Conches

Annonymity and Privacy

Annonymity is to Privacy as
Democracy is to Life Style as
Responsibility is to Choice

Why GMail and Maybe Google in General, Is Scary

First, I use gmail.  It works really well.  Nice way to aggregate all my email accounts.  I can put it on my Blackberry.  Good web interface.  Great search.  Etc.

The problem is, and this is old news but I wanted to say it out loud, Google reads your email.   Not just what you send, but everything that is sent to you.  It might be that this is only limited to what you read in the web interface.  Google would likely dispute this but their argument could only be semantic.  When you read an email in the Google web interface, it provides you with a sidebar of advertisements that are selected based on their relevance to the content in your email. 

A nasty moment in time or Evidence that we don't live in a democracy

There are some very scary trends that are surfacing:

Corporate Media Consolidation

 

Coupled with

 

Telecommunications providers moving to become UNREGULATED Information Service Providers. So far cable, DSL and Broadband over powerline are classified this way.  Here is a quotation from a Stanford Law article   that discusses exactly what an Information Service is:

3. Information service: “[T]he offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications.” 47 U.S.C. §§ 153(20). Unlike cable service, a bi-directional interaction characterizes information service, where users not only receive, but also send and create information. Providers of information services are users of telecommunications and are not subject to regulations as telecommunications carriers. Information services remain largely unregulated.

ALSO

 

Convergence - here is a quotation from an article on Network Neutrilty by the Center for Digital Democracy 

...fundamental changes that the Bells and cable monopolies are seeking in their quest to monetize the Internet.  If we permit the Internet to become a medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal consumption rather than civic-related communications, we will face the political consequences for decades to come.  Unless we push back, the "brandwashing" of America will have serious consequences for both our culture and global society.

Why are the Bells and cable now aggressively advancing such plans?  It's because our media system is undergoing a major transformation with the arrival of the long-awaited "convergence" of communications technologies.  What the phone and cable companies see as their potential lucrative "triple play" by providing us with video, voice and data communications, will soon be flowing into our TV's, PC's and mobile devices (such as cell phones or iPods).  All of these many billions of bits will be delivered over the telephone and cable lines, whose owners have successfully lobbied the Feds so they can impose a near monopoly over the delivery of residential broadband service.

Coupled With...

Public Data

In my mind, the question of  data standards has become far more interesting than database schema (or even  application integration).  Because the best tools that we use to manage our data allow us to aggregate as well as publish data in a  way that can completely seperate content from form, we can now talk about data  in terms of what descrete items do we need.  Additionally, data standards for  tings like person records no longer need a group of people to sit in a room to  agree on what fields represent the data standard and in what format."