of attempts to pass new lawful access legislation, but for a variety of reasons (including Parliamentary prorogation), nothing has materialized. The most recent attempt took place in the last Parliament, in the form of three separate bills: C-50, C-51, and C-52. They all died on the order paper.

During the last election, the government promised to bundle these three lawful access bills together (along with a bunch of other related legislation) into an omnibus crime bill. And they promised to pass this omnibus bill within 100 days of taking power.

The other reason the lawful access issue is heating up is that stateside, a U.S. House of Representatives committee recently approved similar legislation. It’s not exactly the same, but the bill would compel American ISPs to store detailed information about their customers’ online activities.

People have been asking, “Could the same sort of thing happen here in Canada?” The answer seems to be yes.

Warrantless internet snooping

From a civil liberties perspective, warrantless internet snooping is a big deal. But when it comes to the day-to-day online activities of most Canadians, the effects are harder to explain.

Right now, almost everything you do online is being tracked. Your browsing history, e-mail communications, and GPS location data — it’s all being collected, and police can already get access to that information ifthey have legal authority (like a warrant). If new lawful access legislation is passed, it could become much easier for police to get access to that kind of information.

Police could approach your ISP or your email provider and compel them to keep their logs about you for longer than they ordinarily would. In some cases, police could force service providers to hand over identity or tracking information, even if they don’t have reasonable grounds to believe you’ve done something wrong.

Privacy advocates worry about the lack of oversight in this whole process. And they worry that this could turn private companies like internet service providers into state agents who spy on their customers.

Why it matters

“But Dan,” you might say, “I have nothing to hide. Why should I care?”

Even if you have nothing to hide, there are plenty of reasons to care about lawful access.

For instance, you might care about this on principle. You might not like the idea of your ISP or your cellphone company violating your reasonable expectation of privacy, even if all your communication is along the lines of, “Honey, do you need me to pick up anything at the grocery store?”

Personally, my concern has to do with personal data security. My ISP or cellphone company has the ability to keep a staggering amount of information about me and my family. Those detailed records could become a really attractive target for hackers with nefarious intentions. Imagine what you could do if you knew everything about someone’s online activity: where they went online, when they went there, who they talked to, what they said. Simply collecting and preserving this information presents a security risk.

In addition to the stopspying.ca petition (which has upwards of 40,000 signatures), there have been several other strong reactions to this proposed legislation. For instance, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and her provincial and territorial colleagues have written an open letter to William Baker, Deputy Minister of Public Safety, expressing their concerns about lawful access.

This issue is just starting to heat up, and I suspect we’re going to hear much more about it in the coming weeks and months. I’ll definitely keep a close eye on it, from underneath my tinfoil hat.

Google, PittPatt, and facial recognition

This week’s CBC Radio tech column is all about Google’s aquisition of PittPatt, a facial recognition company. It’s online now in written and audio form [mp3 download] [audio:http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/misenerontech_20110726_93720.mp3]

Also, if you’re awesome, you’ll subscribe and rate Misener on Tech in iTunes. Pretty please.

===

Eric Schmidt and I have at least one thing in common: we both find facial recognition software creepy.

In an onstage interview at this year’s D9 conference , the executive chairman of Google said, “I’m very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition.”

He went on to explain that Google had actually developed facial-recognition software as part of its Google Goggles product but withheld the technology because of privacy concerns.

Imagine being able to identify a stranger simply by photographing them with your smartphone: up would pop their name, age, social networking profile. From a technical perspective, with modern face-recognition algorithms and a large enough database of faces, it’s entirely possible. It’s also creepy.

That’s something Schmidt and I agree on. So, then, given Schmidt’s stance, I was somewhat surprised to learn that Google recently acquired PittPatt, a software company that specializes in — you guessed it — facial recognition software.

PittPatt’s software, spun off from research done at Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University, is part of the growing computer-vision industry. According to the company, the software can “search images for faces, determine if faces are the same person, track faces in video sequences and pinpoint constituent landmarks in faces.”

The software does both facial detection (simply identifying the presence of faces) and facial recognition (identifying individuals based on pattern matching). The latter is what has privacy advocates most worried.

So, what will Google do with PittPatt’s software? In short: we don’t know, yet.

Could be used in image search, YouTube, Google+

A spokesperson told me the company has “nothing to announce at this time.” But it’s not hard to imagine some likely applications.

For example, Google has a photo-management program called Picasa, which already uses facial recognition software to help organize images by person.

It’s also not difficult to imagine facial-recognition software being rolled into a service like Google image search or YouTube. But it’s also possible — and this, for me, is where things begin to cross the line into the realm of the creepy — that PittPatt’s technology could be folded into Google+, the recently launched social network.

Google+ already has photo sharing and photo tagging functions that are very similar to ones used by the rival social networking site Facebook. If Google does add facial recognition to its photo-sharing functions, it certainly won’t be the first site to do so.

Late last year, Facebook did exactly that and got itself into hot water with a feature called Tag Suggestions. It used facial recognition to automatically identify people in Facebook photos in order to make tagging them easier. The feature isn’t currently available in Canada, but in parts of the world where it is available, it’s been quite controversial.

Critics take issue with the fact that facial recognition is enabled by default, that the feature is opt-out (rather than opt-in) and that the settings are confusing. This past June, in the EU (which has strong data-protection laws), the Tag Suggestions feature was probed by regulators. If Google does incorporate facial recognition technology into its own social network, it would be wise to pay especially close attention to the Facebook example.

“We’ve said that we won’t add face recognition to our apps or product features unless we have strong privacy protections in place, and that’s still the case,” a Google spokesperson said.

I have to wonder, though, might Google consider its much-touted “Circles” feature, which allows Google+ users to organize people into separate groups, as having “strong privacy protections”?

Are the granular sharing options built into Google+ enough to make web-scale facial recognition software any less intrusive? It’s hard to tell.

For me, the key will be transparency. As creepy as I find facial recognition, I completely understand that others really like it. I understand that it can have practical (even fun) uses. And I have no problem with large companies automatically scanning photos and videos for faces — as long as users are aware that it’s happening and have the opportunity to make informed choices.

I’ll take the creepy face recognition I know over the creepy face recognition I don’t any day.

Why the wait on Google+ for businesses? Ads.

So far, Google+ is for people only.

Google has advised businesses, organizations, and brands — basically, any entity that isn’t an individual human being — to hold off on setting up a Google+ presence.

Eventually though, Google will allow businesses to join. Over at VentureBeat, Jolie O’Dell quotes a nameless Google spokesperson:

While Google is mum on exactly what the business profiles will include, the spokesperson did say, “You can expect to see a level of analytics and measurement that you’d typically find in Google products as well as a nuanced approach to how things are shared. It encourages and enhances conversation, it doesn’t just put things in the stream.”

A “nuanced approach how things are shared” sounds an awful lot like code for Google+ Ads.

My bet: when these Google+ business profiles go live, they’ll be heavily tied into Google’s existing advertising infrastructure, and we’ll see the rollout of something very similar to Facebook’s ad targeting system:

Think about it. If you’ve bought into the whole Google lifestyle, they have your search history, email, breadcrumbs scattered across the web through Analytics… and now, your social graph. What would you do if your company had all of that?

Here’s a fun experiment you can do at home: if you’re on both Google+ and Facebook, go take a look at each sites. Compare and contrast. Did you notice what’s conspicuously missing from Google+? Yup. Ads.

Right now, my Google+ experience is entirely ad-free. But my gut tells me that’s going to change pretty soon.

Audio: How can we build a city that thinks like the web?

Back in June, I moderated a panel at the 2011 Subtle Technologies Festival. It was called How can we build a city that thinks like the web?, and included Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing), Mark Surman (Mozilla) and Sara Diamond (OCAD University).

This week, on my CBC tech podcast, I’m really pleased to be able to play the full (1 hour+) panel: [audio:http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/misenerontech_20110719_46301.mp3]

MP3 download