“Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.”
“No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of “free.” It’s in Facebook’s economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it’s in Facebook’s interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would’ve just turned everyone’s content public automatically without asking.”
January 31, 2010 at 11:42pm
0 notes
Written by the ever reliable Danny O’Brien:
“Of course, the iPad (sorry, just “iPad”) is different because of the lockdown. Even if we had the resources to write something for it, we can’t without Apple’s whim. But I remain confident that the same forces that wash away proprietariness in general purpose computers in the past will eat away at the iPad. Maybe it will be like Windows, where the system itself becomes more open just by virtue of a disinterest in its owners in keeping it closed. My own, perhaps overgenerous feeling is the App Store is not an artifact of Jobs’ control-freak mentality, but a paranoid reaction to iPhone OS’s lack of decent sandboxing; that paranoia may be whittled away slowly.”
“Or it could be like the Mac, which became more open out of competition with more other open systems. Closed costs money to maintain, and open has more features. It may be that the iPad gives up its closed nature when faced with competitors that take its lead, and run faster and more alluringly than even Apple can keep up with. That seems less likely, to me: Apple knows its strengths, and the open world is so far struggling to emulate its aesthetic integrity and hardware integration. Closed costs money, but also lets Apple create new revenue streams for it and its partners. Open has more features, so Apple concentrates and creating a few features very well. Well, shrug: we have competition. That’s good. It’s not like the other proprietary behemoths are doing a good job mimicking Apple either.”
“Is it naive to think that things you post on the internet are really “private?” Many people say it is, but that was core to the value proposition that Facebook grew up on.”
January 26, 2010 at 12:27pm
0 notes
“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”
January 19, 2010 at 12:15am
0 notes
Guardian piece from 5 March 2009, with some hardware examples
“Who has the ear of the White House when it comes to tech issues?”
“This look inside the White House comes courtesy of the Obama administration, which (eventually) released its visitor logs to the public after public pressure from good government groups. The Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government, has done a nice job of making the raw data accessible and searchable online, and Ars Technica ran through the visitor logs to see who was visiting President Obama’s senior technology staffers.”
“Consider this comment left by one of our readers in response to Zuckerberg’s statement.”
“As a person who is being stalked for being an innocent bystander in a child custody case, I can tell you that losing my choices over what is searchable or not is huge. I have nothing to hide nor be ashamed of but the loss of choice for my privacy has hit home in a poignant manner.”
“The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will on Thursday launch a website hosting hundreds of sets of data - including previously unreleased information - about the capital, as part of a new scheme intended to encourage people to create “mashups” of data to boost the city’s transparency and accountability.”
January 11, 2010 at 11:43pm
0 notes
This interview might not be genuine. But it is plausible…
“According to (Zuckerberg) the age of Privacy is Over. This is the quote that is just STUNNING”
“we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it”
“He could have said “I decided” and he as the CEO of a social network has the power to “decide” the fate of the privately shared amongst friends in the context of this particular social network for millions of people. It makes you wonder if this one platform has to much power and in this example makes the case for a distributed social network where people have their own autonomy to share their information on their own terms and not trust that the company running a platform will not expose their information.”
1.
