consent – Dan Q

Google Shared My Phone Number!

Duration 6:06

Podcast Version

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Earlier this month, I received a phone call from a user of Three Rings, the volunteer/rota management software system I founded¹.

We don’t strictly offer telephone-based tech support – our distributed team of volunteers doesn’t keep any particular “core hours” so we can’t say who’s available at any given time – but instead we answer email/Web based queries pretty promptly at any time of the day or week.

But because I’ve called-back enough users over the years, it’s pretty much inevitable that a few probably have my personal mobile number saved. And because I’ve been applying for a couple of interesting-looking new roles, I’m in the habit of answering my phone even if it’s a number I don’t recognise.

Dan sits at his laptop in front of a long conference table where a group of people are looking at a projector screen. — Many of the charities that benefit from *Three Rings* seem to form the impression that we’re all just sat around in an office, like this. But in fact many of my fellow volunteers only ever see me once or twice a year!

After the first three such calls this month, I was really starting to wonder what had changed. Had we accidentally published my phone number, somewhere? So when the fourth tech support call came through, today (which began with a confusing exchange when I didn’t recognise the name of the caller’s charity, and he didn’t get my name right, and I initially figured it must be a wrong number), I had to ask: where did you find this number?

“When I Google ‘Three Rings login’, it’s right there!” he said.

Google Search results page for 'Three Rings CIC', showing a sidebar with information about the company and including... my personal mobile number and a 'Call' button that calls it! — I almost never use Google Search², so there’s no way I’d have noticed this change if I hadn’t been told about it.

He was right. A Google search that surfaced Three Rings CIC’s “Google Business Profile” now featured… my personal mobile number. And a convenient “Call” button that connects you directly to it.

Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly. And, indeed, they didn’t share it publicly, until – seemingly at random – they started doing so, presumably within the last few weeks.

Concerned by this change, I logged into Google Business Profile to see if I could edit it back.

Apparently Google inserted my personal mobile number into search results for me, randomly, without me asking them to. Delightful.

I deleted my phone number from the business listing again, and within a few minutes it seemed to have stopped being served to random strangers on the Internet. Unfortunately deleting the phone number also made the “Your phone number was updated by Google” message disappear, so I never got to click the “Learn more” link to maybe get a clue as to how and why this change happened.

Last month, high-street bank Halifax posted the details of a credit agreement I have with them to two people who aren’t me. Twice in two months seems suspicious. Did I accidentally click the wrong button on a popup and now I’ve consented to all my PII getting leaked everywhere?

Such feelings of rage.

Footnotes

¹ Way back in 2002! We’re very nearly at the point where the Three Rings system is older than the youngest member of the Three Rings team. Speaking of which, we’re seeking volunteers to help expand our support team: if you’ve got experience of using Three Rings and an hour or two a week to spare helping to make volunteering easier for hundreds of thousands of people around the world, you should look us up!

² Seriously: if you’re still using Google Search as your primary search engine, it’s past time you shopped around. There are great alternatives that do a better job on your choice of one or more of the metrics that might matter to you: better privacy, fewer ads (or more-relevant ads, if you want), less AI slop, etc.

Episode 25: ON CONSENT AND CUDDLING with my daughter Des

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

My 17 year old daughter generously sat down with me to talk about consent — her personal experiences with it, humor of it, nonverbal versions, and how to respond to rejection. We talked about her thoughts on the Dear Boy Who Likes My Daughter episode, how she perceives my romantic relationships, what makes a good cuddle partner, and being resourceful after trauma. There’s laughing and crying and lots of proud mama.

Sexplanations Podcast

I’ve been gradually catching up on Dr. Doe‘s Sexplanations podcast; I’m up into the 30-somethings now but my favourite so far might have been episode 25, which presents a very authentic and raw look at Lindsey and her daughter Des’s thoughts on sex, romance, and consent. Adorable.

The Four-Handed Condom

Content warning: rape.

You’ve probably seen the news about people taking a technological look at the issue of consent, lately. One thing that’s been getting a lot of attention is the Tulipán Placer Consentido, an Argentinian condom which comes in a packet that requires the cooperation of two pairs of hands to open it.

Naturally, the Internet’s been all over this shit, pointing out how actually you can probably open it with just two hands [YouTube], how it’s inaccessible [YouTube] to people with a variety of disabilities, and how it misses the point by implying that once the condom is on, consent is irrevocable. A significant number of its critics try to make their claims more-sensational by describing the Placer Consentido as “a real product”, which is a bit of an exaggeration: it was a seemingly one-off promotional giveaway by its creators: it doesn’t look to be appearing on their store pages.

One fundamental flaw with the concept that nobody seems to have pointed out (unless perhaps in Spanish), is that – even assuming the clever packaging works perfectly – all that you can actually consent to with such a device is the use of a condom. Given that rape can be and often is committed coercively rather than physically – e.g. through fear, blackmail, or obligation rather than by force – consent to use of a condom by one of the parties shouldn’t be conflated with consent to a sexual act: it may just be preferable to it without, if that seems to be the alternative.

Indeed, all of these technical “solutions” to rape seem to focus on the wrong part of the process. Making sure that an agreement is established isn’t a hard problem, algorithmically-speaking (digital signatures with split-key cryptography has given us perhaps the strongest possible solution to the problem for forty years now)! The hard problem here is in getting people to think about what rape is and to act appropriately to one another. Y’know: it’s a people problem, not a technology problem! (Unshocker.)

But even though they’re perhaps functionally-useless, I’m still glad that people are making these product prototypes. As the news coverage kicked off by the #MeToo movement wanes, its valuable to keep that wave of news going: the issues faced by the victims of sexual assault and rape haven’t gone away! Products like these may well be pointless in the real world, but they’re a vehicle to keep talking about consent and its importance. Keeping the issue in the limelight is helpful, because it forces people to continually re-evaluate their position on sex and consent, which makes for a healthy and progressive society.

So I’m looking forward to whatever stupid thing we come up with next. Bring it on, innovators! Just don’t take your invention too seriously: you’re not going to “fix” rape with it, but at least you can keep us talking about it.

“Stop Thinking About Consent: It Isn’t Possible and It Isn’t Right”

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

For a philosopher, Helen Nissenbaum is a surprisingly active participant in shaping how we collect, use, and protect personal data. Nissenbaum, who earned her PhD from Stanford, is a professor of information science at Cornell Tech, New York City, where she focuses on the intersection of politics, ethics, and values in technology and digital media — the hard stuff. Her framework for understanding digital privacy has deeply influenced real-world policy.

In addition to several books and countless papers, she’s also coauthored privacy plug-ins for web browsers including TrackMeNot, AdNauseum, and Adnostic. Nissenbaum views these pieces of code as small efforts at rationalizing a marketplace where opaque consent agreements give consumers little bargaining power against data collectors as they extract as much information, and value from this information, as they can. Meanwhile, these practices offer an indefinite value proposition to consumers while compromising the integrity of digital media, social institutions, and individual security.

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Scott Berinato (Harvard Business Review)

That way they would never know

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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Some 702 intimate examinations were done on sedated or anaesthetised patients (table 3). In only 24% of these examinations had written consent been obtained, and a further 24% of examinations were conducted apparently without written or oral consent.

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Coldicott, Yvette; Pope, Catherine; Roberts, Clive (BMJ)

This 2003 study at an “English medical school” determined that vaginal/rectal examinations were routinely carried out on anaesthetised patients without their knowledge or consent. “I was told in the second year that the best way to learn to do [rectal examinations] was when the patient was under anaesthetic,” one fourth year student responded, to the survey, “That way they would never know.”

Well ain’t that a thing.