privacy

Uber, big brother, and company use of big data

There's social privacy (hiding from the state) and personal privacy (hiding from your neighbours). Where do corporations fit in?

Tracking citizens

Wanting to be off-grid reflects more on the individual than on the society they are in.

What's so creepy

I wish I had a deep psychological understanding of people's fear of internet openness. It is so often seen as creepy and privacy-violating. I see this reaction as paranoia and superstition. I don't get it. We're gonna have to come to terms with it. Normally I'm the Luddite but I'm not part of the openness backlash.

GrokLaw tantrum

A website called GrokLaw closed down recently, supposedly because of US snooping into email. The response of the internet chattering classes has generally been supportive and upset. I don't understand why. I think it is one of the daftest things I have heard in a long time.

The Web started the decline of privacy; it is the personal camera that really nails it dead.

Privacy is dead, get over it: the community now knows as much about you as your neighbour does if you live in a village, or your doorman if you live in an apartment block. And anyone who sees you can record what they are seeing.

Privacy is not dead, just becoming impossible

The connectedness of the internet restores the community's ability to observe and moderate behaviour for our own protection. Terrorism and the rise of anti-social behaviours makes this imperative. Anonymity and privacy were an accident of history when the size of communities grew faster than our ability to keep them connected. That has changed now. Privacy is becoming impossible again, whether we like it or not.

More on the privacy issue from Wharton U

Further to my Big Uncle series on privacy, here's an interesting quote from Privacy on the Web: Is It a Losing Battle?

Big uncle: policies and controls for security systems

In our discussions of Big Uncle, we have seen how privacy is pretty much a thing of the past, certainly in the electronic realm. In the final blog post of this series, we look at how it is up to all of us to ensure that the result is Big Uncle not Big Brother.

Big Uncle: the total lack of privacy in electronic communications

We have been discussing Big Uncle: the benevolent aspects of ceding privacy to security systems. Be aware how little privacy you have in electronic communciations.

Big Uncle: looking for the needle in the security data haystack

Big Uncle is the concept of benevolent security. We have been looking in previous posts at the loss of privacy and the positive side of what it means. One application is finding enemies of society.

As the amount of data grows and as it becomes more integrated, a natural trend is to use data mining for more advanced security. The world has barely started down this path. There is much more that can be done to apply existing data technologies and techniques for

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