Privacy should go hand in hand with transparency , Don Tapscott, Globe and Mail (Aug
Chew on this for a while - "At Zeitgeist, Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted that between the dawn of civilization and 2003, five quintillion bytes of data were collected. Today, the same amount is collected every two days. "
And a lot of that data is about us. Don Tapscott warns we've gone too far.
"Information privacy is the foundation of a free society, and not just because of the harm that can occur from blackmail, identity fraud, impersonation, cyber-stalkers and nosy employers. When data can be assembled into profiles, matched with other info and used to make automated judgments and decisions about individuals, such as whether or not to hire them, whether to admit entry, whether to calculate benefits or terms of an offer, whether to corroborate a claim, whether to discriminate against or manipulate, it should make us shudder to think about what it would be like to live in a world where all is known and nothing is forgotten. "
The End of Online Privacy, Susan Karshinsky and Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail (Aug 13)
The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation has proof that we divulge far too much - and most of the time we don't know it.
"The most alarming result of the study of more than 470,000 Web surfers is that 83.6 per cent of them had an instantly identifiable, totally unique fingerprint: Their particular combination of settings and information was unlike that of any other user, increasing the chance they could be personally identified, even though they had done nothing but make a few clicks of the mouse. "
"Put it all together with the constant availability impelled by texting, tweeting, cellphones and status updates – and you have a culture on a path to near-total transparency, a see-through society that may be past the point when it could ever cover back up. "
Posted by Gwen at August 31, 2010 03:05 PM