A city in England has installed a "smart CCTV" system, which is claimed to be able to a href="http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/Smart-CCTV-could-put-criminals.4735976.jp"detect certain behavior or incidents/a (via a href="http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/11/28/portsmouth_cctv/"The Register/a) and to alert camera operators to follow up. The system is supposed to give operators the ability to monitor large numbers of cameras at once, more than they can do just by watching TV screens. This type of technology has been around for a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060901/074818.shtml"a little while/a, but doesn't seem to have set the world alight just yet. It's doubtful that these devices will actually make any significant reduction in crime (perhaps predicting and preventing crime comes in version 2.0), and will serve merely as an a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20061027/004715.shtml"excuse/a to blanket more and more areas with CCTV coverage, putting wider and wider swathes of people's lives under surveillance.p style="border-top: 1px #aaaaaa dashed;padding-top: 5px;margin-top: 10px;"emCarlo Longino is an expert at the a href="http://www.insightcommunity.com/"Insight Community/a. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, a href="http://www.insightcommunity.com/"click here/a./em/p br /br /a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081130/2330472977.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081130/2330472977.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081130/2330472977op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=655f635ba7a3df0eee3b6a4e98387d2dp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=655f635ba7a3df0eee3b6a4e98387d2dp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=655f635ba7a3df0eee3b6a4e98387d2d" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=6H4xo"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=6H4xo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/473238634" height="1" width="1"/

Last month, Mike wrote about how the English Premier League was a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081103/1047072724.shtml"making/a threatening overtones towards Justin.tv, after it discovered some users on the site were streaming broadcasts of its soccer matches. It's the usual stuff from sports leagues, complaining that the sites aren't doing enough to stop piracy, and that their safe harbor shouldn't protect them, and that the DMCA takedown process isn't good enough. Now, a piece in The Guardian wonders if the large-scale piracy, along with a spending slowdown, will a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2008/nov/26/premierleague-bskyb"hit the value of TV rights/a deals when they come up for renewal, with broadcasters unable to justify the same level of spending should viewer figures fall. br /br / This scenario isn't hard to imagine, but should it occur, it will be thanks to a lack of business acumen, not piracy. These sites exist, and thrive, because they serve demand untapped by the Premier League and its rightsholders. For instance, the rights situation means that in England -- where the league's based and its games played -- fewer games are broadcast on TV than in many places in the world. Here in the US, nearly every match is broadcast each weekend; just a handful make it onto UK TV screens. British pub owners tried to serve the untapped demand for this by buying satellite systems from foreign countries, but the EPL a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/technology/21jazeera.html"shut that avenue off/a in the courts. Likewise, users in the UK and elsewhere turn to sites like Justin.tv because they don't have other options. The match they want to see isn't available on television, or they're not near a TV set when the match is being played. I'd argue this drives use of the services much more than a desire for free content does. br /br / The rights situation domestically in the UK is the way it is because of the long-held view that putting games on TV will hold down attendance; but the small stadium sizes and increasingly geographically distributed fan bases (along with high ticket prices) do this already. And indeed, the experience of other sports leagues around the world would indicate that giving fans the ability to watch their teams' games on television does little, on its own, to hurt attendance. That sort of view seems to color the entire TV rights situation for the Premier League: it tries to manufacture some sort of scarcity in an attempt to increase its revenues. But the popularity of sites that make broadcasts available online makes it clear they'd be better off answering this demand with services of their own. br /br / Here's a novel idea: instead of trying to crack down on the likes of Justin.tv, why not require rightsholders to offer free streams of games as parts of their deals? Then, the Premier League and its broadcast partners get to serve this demand, instead of Justin.tv or Chinese P2P services, and get to capitalize on it through advertising or other means. It might have some effect on pay services by giving fans with the least willingness to pay a free service to use, but again, I'd argue that most people would still prefer to watch their teams' games on a bigger screen and in higher quality enough to pay for it. And the additional fans the services would reach could make new converts to paid services as well. Whatever the EPL decides to do, it's impossible to understand how it thinks it can benefit by alienating fans and making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to follow their teams.p style="border-top: 1px #aaaaaa dashed;padding-top: 5px;margin-top: 10px;"emCarlo Longino is an expert at the a href="http://www.insightcommunity.com/"Insight Community/a. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, a href="http://www.insightcommunity.com/"click here/a./em/p br /br /a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081126/1028552964.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081126/1028552964.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081126/1028552964op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=2ce99f96fcd45c8f2cf15ab5c8c75f84p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=2ce99f96fcd45c8f2cf15ab5c8c75f84p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=2ce99f96fcd45c8f2cf15ab5c8c75f84" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=fvH6o"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=fvH6o" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/472956055" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/iphone_and_pc.jpg"It seems we're approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the "real" world and the "virtual" world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online - a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new web. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12762amp;cb=12762' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12762amp;n=12762' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pOn tomorrow's web, we're no longer going to be anonymous. In fact, one can argue that we're no longer anonymous today, but that's not entirely true. We're still hearing of people hijacking people's names and brands on social networking sites like a href="http://twitter.com"Twitter/a, for example, and any MySpace search for a famous celebrity will return hundreds of results purporting to be the "official" page for that person. But those days of "faking it" may be fading fast. /p h2Being "Fake" Is Now A Crime/h2 pA precedent-setting case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, has just come to an end. If you're unfamiliar, this was a case where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online. In the case of Drew, most would agree she deserves the punishment she received. However, the aftershocks of the ruling could very well impact the online identity creation process for years to come if it's not overturned. /p h2Authenticating The "Real" You/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/f8_image1.jpg" align="right"To address the needs of sites wanting weed out fake personas, users will have to be authenticated in new ways. Here, companies like Facebook, Google, and others are already in position to offer a solution for making sure people are who they say they are. a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_connect_readies.php"Facebook Connect/a, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_friend_connect_manages.php"Google Friend Connect/a, and a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_opens_yos_to_developers.php"Yahoo's Open Strategy/a, have all been busy trying to grab land on the new frontier of identity management. All of them want to be your de facto online identity provider. /p pNo matter who wins, though, it's emanonymity/em that loses. For the sites that move to these types of authentication methods, no longer will their users be able to create disposable usernames and passwords so they can troll around harassing others and leaving juvenile comments. Instead, all participants are themselves online#160; - and subject to the same standards for behavior that you would expect to see if you encountered them in a real-life public situation. /p h2The Psychological Impacts Of One Identity /h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/selector-example3d.gif" align="left"Even the utopian plans of a href="http://openid.net/"OpenID/a, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_aims_to_win_developers.php"which MySpace pledged to support/a, is being embraced by other big names like a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_is_now_an_openid_provider.php"Google/a, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_windows_live_openid.php"Microsoft/a, Yahoo, and a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/barack_obamas_changegov_adds_o.php"even President-Elect Obama/a. With this federated identity, one set of credentials can follow you around the net, providing access to hundreds of sites. Although everyday computer users may not understand the technicalities of OpenID, the psychological impact will become apparent. /p pTo the technically unsophisticated, the concept that you are emone/em set of credentials, emone/em username, emone/em person across numerous sites will start people thinking that their activities can be traced, that they are not as emanonymous/em as before...regardless as to whether or not that is true. /p h2The User Data Overlords/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/security-cameras.jpg" align="right"Finally, there is Google, the company we joke around as being "our new overlords." The reality is that we have, in fact, turned over vast amounts of our personal identity to this company in exchange for free webmail with pretty themes, snappy web browsing experiences, free analytics tools, more. As Allen Stern noted this weekend, "a href="http://www.centernetworks.com/google-online-privacy"Google Knows Where I Am and Everything I Do/a." em(If you want to jump even deeper down that rabbit hole, take a closer look at /ema href="http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/index.php/googles-user-data-empire/"emGoogle's User Data Empire/em/aem).#160; /em/p pThe terrifying vision of our future that Orwell imagined in his masterpiece, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four"1984/a, has been surpassed by miles. Big Brother staring at us through TV screens is nothing - instead, we've managed to create a world where we blindly, willingly, hand over our data and personal identities to a publicly traded company because they promised us they were trustworthy. And like a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine"the Eloi people in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine/a, everything we need is provided to us - up until the time we become the dinner for the evils that lurk just below the surface. /p h2Struggling To Adapt/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/facebook_wand.jpg" align="right"In many ways, our society will struggle to adapt to the changes imposed by the lack of anonymity. Those embarrassing Facebook photos you got tagged in this weekend could lose you your job and prevent you from getting a new one. But how can we draw the line between what's public and private when so many of us have already decided that it's socially acceptable to shove cameras and video recorders in people's faces (without asking!) and publish the captured images to the net immediately? /p pThe only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always "be on your best behavior" in public. Frankly, that's no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No - not unless you're willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning. /p pWhen we reach the point where online anonymity has ended, instead of getting to be who we really are, the fact that we've become so aware of the fact that we're always being recorded, photographed, tracked, and traced, will have actually created a slightly altered personality instead. Like reality TV show contestants, the act of being observed will change our behavior. Our personal brand image will become our public identity and therefore our identity. /p h2Not All Bad, Just Different/h2 pThe truth is, giving up our online anonymity may not be all bad - we'll have a convenient, portable friend graph, for example. We can burn our notebook filled with our usernames and passwords. Our search data will be easily accessible from one place. But for the convenience of a simple login, searchable personal data and web history, and social networks filled with friends, we'll have exchanged a bit of who we are in the process. We'll pay for our services on the new internet with our identity and personal information. When the companies we sold ourselves to use it for their own benefits, our outrage will come too late. We'll only have ourselves to blame. /p pemImage credit: iPhone with transparent screen, /ema href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/16189770@N00/1526393678/"emedans/em/a/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_end_of_online_anonymity.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Rb6Js6_dkLIoDnGgeF8kMLrspdM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Rb6Js6_dkLIoDnGgeF8kMLrspdM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=6PnLJzLz"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=e294Dj6d"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=o1vFSWS5"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=o1vFSWS5" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=uJqMQd1P"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=uJqMQd1P" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=5lNZuiR4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=5lNZuiR4" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=J83R7kz9"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=hQrU55RW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/iNWiiSTGLxo" height="1" width="1"/