Privacy – Finally A Sensible Approach

The November 2013 Issue of Scientific American, pp. 64-71, also has what I consider a brilliant analysis of an extremely challenging issue for Autonomous Systems: “How Should We Think about Privacy? – Making sense of one of the thorniest issues of the digital age” by Jaron Lanier. Despite his feelings, I think the Jaron Lanier article in Wikipedia is informative.

I highly recommend that you read the Scientific American article: there are so many excellent points that I can’t quote them all!

Jaron argues that we have not yet locked in the future architecture, and designers of big data need to design in the hooks for future solutions – what a contrast to the Drone Hacking article in my previous post.

We have this folk legacy that “information should be free”, which is what allowed Silicon Valley firms to grow so huge so fast, yet if we allowed information to have commercial value, we might bring individuality, diversity, and subtlety to our lives.

He makes excellent points: “it is inconceivable to have enough government inspectors to confirm that privacy regulations are being followed, but the same armies of private accountants that make markets viable today could probably handle it”, and “commercial equity can resolve the otherwise imponderable dilemmas related to privacy.”

Rather than the difficult to manage privacy settings, we can just set a price – later I’ll give examples of how I think this may evolve.

He points out that “when information is free, then the government becomes infinitely financed as a spy … because people no longer have the power of the purse…”

He advocates a design approach I have used for decades: “… our work is always a first draft and always do our best to lay the groundwork for it to be reconsidered, even to be radically redone.”

My colleagues once described my job as “living 3-5 years in the future” to see what our system needs to be – and we certainly completely redid several major things, more than once.

As usual, I believe in the power of serendipity, and the day after I read Jaron’s article, this appeared in the NY Times: “No U.S. Action, So States Move on Privacy Law”.

Ten states, so far, have passed various privacy laws, which is certainly challenging for Internet companies.

Interestingly, “stiff lobbying efforts were able to stop a so-called right to know bill proposed in California ... required any business that “retains a customer’s personal information” to share a copy of that information at the customer’s request, as well as disclose which third parties have received the information. The practice of sharing customer data is central to digital advertising and to the large Internet companies that rely on advertising revenue.”

So clearly Privacy is an issue crying out to be clarified. In the coming posts I will describe proposed approaches for the Autonomous Age.