Decius wrote:
] While everyone is freaking out about their Tivos, Jeremy
] mentioned a much more serious issue. The fact is that TV only
] shows you popular culture. There are limited circumstances
] where surveillance of TV watching habits would really be
] problematic politically. TV is the soma. The Internet, on the
] other hand, makes your local library look tame. Google knows
] everything that you've thought about seriously in past 5
] years. And what Google knows, the police know.
]
] If they don't need permission or notification to pull your
] records from the library, how long before they can do the same
] with your Google records?

The linking of records cannot be prevented. The development of IT, if let run unrestrained, allows for total tracking of everything. Nanotech can turn us all into grey goo. At points fire probably caused a few people to get seriously hurt.. People will tell you its bad to play with all of the aforementioned.

I'm taking the same line as I did in the Patriot Act renewal thread. The powers of being able to link together certain records will exist, if by the capabilities of technology alone, and our challenge is figure out how we want this to work. That includes where we enforce certain "firewalls" and limitations.

There is much missing policy. This is because we have just as much missing philosophy. The technology is warping our ideas on privacy, its mutating our threats, and its giving us new capabilities. The only thing I am sure of, is that the only way to do good is to lead in the right direction.

Your TiVo tracks you, Google tracks you, your Easypass tracks you, your mass transit card(s) track you, your grocery card tracks you, your credit card tracks you, your atm card tracks you, and your computer owns you. Everything tracks you. You help it just by using it. Given a desire or requirement, it could all be linked.

If anyone still has ideas that its even possible to maintain some kind of "total privacy", they are living in a dreamland. Your various tokens and connections will compromise themselves, without you realizing it. If you have a Safeway card you went out of the way to register as "Customer" (as I have), its got compromised the first time you used your atm/credit card to buy something with it (as I most certainly have). If you sit on Friendster/Orkut/etc and just respond to requests, at least a chunk of your social network will come to you all by itself. Just wait till bill scanners can track serial numbers.. Look at your blog, and embrace the grey goo that is your privacy. There is no escape!

This must be embraced, there is no turning back. It can be used to empower or oppress. I vote for empower, and that's why I work on systems like MemeStreams and get so concerned about Patriot Act like issues. I think that just like every other advance that has been disruptive, this one just needs to be worked through. It can be made to work, as long as there is balance.

One of the major problems, is "asking for techno", as I have called it in previous memes. TiVo is going to tell the media companies that the Janet Jackson tit thing was (dare I use the euphemism) "the tits"... Now, we will get hit with a deluge of this crap until we are complete desensitized to it, tired of it, and consider it and every element of it trite. But without even knowing it, we asked for it. Perception problems are a bitch.

On the other (more dangerous) end of the same phenomenon, the government is going to think I'm a terrorist because I have guns, use crypto, register my Safeway card as "Customer", make all my money from "odd jobs", speak critically of policy online, and describe myself as a hacker. I guess that would be "finding techno"? And yes, I do worry about this in my more paranoid frenzied moments.

In one of his most celebrated spams (I say "spams" with my tongue firmly in cheek, and total respect: https://owl.eff.org/pipermail/barlowfriendz/2002q4/000002.html), Barlow made the point that there needed to be a certain respect in our society for the eccentricities of other people. Or rather, he said that we are going to be forced to make our society a place that is tolerant of eccentricities and public scandals. Something like that. I feel that whole general thing is key. Sitting here in San Francisco, it can seem easy.

In the end, this big issue may simply boil down to proving that profiling does not reveal anything even remotely close to absolute truths, even though it may appear like it could have with the benefit of hindsight. From the Declaration of Independence forward, there has been a history of respect in this country for the rights of the individual, and the idea that the government's purpose is to protect us from threats, internal, external, and from other individuals. The worst that can be said about our current situation, is that we may very well have a leadership vacuum. Its hard to tell.

Update: I'm worried more about private corporations doing something stupid, then the government doing something intentional.

RE: Google Privacy Policy