Technophoria: When No One Is Just a Face in the Crowd

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Technophoria: When You Can’t Tell Web Suffixes Without a Scorecard

But there soon may be, along with hundreds of other new Internet address suffixes like .bible, .blog, .family, .game, .gay and .pizza.

Since last summer, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit entity that coordinates the Internet address system, has vetted and initially approved 1,574 applications for new “top-level domains” — the letters to the right of the dot. The premise is to give companies and consumers seeking secondary-level domain names — the janedoe in janedoe.com — options beyond the 22 top-level generic suffixes like .com and .biz that are currently available.

“With .com and .net, if you wanted a nice name, it’s all taken,” says Akram Atallah, the president of Icann’s division of generic domains. Icann expects to sign contracts over the next year with companies and organizations to manage the registries for the new top-level domains. The first of these could open for registrations as early as this fall. “The idea,” Mr. Atallah says, “is to provide real-estate availability in the market.”

Google and Amazon have each applied to administer dozens of new top-level domains, including .app, .book, .cloud, .game, .movie and .search. L’Oréal is seeking .beauty, .hair and .skin. Johnson & Johnson wants .baby. Donuts Inc., a domain registry company in Bellevue, Wash., filed the most applications, asking for 307 — including .love, .family, .health and .plumbing. Many applicants said they hoped to use the domains as trusted hubs offering authoritative information to the public.

The proliferation of these suffixes seems fraught for both consumers and companies. It has the potential to confuse online searchers: .car or .cars? baby.toys or toys.baby? It could also prompt companies, at great expense, to register bunches of new brand sites defensively as a way to pre-empt cybersquatters, spoofers and fraudsters.

Some technology veterans and trademark experts view the domain expansion as largely unnecessary.

“You are creating a business, like derivatives on Wall Street, that has no value,” says Esther Dyson, a technology investor who served as the founding chairwoman of Icann. “You can charge people for it, but you are contributing nothing to the happiness of humanity.”

There’s a larger issue at stake, however. Advocates of Internet freedom contend that such an expanded address system effectively places online control over powerful commercial and cultural interests in the hands of individual companies, challenging the very idea of an open Internet. Existing generic domains, like .net and .com, overseen by Verisign Inc., a domain registry, have an open-use policy; that means consumers can buy domain names ending in .com directly from retail registrars like GoDaddy. With a new crop of applicants, however, Icann initially accepted proposals for closed or restricted generic domains, a practice that could limit competing views and businesses.

“It’s a very legitimate competition concern,” says Jon Leibowitz, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who recently joined the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell in Washington as a partner. “The public at large, consumers and businesses, would be better served by no expansion or less expansion” of domains.

In its proposal for .beauty, L’Oréal said it intended initially to reserve second-level domain names — like personal.beauty — for itself, eventually opening up the domain to its own business units, selected licensees and partners. Mr. Atallah said Icann would defer moving on certain contracts while it decides whether to allow closed generic domains.

At the end of last year, there were about 252 million domain names globally registered on the Web. Nearly half used the .com or .net suffix, according to Verisign, which manages those two suffixes and reported revenue last year of $874 million. Industry analysts say additional players in the domain market would be welcome.

“Verisign right now is like the Wal-Mart of the domain space,” says Thies Lindenthal, a postgraduate fellow at the M.I.T. Center for Real Estate, where he studies domain names as virtual real estate. “Other big players may be beneficial, just to increase competition.”

Icann charged a processing fee of $185,000 per domain application, but didn’t limit the number of submissions per company. Donuts Inc. forked over nearly $57 million in fees; it now expects to manage at least the 149 suffixes for which no other entity applied. For other suffixes, like .chat and .golf, which had multiple applicants, interested parties will have to negotiate among themselves or submit to an auction run by Icann.

Donuts plans to open all of its generic domains to public registration, each with its own pricing structure. Even professional-sounding suffixes like .architect won’t be narrowly limited to the traditional definition of licensed practitioners, says Jon Nevett, Donuts’ executive vice president for corporate affairs; after all, in addition to building architects, he says, landscape architects and software architects may wish to use to use an .architect domain name.

“We want to be as open as possible,” Mr. Nevett told me. “We don’t want to have a walled garden.”

Likewise, Charleston Road Registry, a unit of Google, has indicated on its Web site that it plans to open certain of its new suffixes — like .ads, .boo, .dad and .how — to public registration. But in applications to manage other generics like .app, the company has laid out a more restrictive approach, saying it planned to employ its own criteria to assess and approve entities seeking to use those suffixes.

In June, the Association for Competitive Technology, an advocacy group representing more than 5,000 app developers, filed an objection with Icann, arguing that Google’s plan to vet developers seeking an .app domain name could curb competition. The concern, says Jonathan Zuck, president of the advocacy group, is that Google might market the .app domain to consumers as a seal of approval for certain apps, including its own, leaving a mistaken impression that apps not marketed on the domain were inferior.

“We are simply raising public-interest concerns,” Mr. Zuck says. “We’d prefer .app to be wide open, like .com.”

Google declined to comment on its application for .app. Mr. Atallah said an Icann committee was reviewing each objection.

EVEN so, the Internet address oversight body may not have considered deeply enough the larger linguistic and societal ramifications of setting off a land grab for new virtual real estate like .love or .home, says Jacqueline Lipton, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

“It’s a private body,” Professor Lipton says, “that is dabbling in this very delicate balance of commerce and expression online that is fraught with pitfalls.”

Technophoria: Dissent Over a Device to Help Find Melanoma

Ms. Oppel is a medical assistant in Manhattan in the office of Dr. Doris Day, one of the first dermatologists to buy the machine. Developed by Mela Sciences of Irvington, N.Y., the system uses pattern-recognition algorithms to help a dermatologist who has picked out a suspicious pigmented spot to decide whether to perform a biopsy. The device may find an audience among sun-seekers worried about developing an aggressive skin cancer: the National Cancer Institute estimates that about 9,500 Americans this year will die of melanoma of the skin.

Yet the device is polarizing the field of skin-cancer detection.

For decades, dermatologists have used their eyes, along with a magnifier called a dermatoscope, to try to distinguish abnormal but benign lesions from potential melanoma in order to avoid unneeded biopsies. Some dermatologists argue that these low-tech tools are still the most useful and worry that their colleagues are falling for expensive, cool-looking gadgets that may simply offer extraneous, and perhaps incorrect, data.

“This technology should still be considered to be in the developmental stage,” said Dr. Roberta Lucas, an instructor of clinical dermatology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “We are better off when the system supports doctors who are thorough and unhurried; who examine and listen carefully and who empower patients to practice good surveillance and sun protection.”

In fact, some members of an expert medical panel asked to review MelaFind a few years ago for the Food and Drug Administration warned that the device had the potential to give doctors and patients a false sense of security. While MelaFind can analyze small pigmented spots identified by dermatologists as having signs of melanoma, it is not designed to evaluate other problems: large melanomas, colorless melanomas or two other types of skin cancer — basal and squamous cell carcinoma.

Dr. Amy E. Newburger, a dermatologist in Scarsdale, N.Y., who was a member of that F.D.A. panel, told me that she was concerned that a doctor could inadvertently use MelaFind on a non-melanoma skin cancer, receive a score indicating that the spot was not irregular, and erroneously decide not to biopsy it. She voted against recommending the device for F.D.A. approval.

Some biostatisticians are also critical of MelaFind, saying the device can recognize a high percentage of melanomas correctly because it also falsely scores as positive so many non-melanomas — potentially prompting doctors to perform unnecessary biopsies.

To help me visualize that issue, Jason Connor, a biostatistician at Berry Consultants, a biostatistics consulting firm, compared the accuracy of MelaFind in distinguishing non-melanomas to a hypothetical pregnancy test which, used on 100 nonpregnant women, would mistakenly conclude that 90 of them were pregnant.

“My concern with MelaFind is that it just says everything is positive,” Mr. Connor said. A member of the F.D.A. panel, he abstained on a vote about whether the device’s intended uses outweighed the risks.

“I don’t think this helps an aggressive doctor,” Mr. Connor told me, “and unaggressive doctors could do just as well if they were more diligent without the device.”

To develop MelaFind’s current algorithm, researchers trained the system on digital images of more than 10,000 pigmented lesions, programming it to recognize irregularities like asymmetry, color variability and cellular disorganization characteristic of melanomas. Company executives said Mela Sciences deliberately calibrated the machine to catch as many melanomas as possible, understanding that such a high setting could lead doctors to biopsy normal tissue.

“It will err on the side of caution,” said Claudia Beqaj, director of commercialization at Mela Sciences. “We wanted to set the system to have such a high sensitivity that we didn’t miss any melanomas.”

(In a company-financed study submitted to the F.D.A., the device missed two out of 127 evaluable melanomas. One F.D.A. reviewer concluded: “There is inadequate data to determine any true value added for MelaFind for use by a dermatologist or other provider.”)

Ms. Beqaj emphasized that MelaFind was intended as a supplementary test that provided extra information about a mole, not as a substitute for a dermatologist’s own expertise.

“If they blindly followed MelaFind, they would be biopsying more," Ms. Beqaj said. “The doctor has to make their own clinical judgment.”

Dr. Day finds the system quite informative. Last week, she gave me a demonstration in her office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Dr. Day picked out what she called an “ugly duckling” mole on the left arm of Ms. Oppel, who had kindly agreed to play the role of patient. Another medical assistant removed a hand-held scanner from the MelaFind console and pressed it against the mole.

Technophoria: Dissent Over a Device to Help Find Melanoma

Ms. Oppel is a medical assistant in Manhattan in the office of Dr. Doris Day, one of the first dermatologists to buy the machine. Developed by Mela Sciences of Irvington, N.Y., the system uses pattern-recognition algorithms to help a dermatologist who has picked out a suspicious pigmented spot to decide whether to perform a biopsy. The device may find an audience among sun-seekers worried about developing an aggressive skin cancer: the National Cancer Institute estimates that about 9,500 Americans this year will die of melanoma of the skin.

Yet the device is polarizing the field of skin-cancer detection.

For decades, dermatologists have used their eyes, along with a magnifier called a dermatoscope, to try to distinguish abnormal but benign lesions from potential melanoma in order to avoid unneeded biopsies. Some dermatologists argue that these low-tech tools are still the most useful and worry that their colleagues are falling for expensive, cool-looking gadgets that may simply offer extraneous, and perhaps incorrect, data.

“This technology should still be considered to be in the developmental stage,” said Dr. Roberta Lucas, an instructor of clinical dermatology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “We are better off when the system supports doctors who are thorough and unhurried; who examine and listen carefully and who empower patients to practice good surveillance and sun protection.”

In fact, some members of an expert medical panel asked to review MelaFind a few years ago for the Food and Drug Administration warned that the device had the potential to give doctors and patients a false sense of security. While MelaFind can analyze small pigmented spots identified by dermatologists as having signs of melanoma, it is not designed to evaluate other problems: large melanomas, colorless melanomas or two other types of skin cancer — basal and squamous cell carcinoma.

Dr. Amy E. Newburger, a dermatologist in Scarsdale, N.Y., who was a member of that F.D.A. panel, told me that she was concerned that a doctor could inadvertently use MelaFind on a non-melanoma skin cancer, receive a score indicating that the spot was not irregular, and erroneously decide not to biopsy it. She voted against recommending the device for F.D.A. approval.

Some biostatisticians are also critical of MelaFind, saying the device can recognize a high percentage of melanomas correctly because it also falsely scores as positive so many non-melanomas — potentially prompting doctors to perform unnecessary biopsies.

To help me visualize that issue, Jason Connor, a biostatistician at Berry Consultants, a biostatistics consulting firm, compared the accuracy of MelaFind in distinguishing non-melanomas to a hypothetical pregnancy test which, used on 100 nonpregnant women, would mistakenly conclude that 90 of them were pregnant.

“My concern with MelaFind is that it just says everything is positive,” Mr. Connor said. A member of the F.D.A. panel, he abstained on a vote about whether the device’s intended uses outweighed the risks.

“I don’t think this helps an aggressive doctor,” Mr. Connor told me, “and unaggressive doctors could do just as well if they were more diligent without the device.”

To develop MelaFind’s current algorithm, researchers trained the system on digital images of more than 10,000 pigmented lesions, programming it to recognize irregularities like asymmetry, color variability and cellular disorganization characteristic of melanomas. Company executives said Mela Sciences deliberately calibrated the machine to catch as many melanomas as possible, understanding that such a high setting could lead doctors to biopsy normal tissue.

“It will err on the side of caution,” said Claudia Beqaj, director of commercialization at Mela Sciences. “We wanted to set the system to have such a high sensitivity that we didn’t miss any melanomas.”

(In a company-financed study submitted to the F.D.A., the device missed two out of 127 evaluable melanomas. One F.D.A. reviewer concluded: “There is inadequate data to determine any true value added for MelaFind for use by a dermatologist or other provider.”)

Ms. Beqaj emphasized that MelaFind was intended as a supplementary test that provided extra information about a mole, not as a substitute for a dermatologist’s own expertise.

“If they blindly followed MelaFind, they would be biopsying more," Ms. Beqaj said. “The doctor has to make their own clinical judgment.”

Dr. Day finds the system quite informative. Last week, she gave me a demonstration in her office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Dr. Day picked out what she called an “ugly duckling” mole on the left arm of Ms. Oppel, who had kindly agreed to play the role of patient. Another medical assistant removed a hand-held scanner from the MelaFind console and pressed it against the mole.

Technophoria: Data Security Is a Classroom Worry, Too

Edmodo’s free software allows teachers to set up virtual classrooms where they can post homework assignments, give quizzes and use third-party apps to complement lessons. Students can create individual profiles, including their photograph and other details, within their teacher’s class and post comments to a communal class feed.

Mr. Porterfield, an engineer at Cisco Systems, examined Edmodo’s data security practices by registering himself on the site as a fictional home-school teacher. As he went about creating imaginary students — complete with cartoon avatars — for his fictitious class, however, he noticed that Edmodo did not encrypt user sessions using a standard encryption protocol called Secure Sockets Layer.

That cryptography system, called SSL for short and used by many online banking and e-commerce sites, protects people who log in to sites over an open Wi-Fi network — like the kind offered by many coffee shops — from strangers who might be using snooping software on the same network. (An “https” at the beginning of a URL indicates SSL encryption.)

Without that encryption, Mr. Porterfield says, he worried about the potential for a stranger to gain access to student information, and thus hypothetically be able to identify or even contact students.

To test this hypothesis, he used a computer on his home Wi-Fi network to log in as an imaginary student; then, using another computer, he installed free security auditing software, called Cookie Cadger, to spy on the student’s online activities. Though the risk of this happening with actual students seemed small — Edmodo and other companies say they have no evidence that this kind of breach has occurred — he contacted his school district about his concerns.

“There’s a lot of contextual information you could use to gain trust, to make yourself seem familiar to the child,” he says. “As a parent, that’s the scariest thing.”

In response to an inquiry from me last week, Sara Mandel, a spokeswoman for Edmodo, said the service provided “a safe alternative to open, consumer social networking sites” in that students could participate only in groups created by their teachers and because students cannot send private messages on the system.

She added that “any school that chooses” had been able to use a completely encrypted version of the site since 2011 and that the company “is working to ensure that all of our users are using an SSL-encrypted version.”

SCHOOL administrators and teachers said they liked these online learning systems because they could control the information that students might share.

“Kids can’t talk to each other. They can only speak to the group,” says Heather Peretz, a special-education teacher at Great Neck South Middle School in Great Neck, N.Y., who uses Edmodo in her English class. “It helps them learn to be good digital citizens so they are not making inappropriate posts.”

But as school districts rush to adopt learning-management systems, some privacy advocates warn that educators may be embracing the bells and whistles before mastering fundamentals like data security and privacy.

Although a federal law protecting children’s online privacy requires online services to take reasonable measures to secure personal information — like names and e-mail addresses — collected from children under 13, the law doesn’t specifically require SSL encryption. Yet school districts often issue only general notices about classroom technology, leaving many parents unaware of the practices of the online learning systems their children use. Moreover, schools often require online participation so students can gain access to course assignments or collaborate on projects.

“What we are finding with this type of database is that parents are uninformed,” says Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Most don’t understand how the technology works.”

Online security experts have long warned consumers about unencrypted Web sites that collect personal details. That is because on open Wi-Fi networks, hackers using simple software programs can see and copy the unique code, called a session cookie, that servers issue to authenticate a person who has logged into a Web site. By replicating that cookie, a hacker can acquire the same privileges, like the ability to edit a profile or grade a quiz, of the authenticated user for that session.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated students’ ability to send private messages under the Edmodo system. Students cannot sent private messages in any circumstance; it is not the case that they can send private messages only in the presence of their teacher.

Technophoria: For Consumers, an ‘Open Data’ Society Is a Misnomer

Consolidated Edison monitors my household’s energy consumption and provides a chart of monthly utility use. But when I sought more granular information, so I could learn which of my recharging devices gobbles up the most electricity, I found that Con Ed doesn’t automatically provide customers with data about hourly or even daily use. Robert McGee, a spokesman for Con Ed, suggested that I might go down to the basement once an hour and check the meter myself.

Then there is my health club, which keeps track of my visits through swipes of my membership card. Yet when I recently asked for an online log of those visits, I was offered a one-time printout for the year — if I were willing to wait a half-hour.

Never mind all the hoopla about the presumed benefits of an “open data” society. In our day-to-day lives, many of us are being kept in the data dark.

“The fact that I am producing data and companies are collecting it to monetize it, if I can’t get a copy myself, I do consider it unfair,” says Latanya Sweeney, the director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard, where she is a professor of government and technology.

Of course, she notes, we can replicate the information that companies collect and collate about us with third-party apps or other workarounds, but we shouldn’t have to resort to redundancy. Professor Sweeney says: “We would like to see people have access to all of the data that they produce.”

In fact, a few companies are challenging the norm of corporate data hoarding by actually sharing some information with the customers who generate it — and offering tools to put it to use. It’s a small but provocative trend in the United States, where only a handful of industries, like health care and credit, are required by federal law to provide people with access to their records.

Last year, San Diego Gas and Electric, a utility, introduced an online energy management program in which customers can view their electricity use in monthly, daily or hourly increments. There is even a practical benefit: customers can earn credits by reducing energy consumption during peak hours.

About one-quarter of the company’s 1.2 million residential customers have tried the program, says Caroline Winn, the company’s vice president for customer services. Newer features, she says, allow customers to download their own use files. Or they can choose to give permission for the utility to share their records directly with a handful of apps that can analyze the data and suggest ways to reduce energy consumption.

“The customer owns their data,” Ms. Winn says. “Whether they want to use our app or somebody else’s, we want to make sure we are facilitating that.”

(Con Ed in New York also offers customers reduced pricing if they use electricity during off-peak hours. But the program requires the installation of a special meter.)

People might feel more comfortable about being subject to data-mining if companies did a better job of demonstrating a direct benefit to them, argues Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry financed research organization in Washington. One model for this, he says, is the product recommendation engine at Amazon, which lets customers view their purchase histories and excise one-off items they bought for friends that might not represent their own personal tastes.

“They are providing transparency as a feature,” Mr. Polonetsky says. “I can tweak their algorithm in a way that is mutually useful.” (Amazon is one of the sponsors of his organization.)

Even so, companies rarely offer customers more than a cropped snapshot of their activities.

Right now, for example, fitness enthusiasts who use blood pressure monitors, calorie calculators and movement sensors typically can’t collate the data for a unified view of their wellness, Doc Searls, a technology writer who has experienced this kind of problem himself, told me. If people could easily integrate their data, he wrote in a recent blog post, they might be able to correlate weight loss to a particular workout routine or diet. Those companies that do allow customers to export their files and integrate their data elsewhere, he says, have a market advantage over companies that are data misers.

“Stock data, bank data, and bond data are all more valuable when they are looked at together,” says Mr. Searls, the author of “The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.” “If I have a choice between apps and one of them shares the data that I can use more easily, I am going to choose that one.”

INTEL, for instance, recently introduced a “data economy” project, intended to encourage companies to think of consumers as participants in the information economy, and not just as data-harvesting opportunities. The venture includes a site called WeTheData.com, which looks at current obstacles to information sharing.

Ken Anderson, a senior research scientist at Intel Labs who oversees the project, compares corporate data-hoarding today to a faulty mind-set of the fast-food industry in the early 1980s. Back then, he says, fast-food chains thought that they should open outlets only at a good distance from their competitors. But when food courts in malls became popular, he says, those restaurant chains realized that they benefited from shared retail space.

“If you put it all in one place, you get more business,” says Mr. Anderson, a cultural anthropologist who studies how people interact with technology.

The same goes for consumer data. He envisions an online answer to food courts — an information smorgasbord where consumers could browse their own records. “We are trying to show companies the value of opening data up” he says, “and having them be more communal in nature.”