Transparent (and fragile) as glass
About twenty years ago a data service – I forget which one – offered a set of compact disks for sale. It contained the names, phone numbers, addresses and demographic data for everyone in the United States. The product launch was drowned out by the howls of outrage from journalists and Congress. It was an unthinkable violation of privacy. It was Orwellian. The venture sank without a trace. For a while.
Ten years later David Brin wrote The Transparent Society making the case that secrets would soon be impossible to keep and that we shouldn’t even try. The Information Age would usher in an era where everyone’s life was on display. Governments would be models of transparency and openness. Corporations would throw open their records or pay through the nose for the privilege of keeping a few vital things confidential for a limited time. Privacy would be an outdated concept. A decade down the line he seems to be batting .500. While business and government have an increasingly broad view of what they can hide from the public the lives of the Little People are on display to an extent that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.
Today? Ah, today is not at all like yesterday. We take it for granted that a few minutes or a few seconds plus a few dollars can extract anyone’s picture, phone numbers and address not to mention the most personal details of his or her life. People sign up for services which tell everyone in the world exactly where they are at all times. Friends of mine with Military Intelligence backgrounds describe how they used to agonize over photos in wallets, matchbooks and brands of cologne to try and piece together the outlines of a target’s contacts and associations. Today their subjects spend hours doing the work themselves with Facebook. Targeted advertising works so well that it’s killing traditional venues like printed newspapers. Twitter and Hotmail are free for the user because they are worth serious money to the real customers – advertisers.
In the last day or so I came across two very interesting takes on how much the world has changed. The BBC’s World Have Your Say featured a spirited worldwide discussion, also available as a downloadable podcast on how transparent our lives should be. My favorite security expert, the brilliant and very readable Bruce Schneier, wrote an excellent piece in the Japan Times. When you exchange information online it stays. Most data you think are private are only that way until someone else decides it’s worth something to share or sell them.
It’s not something most of us think about. We use credit cards. We tweet about whatever comes into our head and broadcast it. But it is very serious business which can have profound repercussions years later. The information we put out for the world to see is worth money to others. We should think about whether it’s worth something to us, how much we should value what we currently give away for free.
Tags: bruce schneier, corporations, demographic marketing, Facebook, free email, free private email, government, Orwell, podcast, privacy violation, private email, private label email, true transparency
If the Health care bill goes into law, just about any hopes we have left of privacy will be gone for good. The government will have access not only to your medical records but others that THEY deem neccessary. The IRS is going to be heavily involved with this as well and we have already witnessed how they treat American citizenm unless of course you’re a member of the elitist Statist crowd.
Thank you so much for providing a free email service on Privacy Harbor. I find it extremely secure and would soon be making it my main email account.
You make some excellent points. I have heard concerns from both the political left and the right saying that the Internet is not a safe place for private, personal information. My more conservative friends say the problem is the government trying to invade their privacy online, whereas my more liberal friends say the problem is corporations trying to harvest their private information for advertising purposes. Anyway you look at it, I think it’s a good idea to be safe and responsible with your information online. Be careful what you post in your profile on sites like Myspace and Facebook. Make sure you’re using a private, secure email service, rather than ad-based providers like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo. Careful what personal information you post on public blogs and forums. And most importantly, remember that many sites and tools on the Internet were not developed with the personal user’s privacy or security in mind. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Great post!
The service which wanted to do the big data base first was LOTUS.
That is the company that invented the spreadsheet, stolen by Microsoft and sold as EXCEL, then stalled for years in the new-gray courts on software.
Like all the other things Microsoft stole or marketed*, they eventually paid or stalled their way out of it. Today Bill Gates is largely retired, but goes to Congress every spring to demand more “temporary Visa” workers, like H-1b, L-1b, etc. Those foreign engineers and accountants, etc. (more fields all the time) get sponsored to work here for half wage and no benefits, hoping they’ll get to eventually stay. Every years Congress votes to raise the number of “temp Visa” workers, which has been in 100,000s for a decade already. Several 100k per year are allowed to come in, always more.
THIS IS WHY YOUR KIDS won’t get to be engineers, any more than they’ll get to cut grass or operate taco stands.
If this was the major media or Wikipedia, they’d just erase this message, so read it while you can.
*Microsoft stole Apple’s Mac windows, but they got it from Xerox anyhow.
Microsoft arranged to sell AND lease and service DOS from IBM—stupid giant IBM was clueless.
I think Intel did something similar from AMD and others. But Microsoft made deals with computer companies to ship it within, so they created a massive market share, and could continue to manipulate other co’s into the wastecan of history.
Then Gates married a woman who gave huge chunks of his bucks to fake drug things like AIDS=HIV and other stuff, but I doubt he missed it.
Finally, when hassled by the U.S. Gov itself (after they screwed tobacco), instead of buying a TV network and having all pro-Microsoft 24/7, he made some kind of silent deal—perhaps like AT&T letting the gov tap us. Who knows? We’ll never know or fix it, now; because our “leaders” voted themselves (& Wall Street comrades) the treasury. TRILLION is the new BILLION, Josie, and the ONLY thing they now fear is if The Dick Cheney and pals will be investigated by Muslim Marxist resident alien Hussein Obamarx. As long as the tax-funded leaders collude to cover up, they can get away with anything, and have. If not for computer/plastic credit, we would have fallen to hyperinflation and collapse. So this is a new-gray economy, as long as other countries are willing to trade. We make nearly nothing here, and we won’t drill/dig/use our own resources. Maybe the robber barons hope to use up the oil in the mideast first, so the west can retain that power. But China is growing in smoking leaps and polluted bounds. So we might be swapping places. If we’re collapsed to bread lines, then the robber barons can control us as a monopoly, enslaved, the better to deal us off to China. Like I say, who knows—it’s not like there’s a single major media “news” agency reporting the real, full story. They’re owned by the same guys. THIS IS FASCISM. Commie bastard Vladimir Lenin said fascism is capitalism in decline. It doesn’t matter if the gov controls corps or if huge corps control the gov.
We The People have little time left to fight back.
I enjoy this site, it is worth me coming back
Is there an RSS Feed I can subscribe to?
I think you just click on the orange icon on the top of your navigation toolbar on your browser.
It sounds like you’re creating complications yourself by attempting to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is really a dilemma in the initial location.
Hello, I belive this can be a terrific web site with fabulous stuff. That is certainly why I like to request you if I can speak about your websites on my weblog if I provide you with link back?