Posts Tagged ‘privacy’

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

SOPA & PIPA

SOPA & PIPA

No, those are not sisters of Kate; nor are they foods, Italian acrobats, prized dogs or special names for grandparents….

They are the acronyms for two ill-fated and possibly ill-conceived pieces of legislation that were in front of the Unites States Congress:

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

The Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA)

Ill-fated because a wildfire online social swell caused its backers to back off.

Ill-conceived because I don’t believe it was handled right.

Look, at the end of the day it’s all about freedom – the right to free speech and the fear of stifling innovation.

On the other hand, creators of unique content and IP have the freedom to own and protect their creations and you and I have the freedom to share or not share our own digital selves.

And there is the sticking point – the conflict – the tension.

There are a lot of freedoms at stake here and at some point either we trust companies and people to be honest brokers and protect and defend our rights as much as their own, or we legislate and force the issue.

Now, I have written a lot about how I feel regarding anonymous posters – posters of good and posters of bad – as well as my worries about the lack of protection for those who create the kind of content and innovation that lasts through the ages.

However, there is a balance. There are places where people can’t speak out for fear of imprisonment or death; there are people who are reticent to ask questions or seek help under their own names; there are people who create and develop and innovate using other’s ideas as platforms and catapults….

Overriding all, however, is the fear of censorship and government interference.

So there you have it. On Sunday I heard Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, discuss the issue and present the EU’s position and direction at DLD in Munich.

I also heard Dean Hachamovitch, a Microsoft Corporate VP, discuss the issue and demonstrate its complexities – for example, by landing on just one news site you might be tracked by 15 or more separate sources, all feeding into that one site – a privacy nightmare….

Also, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and a bunch of others all swirling around the same issue – but no one really wanting to admit that a Wild West solution is acceptable.

The lone dissenter was Andrew Keen whose book Digital Vertigo is set for June publishing, who believes that we need to take back our privacy – now.

But here is the thing – we make out as if the whole issue has been created by the digital world – as if it never existed before – as if during the age of audio tape companies didn’t worry about piracy – as if in the fashion and watch worlds people don’t worry about piracy – as if in the old-fashioned mail order world of 100-plus years ago people didn’t worry about privacy and data protection.

Listen:

“The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.”

– Albert Einstein

And there you have it.

The U.S. Congress needed to discuss the underlying issues – not the digital veneer – and they needed to enlist all of the digital channels as well.

All of these issues existed before – but the efficiency and ubiquity of digital exacerbates the issue. So as old Albert said – it is now urgent.

We need protection and we need openness – we can’t trample one person’s freedoms for another’s – but the problem isn’t new – only getting worse….

What do you think?

Posted by David on 01/23 at 04:16 PM
Monday, September 26th, 2011

Till Death Do Us Part

Till death do us part.

An often parodied yet iconic line that came to fame at wedding ceremonies through The Book of Common Prayer dating back to the mid-1500s. Clearly its sentiment and versions of the line were used for centuries before – but print made it real and helped to spread its practice – printed books…an early form of social networking coupled with word of mouth…

Today – Sunday – we celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary (I’m travelling…what else is new…) and counted our blessings of daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren. Not a bad blessing at all!

Having said that we also commemorated the anniversaries of the deaths of two dear friends – one who died of natural causes, after his great, all-embracing heart gave out after rounds of terrible chemo, and one who was murdered when his great, all-embracing heart propelled him up the stairs of Tower Two on 9/11 to save his friends’ lives.

Till death do us part started to take on new meaning for me because over ten years later these two friends still influence and inspire my life and the lives of others as well – way beyond their immediate families.

Not to get too maudlin – but this got me thinking about today and the world we live in. Where the data trails we leave will in fact live forever – way beyond the lifespan of a marriage or the healthiest of elders…who get older and live longer every year. Our relatively short analog existence is no match for the data lifespan – or is it?

Think Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, the Great Sprit, Zeus, Odin – all alive in our minds and some of them in many people’s prayers. There was no Internet and data stream to track them – just stories and deeds – good and bad – yet live they do.

Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare – all spread through the most powerful of social networks – analog as it might have been.

And of course the Bible (in all its versions) and the Koran leave “data” trails that stretch back millennia….

As I pondered this I came across the notion of Japanese Temples being built of wood because the analog trappings around them are ephemeral but the divine spirit within (think digital) is eternal.

And there you have it – analog and digital – one dies; evaporates – the other lives on forever…whatever that might be… “I didn’t know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.” Richard Brautigan

I was reminded of the time I took my older daughter to France for her 16th birthday and we went to Pere Lachaise – the cemetery of Paris – to visit Jim Morrison’s grave – that is Jim Morrison of the Doors (my favorite group of all time). We got lost and an old man started yelling at us in French how could we so desecrate such a place by looking for a nobody when Voltaire and Moliere were buried right where we were standing….I guess Jim’s digital trail wasn’t long enough…

All of this resonates as we look at data storage issues, privacy, ownership of data – for sure but what intrigues me is the notion of immortality created simply because there is a digital record vs. the immortality created by deed and action – good and bad.

There are new services – for example, 4SquareAnd7yearsago – that were created expressly to help people track their historical data trail and aggregate any date you really wanted to remember.

In other words, if you wanted to relive last September 26, it would aggregate all your tweets and posts and sign-ins and whatevers so you could remember that you got your shoes wet in the rain or had a bad piece of sushi.

OK – I am being a bit facetious – but I hope you see my point – do we really create a better immortality of remembering someone or something of influence because we now have a digital trail? Will that become a surrogate for the myth building that has kept stories alive since the dawn of time? Are we shortchanging ourselves and our memories by linking them to Twitter?

As I think of my 33 years and I look at my photos – analog and digital – I am grateful that so much of what makes me smile is mine alone – and as I think of my two dear friends, I am comforted that I have my own memories to share and store.

I guess the bottom line is that the digital shelf does not guarantee immortality – for that you need people who love you for who you are and what you achieved.

I was inspired by my own musings (hope you don’t mind) but also by the following and its source…Listen:

“In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about.” Eric Schmidt

So as we all tweet and post and blog and upload and overload today – think about what it and you and I look like way after our analog gigs are up.

Till death do us part…

What’s your view?

Posted by David on 09/26 at 06:43 PM
Monday, August 8th, 2011

On Anonymous Posts

Do you know destroyaliens1?

Or perhaps you are acquainted with devilsevil613?

Deathtoinfidels?

Maybe you have run into myviewrules?

How about youareallidiots?

These are just some of the wonderful folks who anonymously post comments laced with hatred, vitriol, and yes even death threats all across the social web. And they do so with the full and open freedom of our digital age and without the terrible “abuse of power” that those who believe in accountability would demand and impose if they got their Neanderthal way.

Give me a break…

I have long been a foe of the kind of anonymous comments that belittle, insult, present falsehoods, insinuate, and otherwise cause personal, property or business damage.

And yes, I am aware of the important comments being shared by those too timid or afraid to speak out – and I am not being facetious here– but I am as equally aware of those who have been seriously hurt – some fatally as we sadly know – by people who hide behind the freedoms they have.

My issue – to be clear – is not for or against the freedom that should be inherent in our time – it’s about how do we make the Freedom a privilege and not an entitlement.

What got me going was a piece in Techdirt.

It’s a good piece and worth the read – more importantly, it’s a great platform for the discussion.

See what you think…

If you work for a company that has a policy – that you subscribed to and signed – that doesn’t allow you to comment to the media in any way and therefore the only way around this tyranny is pseudo name – does that equate with someone who is afraid of cyber stalkers or of death threats…no doubt from other veiled sources – or with the posts from some authoritarian country where the very act of posting can lead to torture and death?

You tell me – my opinion should be clear.

Seems to me that we have a skewed and sad view of anonymous driven by the nature of our time.  Listen:

“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.” 
Daniel J. Boorstin

The problem is that in pursuit of their 15mg of fame (thank you Bob Greenberg for that notion) too many want to be “well known” and equate a posting with some kind of celebrity status. They want to be other than they are – someone different – something different – which reminded me of a thought I had read by Wilde…listen:

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry…”  Oscar Wilde

And there you have the issue – the desire to be other – not to accept the accountability of being oneself and all that comes with it.

I feel it – there are issues I’d like to comment on that I can’t – for all kinds of reasons – some out of fear of stalking or threats, some out of appropriateness for my job and such, and some because I just plain should not.

Call me shackled if you will – or slave to injustice – I call it accountability – and maybe more…listen:

“Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.”  Frank Moore Colby

Truthfully – I am worried about being a bore but then again no one has to read this if they don’t want – and more – I am triply cognizant of participating in any forum if I don’t think I have something to add.

The good news is that the bores are easy to spot if we identify ourselves…it’s the dangerous folks I’m really worried about and remember:

“Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.”  W. S. Gilbert

So let’s give all identified skim milk the forum – by all means – but find a way to know the cream if we can’t…

What do you think?

Posted by David on 08/08 at 03:26 PM