More and more the United States and other parts of the world are introducing changes in technology both on and offline that invade the privacy of citizens. Whether it is the telecom companies looking for a monopoly on the Internet and bandwidth or selling your information to the Government, or the Government itself perpetrating these privacy violations, the world is changing and people need to be more vigilant.

Recently Sears was busted mining computer data in a classic phishing scam usually employed by black hat hackers. FaceBook was called to the carpet by nearly 100% of its users for its ill thought out Beacon marketing software that was scraping user data and sharing it with the masses. AT&T was in a huge bruhaha just last year for selling out its users to the NSA. Verizon has had privacy woes in the past, causing them to offer a way to opt out of sharing your data with third parties.

Even Robert Scoble was recently banned from FaceBook for a while after using Plaxo’s importer to scrape data form FaceBook into Plaxo. Apparently FaceBook is ok with mining their users’ data for their own nefarious purposes, but doesn’t want anyone else to do it for social network aggregation. Just this week the US Government was caught outsourcing the spying and monitoring of the US citizenry to a private corporation, making me feel even less secure than when the Government was just spying on us themselves.

So what do we do to protect ourselves with this onslaught against privacy? First we need to set a solid definition of privacy. Rights of privacy we take for granted now, that were established in an age before computers, may not apply to a digital world. Now it isn’t enough to give your family and friends access to your financial accounts and papers any more, you may also have to grant them legal access to social networks, online accounts, email and more. This creates legal and logistical issues in an age of ever changing passwords and identity theft, and changes the way we define friendship and family.

What about dynamic, open sites like social networks and other online community sites? How should they define privacy. With an ever increasing demand for social aggregator sites to consolidate your social networks into one screen, data sharing is becoming common. How much data should be shared? How should the importers and aggregators protect this data? These are all questions that need to be addressed before further laws are enacted that affect how we live and work and maintain personal space in an online age.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 10:57 am under Technology, Web2.0.

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