The age of drones has arrived quicker than the laws that govern them

No drone-fly zone. Niall Carson/PA

Just because you may not have seen a drone overhead doesn’t mean it hasn’t seen you. And, as was demonstrated by the killing of two British jihadis in Syria recently, these unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly deployed by the West as frontline weapons of war.

Drones are set to become a defining feature of this century. Thousands are already in operation in most developed countries worldwide – and that is likely to grow to hundreds of thousands as drones of different shapes and sizes are deployed by the media, emergency services, scientists, farmers, sports enthusiasts, hobbyists, photographers, the armed forces and government agencies.

Eventually commercial uses will dwarf all others. Amazon promises to deliver purchases within 30 minutes via delivery drones. Domino’s Pizza has staged hot pizza drone delivery. More than 20 industries are approved to fly commercial drones in the US alone, and developing countries are following suit.

The question is, is this boom in drones moving faster than the law? How to fit such a proliferation of drones into the current regulations? The answers will need to be written into national and international laws quickly in order to govern an increasingly busy airspace. Many existing laws may need to be tweaked, including those governing cyber-security, stalking, privacy and human rights legislation, insurance, contract and commercial law, even the laws of war.

There have after all been numerous suspect or dangerous uses of drones already. For example, illegal flights over seven nuclear plants across France, disruption to US forest fire-fighting, and seven near-misses at airports in the UK. In the US several landowners have shot them down, leading to court cases that pit claims of trespass and the right to privacy against criminal damage.

Piecemeal legal changes not enough

French legislators responded swiftly with a police order to the first balloon flights by the Montgolfier Brothers in 1784 by prohibiting all flights over Paris without prior authorisation. In the same way sovereign states ought to define precisely how and when they will permit drone flights over their territory. So far legal development to govern drone use has been very piecemeal; most countries have done nothing yet.

Again, it was France that was first to introduce dedicated legislation governing drones through a decree in 2012 bringing drones within its civil aviation regulations. Drones are allowed to fly between 50-150 metres from the ground and there are penalties up to five years in prison and fines of 75,000 euros for unlawful use of a drone.

Also in 2012, the US congress passed the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) Modernisation and Reform Act which required the integration of civil drones into national airspace by the end of September 2015.

The Italian Civil Aviation Authority issued commercial drone regulations in April 2014. The law vaguely requires the operators to comply with data-protection laws and hold insurance. In the meantime, controversial Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team is already developing drones capable of delivering spyware to computers and smartphones, infecting them via Wi-Fi.

However, the UK has struggled with fitting drones into its legal framework as neither the Civil Aviation Act nor the Air Navigation Order provide a good fit. The Department for Transport recently announced plans to introduce fines of up to £2,500 for flying drones in built-up areas. Some clarity is provided by the CAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System Operations in UK Airspace Guidance, which requires drone pilots to maintain direct line of sight with drones and limits their altitude to a maximum 120 metres. Small drones must avoid and give way to manned aircraft at all times.

Delivery by drone is already a happening in Switzerland. Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA

Flying in the face of the law

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) plans to introduce policies to regulate civilian drone flight by 2028 worldwide. The EU and US have signed a formal agreement to cooperate on integrating drones into civil air traffic management. But consensus is notoriously difficult in international regulation – it could take decades to achieve a global agreement.

The last international civil air treaty of note is the 1944 Chicago convention. This impressive treaty created the standards for the common use of airspace between nations. For example, that every nation has sovereignty over its airspace and that no aircraft operated by the state (such as military or police) will fly over other states without authorisation. It also required nations air regulations to be obeyed and required aircraft to be registered and display their registration marks.

For drones, however, it’s not clear what types and sizes of drones are required to be registered and display their nationality. There are drones the size of small birds or even coins that can fly across national borders in near-invisibility, upsetting these egalitarian rules. It’s vital these issues are comprehensively dealt with quickly in a new treaty, in the same spirit of egalitarianism as at Chicago in 1944.

Dronefare versus Lawfare

For many, drones are typified by their use for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US is reported to have up to 7,000 drones in Afghanistan, with the main source of funding for developing modern drone technology coming from the military.

Successive US governments’ policies of conducting drone assassinations will perhaps go down as one of the most egregious use of air power in human history, with thousands of lives lost in an amorphous conflict against vaguely-defined al-Qaeda and ISIS “affiliates”. The only legitimisation in most cases appears to be White House’s early morning bureaucratic meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union has correctly addressed this, stating: “The targeted killing program itself is not just unlawful but dangerous … it is dangerous to characterise the entire planet as a battlefield.” A recent RAF strike was the first targeted UK drone attack on a British citizen. However, UK armed Reaper drones have accounted for up to a third of the 100 airstrikes) in Iraq alone as at January 2015.

Lethal drone technology is going to be available to nearly all countries in a very short time. The possibility that even a few dozen states might follow the path beaten by the US is really a scary proposition – as what goes around may fly around.

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The web has become a hall of mirrors, filled only with reflections of our data

The web should expand our horizons, but instead it's shrinking our view. uroburos

The “digital assistant” is proliferating, able to combine intelligent natural language processing, voice-operated control over a smartphone’s functions and access to web services. It can set calendar appointments, launch apps, and run requests. But if that sounds very clever – a computerised talking assistant, like HAL9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey – it’s mostly just running search engine queries and processing the results.

Facebook has now joined Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon with the launch of its digital assistant M, part of its Messaging smartphone app. It’s special sauce is that M is powered not just by algorithms but by data serfs: human Facebook employees who are there to ensure that every request that it cannot parse is still fulfilled, and in doing so training M by example. That training works because every interaction with M is recorded – that’s the point, according to David Marcus, Facebook’s vice-president of messaging:

We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do. Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that’s an opportunity for us to [make money] over time.

Facebook, through M, will capture and facilitate that “intent to buy” and take its cut directly from the subsequent purchase rather than as an ad middleman. It does this by leveraging messaging, which was turned into a separate app of its own so that Facebook could integrate PayPal-style peer-to-peer payments between users. This means Facebook has a log not only of your conversations but also your financial dealings. In an interview with Fortune magazine at the time, Facebook product manager, Steve Davies, said:

People talk about money all the time in Messenger but end up going somewhere else to do the transaction. With this, people can finish the conversation the same place started it.

In a somewhat creepy way, by reading your chats and knowing that you’re “talking about money all the time” – what you’re talking about buying – Facebook can build up a pretty compelling profile of interests and potential purchases. If M can capture our intent it will not be by tracking what sites we visit and targeting relevant ads, as per advert brokers such as Google and Doubleclick. Nor by targeting ads based on the links we share, as Twitter does. Instead it simply reads our messages.

‘Hello Dave. Would you like to go shopping?’ summer1978/MGM/SKP, CC BY-ND

Talking about money, money talks

M is built to carry out tasks such as booking flights or restaurants or making purchases from online stores, and rather than forcing the user to leave the app in order to visit a web store to complete a purchase, M will bring the store – more specifically, the transaction – to the app.

Suddenly the 64% of smartphone purchases that happen at websites and mobile transactions outside of Facebook, are brought into Facebook. With the opportunity to make suggestions through eavesdropping on conversations, in the not too distant future our talking intelligent assistant might say:

I’m sorry Dave, I heard you talking about buying this camera. I wouldn’t do if I were you Dave: I found a much better deal elsewhere. And I know you’ve been talking about having that tattoo removed. I can recommend someone – she has an offer on right now, and three of your friends have recommended her service. Shall I book you in?

Buying a book from a known supplier may be a low risk purchase, but other services require more discernment. What kind of research about cosmetic surgery has M investigated? Did those three friends use that service, or were they paid to recommend it? Perhaps you’d rather know the follow-up statistics than have a friend’s recommendation.

Still, because of its current position as the dominant social network, Facebook knows more about us, by name, history, social circle, political interests, than any other single internet service. And it’s for this reason that Facebook wants to ensure M is more accurate and versatile than the competition, and why it’s using humans to help the AI interpret interactions and learn. The better digital assistants like M appear to us, the more trust we have in them. Simple tasks performed well builds a willingness to use that service elsewhere – say, recommending financial services, or that cosmetic treatment, which stand to offer Facebook a cut of much more costly purchase.

No such thing as a free lunch

So for Facebook, that’s more users spending more of their time using its services and generating more cash. Where’s the benefit for us?

We’ve been trained to see such services as “free”, but as the saying goes, if you don’t pay for it, then it’s you that’s the product. We’ve seen repeatedly in our Meaningful Consent Project that it’s difficult to evaluate the cost to us when we don’t know what happens to our data.

People were once nervous about how much the state knew of them, with whom they associated and what they do, for fear that if their interests and actions were not aligned with those of the state they might find ourselves detained, disappeared, or disenfranchised. Yet we give exactly this information to corporations without hesitation, because we find ourselves amplified in the exchange: that for each book, film, record or hotel we like there are others who “like” it too.

The web holds a mirror up to us, reflecting back our precise interests and behaviour. Take search, for instance. In the physical world of libraries or bookshops we glance through materials from other topics and different ideas as we hunt down our own query. Indeed we are at our creative best when we absorb the rich variety in our peripheral vision. But online, a search engine shows us only things narrowly related to what we seek. Even the edges of a web page will be filled with targeted ads related to something known to interest us. This narrowing self-reflection has grown ubiquitous online: on social networks we see ourselves relative to our self-selected peers or idols. We create reflections.

The workings of Google, Doubleclick or Facebook reveal these to be two-way mirrors: we are observed through the mirror but see only our reflection, with no way to see the machines observing us. This “free” model is so seductive – it’s all about us – yet it leads us to become absorbed in our phones-as-mirrors rather than the harder challenge of engaging with the world and those around us.

It’s said not to look too closely at how a sausage is made for fear it may put you off. If we saw behind the mirror, would we be put off by the internet? At least most menus carry the choice of more than one dish; the rise of services like M suggests that, despite the apparent wonder of less effortful interactions, the internet menu we’re offered is shrinking.

Got a great relationship? You may want to thank your prehistoric grandmother

Is there an old lady behind every happy couple? Alan Turkus/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

I went to a very international wedding last weekend. The guests crossed continents to be there, spoke mutually incomprehensible languages and came from different traditions. However, they all shared a common understanding of the relationship between the bride and the groom. Monogamous pair-bonds are, after all, universal in human societies, despite being rare in other mammals. And we don’t exactly know why.

Before the wedding breakfast, I chatted with a relaxed couple who had left their kids with their grandparents for the day. This is not unusual; UK grandparents babysit on average 76 times a year – and we often take it for granted. But now a new study finally gives grandparents the credit they deserve by arguing that long-term relationships actually evolved thanks to grandmothers helping out with kids in prehistoric times.

The greatness of grandparents

The question of why humans form pair bonds – the biological term for the strong affinity that develops between partners (often a male-female pair but not always) – is in fact one of the biggest puzzles in evolutionary anthropology. Humans are apes, yet our closest living relatives – chimpanzees and bonobos – have no such long-term relationships between male-female pairs.

Hadzabe women can have lots of kids, perhaps thanks to their grandmothers. idobi/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

In the late 1990s, anthropologists put forward the “grandmother hypothesis” to explain why human females stop reproducing at a similar age to other great apes, but live markedly longer lives. Chimpanzees live into their 30s or 40s, but human females often live decades beyond their child-bearing years.

The grandmother hypothesis was based on observations of the Hazda people, in Tanzania. Hadza people live by hunting and gathering food, like our ancestors, although, they are of course modern people.

Older Hazda women dig up tubers to feed youngsters who aren’t strong enough to it themselves. The grandmother hypothesis suggests that this help allows daughters to have their next baby sooner than they would otherwise. Over time, grandmothers who lived longer and helped more had more grandchildren, who shared their genes for longer life and care of their grandchildren. Thus, these genes became increasingly common in the population and human lifespan increased.

The evolution of partnership

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has used computer simulations to link this hypothesis to the evolution of pair-bonding in humans. The authors argue that long-term romantic relationships evolved due to a combination of people living longer and men remaining fertile longer than women. This situation led to a surplus of older men competing for younger, fertile women.

In fact, the study shows that the ratio of fertile males to fertile females in humans is twice as big as it is in chimpanzees, making humans very unusual mammals. This excess of males makes us more like birds. And birds are well-known for their pair-bonds.

Family life sure is easier with a grandma around. Wavebreakmedia, Shutterstock.

Where many males compete for relatively few females, a male who develops a strong bond with one female will have more surviving offspring than males who seek numerous partners. The authors suggest that this created increasing incentives for men to “guard” their mate against rival males.

While mate-guarding is not necessarily the same thing as pair-bonding, the authors argue that both involve a trade-off between paying attention to the current partner and seeking a new one. Of course, although the study concentrates on male strategy, females are not passive in this scenario – it takes two to bond.

So, to put the wedding celebrations into their evolutionary context, perhaps it was the caring grandparents who led to the special relationship that we celebrated. A toast to the bride and groom … and one to their parents.

How does the Lexus hoverboard actually work? A scientist explains

Riding on air Lexus

Marty McFly wouldn’t be surprised. Lexus recently announced it had fulfilled the dreams of Back to the Future Part II fans everywhere by building a working hoverboard. And just in time for the October 2015 date that Marty visits in the film to discover kids have ditched skateboards in favour of their flying counterparts.

The Lexus “Slide” hoverboard isn’t set to go on sale but a prototype was recently put through its paces by pro-skateboarder Ross Mcgouran at a custom-built skate park in Barcelona. Now Lexus has also revealed how the device actually works, involving a special track that enables the board to magnetically levitate above it, in a very similar way to maglev trains.

It’s an amusing coincidence that, while Back to the Future featured technology called a flux capacitor, the Slide relies on something called flux pinning, as well as a principle called the Meissner effect. And this all works because of something called superconduction.

A superconductor is a material cooled to a very low critical temperature that, when you run a current through it, experiences no electrical resistance (the material doesn’t push back against the current). When a material becomes a superconductor it pushes away any magnetic fields inside it. This is known as the Meissner effect.

The Slide hoverboard contains a series of metal alloy superconducting blocks cooled to -197°C by reservoirs of liquid nitrogen. The track below contains three magnets that induce a current in the blocks, causing the Meissner effect to take hold and expel the magnetic field back towards the track in a mirror image.

These mirroring magnetic forces repel each other and so the board is lifted above the track. Even if someone stands on the board, the magnetic forces are strong enough to keep it levitating because the lack of electrical resistance in the superconductor means the magnetic field can adjust to deal with external pressure.

But another scientific phenomenon makes the hoverboard even more stable. When the cooling process is switched on and the blocks in the board become supercondutors, they effectively trap the lines of the magnetic field from the track. This causes the blocks to be pinned at a fixed height above the track, a process known as flux pinning, which provides much more stable levitation. Flux pinning ensures the hoverboard doesn’t deviate either horizontally or vertically from the track.

As a proof of concept, the Slide shows that constructing a hoverboard with stable levitation is entirely possible. Sadly, before we get too excited, the technology looks unlikely to hit the market in the near future for several reasons. The current board weighs 11.5kg, including the superconducting material and the liquid nitrogen on board, making it rather cumbersome to carry. The liquid nitrogen also requires a top-up roughly every 10 minutes to ensure that the superconducting material remains at optimal temperature.

On top of that, the board currently only works at one custom-built skate park. Lexus hasn’t disclosed the cost for this proof of concept, but it is safe to presume that superconducting blocks, supplies of liquid nitrogen and a custom-built park awash with permanent magnets could not have been cheap.

Despite these limitations – and as Lexus points out – nothing is impossible. It is entirely plausible to imagine similar parks and guide-ways being constructed as part of future smart cities. Perhaps the hoverboard could even offer a greener travel alternative within the city as well as a leisure activity. In years to come, we could well find ourselves topping up our boards with liquid nitrogen at city-wide charging points, just as we fill up our cars today.

Five myths about gravitational waves

Elegant but elusive. Simulation of merging black holes showing gravitational waves. NASA/ESA/wikimedia

The scientists behind the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope, last year made an extraordinary claim that they had detected gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time. Initially hailed as the most groundbreaking discovery of the century, it later proved a false alarm: the signal was merely galactic dust.

So are we likely to ever find gravitational waves? And would they really provide irrefutable evidence for the Big Bang? Here are five common myths and misconceptions about gravitational waves.

1. Setbacks are just due to teething problems

It may seem like the search for gravitational waves has only just begun, but it has actually been going on for decades without success.

Gravitational waves are pulsating perturbations, or “ripples” produced in the fabric of space-time as a massive object moves through it. As they propagate, they stretch and squash objects, albeit on subatomic scale. Scientists have therefore been trying to demonstrate the existence of gravitational waves by looking at how nearby objects are affected.

A passing gravitational wave stretches and squashes objects in its path. wikimedia

In 1968, American physicist Joseph Weber claimed he had detected gravitational waves in this way using his esoteric detector made up of enormous aluminium cylinders. This was sadly later disproved.

These days, scientists prefer using laser interferometry to search for gravitational waves. It works by splitting a laser beam in two perpendicular directions and sending each down a long vacuum tunnel. The two paths are then reflected back by mirrors to the point they started, where a detector is placed. If the waves are disturbed by gravitational waves on their way, the recombined beams would be different from the original.

Ground-based interferometers, like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), have arms that are about four kilometres long. Future space-based interferometers like the Deci-hertz Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (DECIGO) and the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) will use laser arms spanning up to a million kilometres. These experiments are expected to launch within the next decade, with an eLISA “Pathfinder” mission to launch imminently.

2. The waves come from the early universe

The strongest sources of gravitational waves are in fact astrophysical processes, which are happening all the time.

The most dominant of these sources is the rotation of pairs of white dwarfs or black holes (so-called “binary systems”). Such pairs are thought to gradually lose energy by emitting gravitational waves. This was demonstrated by the discovery of the famous Hulse-Taylor pulsar in 1974. The pulsar provided indirect evidence of gravitational waves as it was losing energy at a rate which had been predicted predicted by the general theory of relativity (the waves themselves were not seen).

However, scientists are also looking for gravitational waves created shortly after the universe was born, called primordial gravitational waves, which are much more elusive.

3. BICEP2 could one day ‘see’ gravitational waves

One of BICEP2’s goals was try to detect the signature of primordial gravitational waves imprinted in the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This radiation contains light that first emerged from the soup of elementary particles when the universe was just 300,000 years old, long before the first stars were born.

The cosmic microwave background, as measured by the Planck satellite. ESA/Planck Collaboration

When light waves vibrate in a certain direction, we say that it has a specific polarisation. If gravitational waves were present at the time when the CMB was born, they should leave behind a unique swirly pattern – a curling in the polarisation of the light – dubbed “B modes”.

Therefore, the B modes are only indirect evidence for gravitational waves. This is an important point: Experiments like BICEP2 will never be able to observe gravitational waves themselves, only the fingerprints they left behind.

Even dusting for these fingerprints is not easy. B-modes are typically masked by much stronger signals from dust emission and an effect called gravitational lensing, which mixes different types of polarisation patterns. Eliminating these and many other contaminants is a most delicate task, often relying on results from other experiments.

This complex challenge will be tackled by the next generation of BICEP-like experiments such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and its planned successor AdvACT. They will be able to measure CMB to scales beyond the reach of Planck, and would have learned valuable lessons from BICEP in the modelling of dust and other contaminants. The prospects for detecting B-mode within the decade look very promising.

Some have even speculated that space interferometers might be able to detect primordial waves, perhaps by subtracting the waves detected from know astrophysical processes.

4. Gravitational waves would ‘prove’ the Big Bang

The earliest source of gravitational waves is not the Big Bang, but rather cosmological inflation: a period during which the universe underwent a brief flash of exponential expansion just after the Big Bang.

The gravitational waves that BICEP2 claimed to have detected are the by-product of this burst of accelerating expansion of the universe. This is in accordance with general relativity, which predicts that an accelerating body emits gravitational waves (similar to the way an accelerating charge emits electromagnetic waves).

Inflation is currently regarded as the leading model of the early universe. While many key predictions of inflation have been verified, the predicted existence of primordial gravitational waves remains elusive. If they are observed, they will tell us directly about the energy scale at which inflation occurred, bringing us closer to understanding the Big Bang. But they would not prove the Big Bang, which is a mathematical singularity that we are yet to understand.

5. We just need one experiment to detect them

Strong statistical evidence for gravitational waves will certainly require more than one experiment. Like light waves, gravitational waves come in a spectrum of frequencies. The two detection techniques (B-modes and laser interferometry) are searching for waves at different frequencies – 15 orders of magnitude apart.

The simplest theory of inflation predicts a background of primordial gravitational waves with a particular frequency spectrum, in other words we know what the amplitude should be in each frequency. So, if scientists could detect gravitational waves on two of these very different frequencies, it would be strong evidence for inflation that is difficult to refute even by the most hardline sceptic.

So is the search worth it?

It is highly unlikely that the first generation of space interferometers would achieve the sensitivity required to detect primordial gravitational waves. Exactly what such a signal would look like is unknown and could, in principle, be forever out of reach by any future interferometers.

Nevertheless, if we could detect astrophysical gravitational waves directly. This would open up new ways to test the validity of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is used to describe gravitation in modern physics. The theory, which has been questioned in recent years), predicts the existence of gravitational waves.

It would also provide new insights into the evolution of stars, galaxies and black holes that we could never get any other way.

Teenage sexting is not all the same – criminalise abuse, not sexual exploration

phone by D. Hammonds/shutterstock.com

Now that so many teenagers have smartphones equipped with cameras it’s inevitable that they’re used to take pictures, sometimes regrettable pictures, and to share them with others. The problem is that this is not just often regrettable in their own eyes, but also illegal in the eyes of the law.

A 14-year-old boy who took a naked selfie and sent it to a girl at school that he’d been flirting with recently found himself in hot water with his school and with the police. Both his and the girl’s details have been added to a police intelligence database for making and distributing an indecent image. Indecent because, as an image of a minor, it’s classified as child pornography under the Protection of Children Act 1978.

The police investigating said no charges were brought as it was not in the public interest. But the boy was informed that this record may, despite the lack of conviction or charges, be revealed by advanced criminal records checks. This could potentially ruin both of the teenagers' futures if their chosen careers involve working with children.

Criminal ‘sexting’?

The case highlights the problems raised by smartphone-enabled “sexting” that is increasingly common among young people, and yet, where the subject of the image is under 18, constitutes the creation and distribution of child pornography. Children are unnecessarily criminalised, and the broad scope of criminal law discourages schools from educating teenagers about when sharing sexual images may be harmful or a harmless part of teenage sexual exploration. Whether part of growing up or not, teens need to know that all sexting could be seen as potentially criminal.

This all-encompassing sweep of the law is recognised as a problem, so CPS guidance limits the prosecution of teenagers sharing images of themselves when they are not causing harm to others. For instance, the approach of the Association of Chief Police Officers is to safeguard children over bringing prosecutions, and in this case the investigating police said no one was arrested or interviewed under caution.

Nevertheless, as the school exercised its discretion to report the incident to the police it was recorded as a crime. While the school says pupils were informed that this was their policy, the boy in question says he was not aware of this, nor of the consequences of admitting his actions – something he did with police present and without any form of adult representation.

Teenage kicks that have lasting consequences

So now a 14-year-old’s name appears in a police crime record, relating to a sexual offence no less, which could damage his future – even though no charge was brought against him. It’s likely to be of little comfort that the National Police Chief’s Council state that the decision to disclose this under future record checks is “carefully considered” and “in line with Home Office guidance”.

Don’t let your phone become a crime scene phone by VitaminCo/shutterstock.com

This case also raises questions about the scope of offences involving the making and distribution of sexual or intimate images. In particular, how a provision in the Protection of Children Act regarding child pornography, designed to protect children, is being used to criminalise them. The problem is that the law captures incidents that may not be harmful, and distorts the kinds of harm caused in particular circumstances. Teenage sexting is not a problem because it involves naked images of minors. It is a problem when the sharing of sexual images is used in an abusive way.

In this case, for example, if the boy sent the image with the intention of causing distress, as an act of harassment, then this would constitute harm. Alternatively the boy in this case could be seen as the victim, as the girl who received the image shared it with others, either with the intention to humiliate or without thought to the possibility, and in any case without the boy’s consent. This could constitute an offence under the new so-called “revenge porn” legislation. In fact this more accurately depicts the situation – of more immediate concern to the boy than his record is the humiliation he feels at school that numerous schoolmates have seen the image, and repeatedly refer to it. However, no such offence was recorded.

Criminalising young people for making or distributing such images without taking into account the context only serves to draw attention away from really harmful behaviour – either among teenagers, or from those who might prey upon them.

Young people need to be informed of the law, its implications for sexting, and understand what constitutes ethical and unethical behaviour involving the sharing of sexual images. The sharing of sexual images as harassment or abuse or as acts of “revenge porn” should be reported. Schools’ focus should be to teach teenagers about healthy and harmful sexual relationships. It’s particularly apparent that this often occurs in the context of abusive relationships which commonly involve a male perpetrator and female victim. The sexualisation of women and girls too, means images of them are treated differently to that of men and boys.

However, despite the importance of discussing these important issues with teenagers, institutional fear and cultural concerns around offences of a sexual nature and the wide scope of the law that criminalises all sexting as if it were the same too often means the education needed just doesn’t happen.

Using Wikipedia as PR is a problem, but our lack of a critical eye is worse

Wikipedia - it's a work in progress. Lane Hartwell, CC BY-SA

If you heard that a group of people were creating, editing, and maintaining Wikipedia articles related to brands, firms and individuals, you could point out, correctly, that this is the entire point of Wikipedia. It is, after all, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.

But a group has been creating and editing articles for money. Wikipedia administrators banned more than 300 suspect accounts involved, but those behind the ring are still unknown.

For most Wikipedians, the editors and experts who volunteer their time and effort to develop and maintain the world’s largest encyclopedia for free, this is completely unacceptable. However, what the group was doing was not illegal – although it is prohibited by Wikipedia’s policies – and as it’s extremely hard to detect it’s difficult to stamp out entirely.

Conflicts of interest in those editing articles has been part of Wikipedia from the beginning. In the early days, a few of the editors making the most contributions wanted a personal Wikipedia entry, at least as a reward for their contribution to the project. Of course most of these were promptly deleted by the rest of the community for not meeting the notability criteria.

As Wikipedia grew and became the number one source of free-to-access information about everything, so Wikipedia entries rose up search engines rankings. Being well-represented on Wikipedia became important for any nation, organisation, firm, political party, entrepreneur, musician, and even scientists. Wikipedians have strived to prohibit self-serving editing, due to the inherent bias that this would introduce. At the same time, “organised” problematic editing developed despite their best efforts.

The glossy sheen of public relations

The first time I learned of non-Wikipedians taking an organised approach to editing articles I was attending a lecture by an “online reputation manager” in 2012. I didn’t know of her, so I pulled up her Wikipedia entry.

It was readily apparent that the article was filled with only positive things. So I did a bit of research about the individual and edited the article to try and introduce a more neutral point of view: softened language, added references and [citation needed] tags where I couldn’t find reference material to back up an important statement.

Online reputation mangers and PR firms charge celebrities and “important” people to, among other things, groom Wikipedia pages and fool search engines to push less favourable search results further down the page when their name is searched for. And they get caught doing it, again and again and again.

Separating fact from fiction

It is not that paid-for or biased editing is so problematic in itself, but the value that many associate with the information found in Wikipedia entries. For example, in academia, professors with Wikipedia entries might be considered more important than those without. Our own research has shown that scholars with Wikipedia articles have no greater statistically significant scientific impact than those without. So do some appear on Wikipedia while others do not? The reason is clear: because many of those entries are written by themselves or their students or colleagues. It’s important that this aspect of Wikipedia should be communicated to those reading it, and remembered every single time you’re using it.

The arrival of [citation needed] tags is a good way to alert readers to the potential for statements to be unsafe, unsupported, or flat-out wrong. But these days Google has incorporated Wikipedia articles into its search results, so that an infobox at the right side of the results page will display the information – having first stripped such tags out, presenting it as referenced and reliable information.

A critical eye

Apart from self-editing that displays obvious bias, we know that Wikipedia, however amazing it is, has other shortcomings. Comparing Wikipedia’s different language versions to see the topics they find controversial reveals the attitudes and obsessions of writers from different nations. For example, English Wikipedia is obsessed with global warming, George W Bush and the World Wrestling Federation, the German language site by Croatia and Scientology, Spanish by Chile, and French by Ségolène Royal, homosexuality and UFOs. There are lots of edit wars behind the scenes, many of which are a lot of fuss about absolutely nothing.

It’s not that I’d suggest abandoning the use of Wikipedia, but a bit of caution and awareness in the reader of these potential flaws is required. And more so, it’s required by the many organisations, academics, journalists and services of all kind including Google itself that scrape or read Wikipedia unthinkingly assuming that it’s entirely correct.

Were everyone to approach Wikipedia with a little more of a critical eye, eventually the market for paid editing would weaken or dissolve.