Data Privacy Day

Yeah, so it's DPD again. And today it's more important than ever to be aware of data privacy issues. In our society, as it is today, we're rapidly approaching total populace monitoring. We're not quite there yet, but it's just a matter of time.

Of course, it can be argued that not everyone will have to worry too much about being "monitored". Authorities, the government and cynics tend to say: "If you don't have anything to hide, you don't need to worry". Well, is this completely true? I would disagree.

A lot of the sensitive (and often, very personal) data stored about individuals online can be used against private citizens without the intent of criminal persecution what-so-ever. An individual does not strictly have to be a criminal to be monitored. It can be any one of us. And who's to say that law-abiding citizens won't be persecuted for reasons other than direct judicial causes?

The major problem(s) with national surveillance is often: "who has the right to disclose this information?" and "who determines what parts of this information can be utilized as judicial evidence?" and last but not least "to whom can this information be disclosed?". These questions worry me.

Of course, it would be argued that ALL crime should be fought with the tools we have readily available. Fair enough. But WHO has the right to pry into such sensitive information? What do they have as a legal-inscentive to use this information for? And for whom can the person(s) responsible for gathering specified informatiom disclose this information to?

Time will show...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Privacy_Day

Google scraps "lock-in" effect

I just love it when internal Google-projects go public. It's a thrill-ride every time, because of their ingenious engineers.

This time round, it's all about moving data in and out of Google applications. They see it as only fair to be able to bring your own generated data into the "Googleplex", or migrate data out of it, for usage elsewhere.

Thus, they started "The Data Liberation Front" as a support-group for this task.

The engineers have also started a blog to make it possible to send in "liberation-requests" (what type of data to liberate, and why it should be liberated).

One of the main reasons why Google created this group, is to eliminate the "lock-in" effect in their products. To put it bluntly, they're ACTUALLY GIVING YOU THE ABILITY TO LEAVE GOOGLE AS A SERVICE-PROVIDER!

Yes, they either have ENORMOUS trust in their user-base, or they just really believe in their product-lines (I think it's the latter). And this is THE reason why I favour Google over other proprietary web-service providers. They have always tried to keep their framework as open as possible.

Heck, I even remember a period when they hosted (what I like to call) "hackathon"-servers. Providing a LEGAL method of network-hacking/-penetration, just for the fun of it (or whas it... :P)

I consider Google Inc to be the ONLY big-time computer/web-technology giant that tries to comply with the saying: "the true meaning of hack".

Link:

http://www.dataliberation.org/

http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/