WikiLeaks' founder says that Facebook is an instrument for government spying. Whether that's true or not, we're sharing too much, and we’re on the edge of compromising the notion of identity, and with it of privacy and commercial protection.
That's true, Terry, and I wonder whether that's something that can be handled via legislation or disclosure, absent more awareness on our own parts, as Kim suggested in his last post. Social media is, I think, the most insidious because we think of our exchanges as being among "friends" and yet the applications we use are sharing our information much further, and who knows what the sites themselves are doing, or have done. The other problem is that all the policy changes in the world won't retract disclosures already made. How many are there out there, and to whom? We may never know.
It probably does, Kim. We tend to think of the "price" of something in terms of cash only. We'd never think to buy something without looking at the cost in money terms, and yet we trade privacy against something without any regard for just how much we got...and how much we gave.
I wish that other companies could be as forthcoming with their purpose. It seems, however that no matter what policies companies put in place, there is always that executive or partner that wants to push a bit more in the name of customer engagement.
Does it require a greater degree of user sensitivity to make that happen? I realize guiltily how rarely I click on the link to read what a site wants to tell me about its privacy policies. Nice to see the link - "We Care About , etc" - but finding time for the small print...
This site is a good example of what I'd say is reasonable; you ask for information about what a person does because it's what they do that qualifies them for the site, validates their interests, and recommends them to advertisers. What's asked is what's needed for each of those things. If you ask for more detailed information about the person's professional life, or information that goes outside professional boundaries, then you're asking for too much.
I would like to see a policy on use and on disclosure to third parties on every site, and the latter should include a pledge that whatever safeguards or restrictions the site might place for its own use, those same ones will be imposed at the minimum on anyone who shares the data "downstream".
That's the crux of the problem, Terry. Everything that's private and personal has business value, both to those who own it and to those who'd like to have it. The difficult question is whether the trade between the two parties is fair. What's the value of what you surrender in privacy, compared to the benefit of playing a game or participating in a "social" or "business" forum? My beef is that what we give up is objective, and what we get is subjective at best. In some cases, as you point out, it's not even subjective--it's absent.
I wonder when does this type of information become more of a business tool than a security risk.
I once met a guy who brokered in personal information lists (mailing, email, etc.) it seemed pretty labor intensive.
That said, have you heard of info sharing sites masking as social networks? I just spotted Jigsaw, which asks you to sign up and basically sell out your Rolodex to get better business leads.
Tom, yes... it's those darn data-mined correlations from a vast amount of public data.
And perhaps the thing people should really be worried about is not the accurate correlatons -- but the *inaccurate* correlations that are made! The movie Brazil comes to mind... Instead of a typo that flags you as "Harry Tuttle" -- a data mining algorithm will say you are a Tuttle with a >95% confidence level.
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.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
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.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
The US government is funding controversial projects to collect daily Internet activity, including Web searches, Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, and the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones. Its goal is to map these interactions to predict social behavior, such as protests.
Our online communications and privacy are being threatened by governments and corporations. Eben Moglen believes it's time for a People's Internet, made possible by "Freedom Boxes."
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
The plan for unmanned police drones to patrol traffic and other city conditions in Seattle has sparked a new set of legal concerns about privacy. Law traditionally lags technology, but we can expect now to see a new round of activity in the courts as legal definitions begin to emerge on what "next-gen privacy" will look like.
Companies are still getting their feet wet with social networking and what employees should and shouldn't broadcast. But they don't always involve HR and PR. Here's why they should, and what they risk when they don't.
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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
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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