Topic: Privacy
In the future consumers may have lower costs for services they demand but at the cost of their privacy and attention, while private enterprise will benefit from a wide variety of customers and more expansive relationships with those customers. Martin Geddes imagines the public will soon be ready to receive billing and customer service notices via pay-per-moment options added to Twitter or other social media instead of through today's minute-based telephony.
Nearly every day the news media carries stories about how much information the government compiles about the average citizen. As Daniel J. Solove writes in his new book Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, many people say, "If you've got nothing to hide, you shouldn't worry about government surveillance." However, Solove argues that it should not be necessary to choose security over privacy. He discusses the history of privacy law and reviews the problems of technology and privacy.
Deborah Estrin talks about GIS tracing of individual activity, it's fascinating usefulness, and potential privacy drawbacks. She assesses how combining tools such as location trace and environmental data with a wellness focus can inform public policy and personal decision making. According to Estrin experience sampling can yield data points which help patients to adjust and cope with medications. On the other hand, these living records can be intimate traces almost impossible to erase.
John Heilemann talks with FCC chair Julius Genachowski about the FCC's policy-making positions and challenges for the 21st century; including spectrum reapportionment, net neutrality, keeping up with the spectrum requirements of mobile broadband, global competitiveness, and "keeping the pipes open for innovators and consumer choice."
Given that amount of digital data available about people and businesses, users are discovering that they have no way to control and correct information about themselves. The Personal Data Ecosystem is a project meant to help create ways for better digital management. Three members of the PDE community, Paul Trevethick, Kaliya Hamlin, and Drummond Reed discuss the status of their activities, emphasizing some of the technical aspects of how to assist businesses and individuals manage their digital lives.
The Mobile Sensing Group at Dartmouth College is helping lead the way in turning the everyday mobile phone into an open global mobile sensing platform for personal, social-nets and societal-scale sensing. Led by faculty member Andrew Campbell, the group is working to be involved in new ways to use mobile devices. He gives an overview of the work carried out at Dartmouth with his colleague Tanzeem Choudhury.
Why did that visitor come to your site? The answer will always surprise you. Avinash Kaushik explains that the "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" (HIPPO) often overrides expert analysis. He argues that qualitative and quantitative research, traditionally separate, are far more effective when combined, as unified web analytics reveal what's important to the individual user. He suggests we stay in perpetual beta, because nothing on the web is ever really final.
"Move fast, be bold and take risks" is what Mark Zuckerberg tries to hammer home every day. A series of news-making revelations about Facebook's strategies broke at this talk. Facebook is going to build platforms to offer access to it's 500 million users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and John Batelle of Federated Media Publishing and answered frank and challenging questions. The result was a cascade of new strategic decisions about "all the awesome stuff" that Facebook is launching.
Stormy Peters of the GNOME Foundation makes a call for the development of free, open-source web services in which complete data rights are maintained by the user. Noting cases of data lock-outs, or re-use of user data by service providers, she calls for close examination of user agreements. In this short and earthy appeal, Peters says "Don't give away your future choices with the choices you make today."
Dr. Moira Gunn chats with author, Bill Bryson about his new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. In it, he examines how common household items have transformed the way people lived, and how houses have evolved around certain items.
