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."
Paul, our laws definitely are not keeping up with technology.
That may not be a bad thing, in that I think we are over-lawed as a society, anyway. But, the only privacy things that tend to get legislated come after a tragedy, like cyber-bullying that leads to suicide.
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.
..I would argue that there is no privacy. I sometimes take the time to google myself..and the hits that comes back for me--an ordinary face in the crowd--is scary. If someone wants to find you, they will--and we need to be really scared about it.
Beyond the privacy issue of the GPS chip, my biggest issue with that is that, one way or another, you paid for the chip and the tracking service.
It's akin to the Mortgage Insurance Premium charged to home buyers, yet that mortgage insurance didn't in any way prevent the meltdown after the buyers foreclosed.
I do think people become desensitized to all of this, and it goes beyond tech privacy, but really freedom. We just have a gradual creep that encroaches "rights," so that it doesn't seem unusual to most.
I am more scared of webcams than apps, sites, or companies that collect data. The Pennsylvania school district that spied on students who used the schools' laptops only cemented that fear (In 2010 the district surreptitiously snapped thousands of pics of kids at home). I told my daughter to always close her laptop at night and to never change in front of it... maybe I'm paranoid but what the heck!
As 'spying' becomes easier to do, we'll all see some our privacy taken advantage of. And as we all become more used to collection of data from our purchases, and internet behavior, there's going to be little left that's private in a decade.
Whether companies will be able to profit from the minutia is another matter. Just because it's easy to collect the data, doesn't necessarily mean it will make money for anyone.
Good point Bolingbroke, and as if often the case with a supposed "natural right" it's by no means always clear where the dividing lines are between some right we hold absolutely, the rights created by law, and rights we just assume as part of everyday etiquette.
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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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