When Web Chaos Takes an Ugly Turn

When the Web's Chaos Takes an Ugly Turn

THE most successful cities achieve a kind of organized chaos - a rich, dense and varied mix of different kinds of people, ideas and businesses, constantly colliding in new and interesting ways.

Jane Jacobs, an urban activist, made that observation in 1961 in her landmark book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Although she was describing cities built of bricks and mortar, her ideas about cultivating vibrancy feel relevant today, as some of the most important metropolises of the 21st century are being constructed online, where chaos is in no short supply.

The latest controversy surrounds Reddit, a community and social news site that lets members create and run their own forums on any topic, from movie news to local politics to the sharing of beautiful nature photographs. Reddit has come under fire for harboring a forum that encourages people to covertly photograph women on the street and upload the images to the site for others to ogle and comment on. The pictures, nicknamed “creepshots,” incited outrage and provoked other members of the site and some journalists to publicly out those distributing the suggestive images. These actions, in turn, prompted an outcry from those who felt that they should be able to retain their own anonymity while posting photographs of women without their consent.

The skirmish has set off a debate about privacy and free speech, ownership and community, digital rights and accountability, touching upon issues of privilege and the undercurrents of power that course through the Web. At its core, the fallout is about how we transport social order, morals and responsibility to the digital realm and whether the online infrastructure can find a weird wisdom in the way it is being erected that will allow all its inhabitants to flourish.

Reddit is just one Web site - and one that many people have never heard of, at that. But it wields a sizable chunk of influence online, playing an instrumental role in rallying the Web to halt the progression of antipiracy bills proposed by Congress earlier this year, as well as enticing President Obama into its virtual halls to answer questions submitted by its members. It also drives significant amounts of traffic around the Web each month.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, described the site as “the secret backbone of the Internet,” which is why it is even more crucial that it be accountable for the environment it is fostering, she said.

“Reddit is not just a cog in the machine,” she said. “It may not be the most visible site, but is a powerful platform.”

Of course, Reddit isn't the only Web site struggling with these issues. Such creepshots appear on other places around the Web, including Twitter. And sites from YouTube to Instagram, the photo-sharing app, are grappling with how to address provocative content, from images depicting self-harm to violent torture videos, and where to draw the line about what to publish and what to remove.

But the discussion around Reddit feels particularly pertinent because it is a site that deftly straddles the old Web and the new, managing to house the wondrous and the freewheeling, an antidote to the mainstream social networking sites where advertising and data-mining can seem more important than the conversations and community they contain.

As more of our life migrates online, the digital domains where we spend so much time may be as influential and important as the towns where we choose to go to school, find jobs and raise our families. The gap between who we are online and who we are offline is closing, said Katie Baker, a writer for Jezebel, who has been covering the skirmishes around Reddit. “It is increasingly clear-cut that we can no longer think that way,” she said.

Reddit, like Ms. Jacobs's great cities, is a hub of interaction and civilization. And if one population feels marginalized within it, as many women and men who oppose those forums do, it detracts from the overall health of the community.

Those turned off by Reddit's policies, which the company has no plans to amend despite the blowup, could always find a new place online to roost. But in Ms. Jacobs' book, the cities that drive people away rather than deal with their unsavory bits begin to deteriorate and decay, and eventually wither.

In other words, averting our eyes and avoiding certain forums won't solve the problem of how to deal with those forums when they tolerate and encourage attitudes of hostility and exploitation of women and underage girls.

Reddit is not an island. It is a site with 19 million users a month, according to Quantcast, one that is inexorably linked to the rest of the Web, and its community's ideas, memes and images migrate from its front page to a larger online world. While it is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast, it is largely independent.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 21, 2012, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: When the Web's Chaos Takes an Ugly Turn.

Disruptions: A Tiny Camera for the Stratosphere

There have been two major milestones in narcissistic photography in the last century. The first was the invention of the self-timer, which Kodak began selling during World War I. The second came a few years ago, as teenagers stood at mirrors taking pictures of themselves with camera phones to share online.

The camera phone is perfect for the social networking era. But even smartphones have a limitation: you need to hold them.

As the smartphone has pushed some camera companies off a cliff, a tiny, ultrahigh-resolution camera that can record that very feat has taken off into the stratosphere, figuratively and literally.

The GoPro, which costs $200 to $400, was mounted on Felix Baumgartner as he sky-dived 24 miles. It has been affixed to jets traveling at Mach 5 and surfboards sent down 100-foot waves.

As other companies have sunk, GoPro has sold three million cameras in three years. The market research firm IDC says that makes the GoPro the most popul ar video camera in the country.

Last week, the company, which began 10 years ago with a disposable camera strapped to surfers' wrists, unveiled the Hero 3. You might think a product announcement from a camera company would feel like a funeral shortly before the person was going to die. But it felt more like a celebration for someone who was going to live forever. Big-wave surfers - those who ride 80-foot waves for fun - showed their GoPro shots to sky divers, who, in turn, had their own stories to show.

How did this happen? Nick Woodman, the founder and inventor of GoPro, says, “Right place, right time.”

It was almost that simple. Mr. Woodman, 37, made the first, crude GoPro when he went to Indonesia on a surfing trip. He wanted to take pictures of a friend in the water. But when he turned the camera around to take pictures of himself, he realized the company's potential.

“The big ‘aha' moment was in 2007, when we realized the bigger opportuni ty wasn't just making wearable cameras for photographers,” Mr. Woodman said. “It was making wearable cameras for people to photograph themselves.” This was happening just as Google was buying YouTube and sites like Twitter and Facebook were going mainstream.

Mr. Woodman began selling inexpensive mounts that could attach the GoPro to anything: surfboards, bicycles, helmets, body harnesses, cats, you name it.

What happened next was astounding: people started to develop a relationship with GoPro.

“One of the magical things that started happening with the company was our customers felt compelled to give us credit in their photos and videos,” Mr. Woodman said. “People would upload videos to YouTube saying, ‘Me and my GoPro going sky diving.' You certainly don't see people uploading videos that say, ‘Check out my Sony Cyber-shot ski vacation.' ”

A search on YouTube for “GoPro” nets more than half a million videos. Millions of photos a nd videos litter social networking sites, all tagged with the camera's name in the same way people highlight their friends.

Now, the appeal is moving beyond extreme sports enthusiasts, whose idea of fear is sitting in a cubicle, to the people who sit in cubicles watching GoPro videos. The big camera companies are trying to displace GoPro, but they may be a decade too late.

“For the last 50 years, companies like Nikon and Canon have been focused on precision, which has its benefits but also has its limits,” said Chase Jarvis, a photographer and director. “GoPro is incredibly disruptive to these legacy camera makers, and I can tell you, their launch parties feel a little bit different. They are from a different culture.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

As Microsoft Shifts Its Privacy Rules, an Uproar Is Absent

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

The Bing search engine is one service covered by the new policy.

Microsoft instituted a policy on Friday that gives the company broad leeway over how it gathers and uses personal information from consumers of its free, Web-based products like e-mail, search and instant messaging.

Almost no one noticed, however, even though Microsoft's policy changes are much the same as those that Google made to its privacy rules this year.

Google's expanded powers drew scathing criticism from privacy advocates, probing inquiries from regulators and broadside attacks from rivals. Those included Microsoft, which bought full-page newspaper ads telling Google users that Google did not care about their privacy, an accusation it quickly denied.

The difference in the two events illustrates the confusion surrounding Internet consumer privacy. No single authority oversees the collection of personal information from Web users by Internet companies. Though most companies have written privacy policies, they are often stated in such broad, ambiguous language that they seem to allow virtually any use of customers' personal information.

Web companies like Microsoft and Google have been moving aggressively to expand their abilities to gather and sort information about individuals' habits and interests - even as Congress, federal regulators and the Obama administration have been seeking ways to protect Internet users against unwanted privacy incursions.

Microsoft's policy, which it calls its Services Agreement, allows it to analyze customer content from one its free products and use it to improve another service - for example, taking information from messages a consumer sends on Windows Live Messenger and using it to improve messaging services on Xbox. Previously, that kind of sharing of information between products would not have been allowed under Microsoft policies, which limited the use of data collected under one of its products to that product alone.

Microsoft has promised, however, that it will not use the personal information and content it collects to sell targeted advertising. It will not, for example, scan a consumer's e-mails to generate ads that might interest the user. Google does that, and expanding its ability to draw on that content was part of the reason Google changed its privacy policy this year.

But the new Microsoft policy does allow for such targeted advertising. Microsoft promised not to do so in blog posts and e-mails informing its customers about the change, but not in the formal policy. That has some privacy advocates nervous.

“What Microsoft is doing is no different from what Google did,” said John M. Simpson, who monitors privacy policy for Consumer Watchdog, a California nonprofit group. “It allows the combination of data across services in ways a user wouldn't reasonably expect. Microsoft wants to be able to compile massive digital dossiers about users of its services and monetize them.”

Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman, says the company's plans are benign. He differentiates between the Services Agreement, also known as the terms of use, that was changed on Friday and the company's Privacy Policy, which was last updated in April.

“Over the years, we have consistently informed users that we may use their content to improve the services they receive,” Mr. Evans said in a written statement. “For instance, we analyze content to improve our spam and malware filters in order to keep customers safe. We also do it to develop new product features such as e-mail categorization to organize similar items like shipping receipts in a common folder, or to automatically add calendar invitations.

“However,” he added, “one thing we don't do is use the content of our customers' private communications and documents to create targeted advertising. If that ever changes, we'll be the first to let our customers know.”

Microsoft's new services agreement affects only its free, Web-based products, not the software programs that individuals and companies buy off the shelf for home or business use. It covers Hotmail, and its related e-mail service, Outlook.com, but not the Outlook e-mail and calendar program that is individually loaded onto computer hard drives and widely used by corporations. Bing, its search engine, is covered, but Internet Explorer, its browser, is not.

Microsoft's pledge not to use the data from its Web services to target advertising has some credibility, given the company's broader privacy initiatives. The company has said it will include a “do not track” feature in its new Internet Explorer 10 Web browser that prevents online advertising companies from monitoring the browsing habits of users so they can target promotions. Microsoft has made “do not track” the default setting on the new version of Explorer, a move that has caused a firestorm among online advertising companies.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 20, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Microsoft Expands Gathering and Use of Data From Web Products.