3 Reasons Why Privacy is a Hot Topic For Me This Week
Firstly we had to write a privacy policy for the upcoming SourceClear.com web site. I must be honest and say that until now I haven’t had much of an appetite for the topic. If you grow up in the UK with speeding cameras everywhere, city cameras on every corner and even cameras in the toilets in some nightclubs (to stop muggers but yes they occasionally catch other things and it usually ends up on YouTube) you are conditioned by thinking that privacy is not something you can take for granted. I never read privacy policies but was forced to investigate and understand them a little more in order to ink our own. Luckily I have a few good people to turn to (to which I am very grateful, you know who you are Mr. L). What was interesting to me was that I realized we are effectively making a contract with our users about what we will do with their data before we even know ourselves. For instance what would happen if we choose to store stuff at Amazon Web Services ? I guess we have to re-write it. What would happen when we allow certain bits of data to be sent back and forth to 3rd parties they sign up to? When I understand more about what needs to be considered and how to write a good one I will post it online.
Secondly Karen Oqvist sent me a link to a paper she is publishing is ISSA Journal. If you aren’t a member I think you can send Karen an email and she will send you the PDF. It’s well worth a read and discusses privacy in the world of blogs, MySpace generation etc. I particularly liked this thought.
We can only speculate on how today’s younger generation will deal with this challenge in future, when they realize that something that they may have published, shared or done online in the past may impact their professional or personal prospects in the physical world today and tomorrow. Yes, there are laws protecting, to a degree, privacy. However, they are inadequate given the social evolution that we have seen happening over the last few years. What we can expect is a rapid growth in those business specialized in hunting down and eradicating digitally stored information residue that could be linked to us - as people.
If you haven’t read Snow Crash in a while I recommend it. Hiro makes money by creating snippets of information and gets paid in micro-payments when people use them in the Metaverse. Lots of things in Snow Crash are coming true in the physical and virtual worlds of today.
Finally to round out Michael Smith posts about Wired article where a sex lube company that exposed 250,000 trial users names and addresses that were found via Google hacking. Now that’s a far more slippery problem that exposing credit cards.
