The Coming Privacy Backlash

The “social” media revolution has everyone letting it all hang out all over the “open web,” so it should come as no surprise that the NSA is taking advantage of all this voluntary disclosure of personal information:

“I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.” So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop’s dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Looks like News Corp isn’t the only one to see the data mining potential.

There is a privacy backlash coming that is going to throw cold water on MySpace, Web 2.0, and all the related frothing over anything with the word “social.”

Tags: privacy, invasion, social architecture, resistance, wirearchy

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David Weinberger reporting from The Annenberg Centre’s conference on hyperlinking and society:

Jay Rosen says that returns to Raymond Williams who says in Culture and Society:

There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses. People are unique, but you can address them as a mass.

The Age of Mass Media, says Jay, is about the art and science of seeing people as masses. But today all these ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart. They’re not as effective. People don’t stand for it any more. So now we have to learn how to see people not as a mass but as a public, a community, knowledge producers.

Links connect us horizontally, not just up and down. "All the professions that specialize in seeing people as masses, or as the market, are having to contend with a world where horizontal communication is so much more effective." Often, if people can meet each other, they don’t need the mass world, says Jay.

And, as a blogger, he says, through the "magic of links" he was able to talk about the press without having to go through the filter of the press. "So, for me linking has been powerfully associated with intellectual freedom.

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Tags: horizontality, hyperlinks, hyperlinking, wirearchy

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House passes telecommunications bill

‘Net neutrality’ dominates debate

WASHINGTON (AP) — Legislation to open cable TV markets to more competition, possibly saving consumers hundreds of dollars a year, passed the House Thursday.

The biggest telecommunications legislation in a decade, approved 321-101, would make it easier for telephone companies to enter the subscription television market. A national franchise process would replace the current system where potential providers must negotiate contracts municipality by municipality, sometimes taking months and years.

Tags: net neutrality, competition, television over IP

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