The FBI is reading David Petraeus's email. Apple wants to help you find your phone, and your browser knows what kind of underwear you prefer. Welcome to the new paradigm of privacy: There isn't any.
Remember back in the day when the phone just rang and rang if you weren't home? Maybe the answering machine eventually picked up, or maybe the caller just tried back later. Fast forward a few years. Big Brother knows which of the 31 Baskin-Robbins flavors you chose, because your iPhone has a secret app designed to detect the difference in the level of corn syrup between Mint Chocolate Chip and Baseball Nut and report it to the government to be used against you in a court of law.
Communication (especially Internet-based) is an amazing thing. It saves lives, makes money, and brings disparate forces together for the common good. But there's a dark side to everything. In this day and age, that dark side comes with a Lord of the Rings-style fiery eyeball watching everything we do, day in and day out.
For the business community, this is the ultimate double-edged sword. I think it's fair to say that we're better off today than we were when IBM (this site's sponsor) was making cash registers and adding machines. But, boy, could those guys keep a secret. There was no Internet on which to air one's dirty laundry, no prying eyes to intercept executive correspondence, and no microtrading to eviscerate one's stock price 12 milliseconds after the publication of an erroneous report detailing the cancellation of parts to build the world's most successful product. (I'm talking to you, Apple.)
One day, perhaps, we'll find a happy medium between always on and blissfully ignorant. But today's world of commerce is based on the kind of geolocated, instantly messaged, gotta-have-it-yesterday mentality that breeds more privacy-busting technology in one day than J. Edgar Hoover managed to cram into his entire career.
A few weeks ago, I attended the famous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to catch a glimpse of the future. I was dazzled by all those smart TVs that featured the most amazing cloud-based functionality. But I couldn't help thinking about the reams of data half a dozen different corporations were going to collect regarding my private TV-watching habits.
Mass Media, Mass Appeal
Apparently, Kevin Jacoby wasn't the only CES attendee interested in visiting LG's booth.
I also saw a tiny device that could be attached to anything or anyone and had only one purpose: to locate anything or anyone via GPS, wherever it happens to be. Helpful? Could be. A little weird? Yep.
Finally, I visited a booth displaying a wristband designed to measure your vital biorhythms, the number of steps you take in a day, your location, your temperature, your stress level, and more. Once it knows your favorite color and the name of your brother's goldfish, the wristband communicates all this information to a nearby cellphone, which then sends all your stats to a nameless, faceless cloud server for processing and data mining. Is George Orwell spinning in his grave right now or what?
As I was considering the implications of this potentially insidious device, I ran into an executive I never really liked from a company you've likely heard of (but which shall remain nameless). His take on this device: "Hey, that's great. I should put one of those on all my employees."
Bollingbroke -- I never said you were wrong. I'm not a legal scholar, but I believe the constitutional protections only apply to over-the-top government snooping.
Your example on yogurt preference is spot-on. I don't believe that anything in the constitution that prevents grocery stores or credit card companies from compiling information about how we spend our money, or prevents a company from offering us free disk space and a free email service in exhange for allowing them to examine our information/data.
I was reluctant to even write a post with the C word. Certainly not a topic I'm familiar with or even that interested in. And now my worst fears realized someone responds and challenges my statements. What to do? I could without causing a ripple just ignore it and move on. But no, I will give a half-hearted response but with the proviso and promise never to bring up the C word again on this forum and leave its use to those who are angry enough to employ it ( it does seem anytime you come across any discussion of the C word there are mostly very angry people involved ) .
Just saying that what you quoted could more easily be applied to the right of the individual to security as you mentioned rather than privacy which are not always the same thing. Let the world know my preference in Greek style yogurt rather than take residence on the shores of some dreary pond in eastern Mass. I think there are many out there protecting some very boring and unimportant details about themselves.
"For some the bottom line is always the Constitution, which contains no express right to privacy."
Generally, I agree, but doesn't the Fourth Amendment guarantee some right of privacy, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause ..."
I make a conscious choice to trade privacy for conveniences. I could go live in a Walden-Pond-like hut in the wilderness and enjoy privacy. I choose to enjoy comfort-controlled spaces, street lights on paved roads, running water, electricity, electronic financial transactions and wireless communications. Some loss of privacy is a consequence.
"Companies have had to create intellectual property protection departments to combat the trolls who spend their time looking for patent holes and litigating for damages."
Brian, intellectual property departments are nothing new. And many of the companies that complain about trolls are actually the ones who engage in the most offensive, troll-like behavior.
Large companies complain loudly about patent trolls, while they themselves engage in predatory patent behavior. Shakespeare hit this issue on the nail when he said, "The lady doth protest too much."
"One of the hidden technological impacts and laws, I believe, relates to patents. Companies have had to create intellectual property protection departments to combat the trolls who spend their time looking for patent holes and litigating for damages."
Why do you refer to is as been 'hidden'? I thought patents are as pervasive and well known as anything in the tech world that you could possibby imagine. As you rightly noted, we know there are folks out there looking to exploit weaknesses in exisiting patents. But don't you think patents laws as they relate to technology have evolve enough to minimize the activities of these trolls?
"That may not be a bad thing, in that I think we are over-lawed as a society, anyway".
It is true that we are over-lawed but what if a larger portion of theselawas no longer applicable considering the changing nature of how we consume information these days? We have had cases in the recent past in which there are no applicable laws to punish the culprits when the crime was committed online.
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People called it "crackberry" because RIM invented the smartphone addiction. Then they messed up and all was lost. And now here they are again with their noses pressed up against the glass. Should you let them back in?
The sun is shining on a whole new way to get ahead. And every big company is looking for the keys to the castle. Turns out, the key is personnel. Are you the answer to their question?
There is a service you can now retain to help you with your anonymous social network stalking. The company, once contracted, will assume a cover identity; friend, follow, or otherwise connect with your desired target; and then publish a daily report regarding your mark and his or her Internet-enabled comings and goings.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
A recent release of the popular TweetDeck app for Twitter power-users gives new life to software that had previously taken a wrong turn. Here's a quick walk-through of the new TweetDeck, to show you why it should be at the top of your Twitter toolkit.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
Apple may want to do a TV offering, but to meet its goal it would have to address three specific issues that have been exposed by earlier attempts to make Internet TV work.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
A growing number of HR managers are suspicious of individuals who do not take part in social media and view them as anti-social in real life as well as online.
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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