Yule Heibel's Library tagged privacy →  View Popular, Search in Google

As an aside: actually, there are people working on the idea of users owning their data - and selling it to companies.
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The bad news is that people haven't taken control of the data that's being collected and traded about them. The good news is that -- in a quite literal sense -- simply thinking differently about this advertising business can change the way that it works. After all, if you take these companies at their word, they exist to serve users as much as to serve their clients.
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atlantic_cities privacy advertising

Excellent summary of some of the issues around online privacy, transparency, and - lately - re-anonymization. Interesting roadblocks ahead, too:

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However, there are powerful opponents to this kind of anonymity software, and they aren't online advertisers; they're security agencies. Simply put, the same technology that allows people to maintain their privacy online also makes criminals tougher to catch. As such, there is a push to limit anonymity on the Web.

A perfect example is Research In Motion's BlackBerry. For years, big businesses have purchased the devices in droves because of their strong encryption, which makes messages sent from BlackBerrys much more difficult for outside parties to monitor. But now, a host of countries are threatening to ban BlackBerry services precisely because RIM keeps the data too private.
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Interesting article by Steven B Johnson on conceptions of privacy and how they have evolved through internet communication.
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What we do online is something quite different: we curate our private lives for public exposure. We don't serve up a raw feed of our existence. We edit out certain bits, and highlight others. We fiddle with the privacy controls at Facebook. We define the circles of exposure.

There used to be a large crevasse separating the intimate space of private life and what's exposed by the klieg lights of fame. But in the Facebook age, that crevasse has broadened out into a valley between the realms of privacy and celebrity, and we are starting to camp out there and get the lay of the land. What happens in the valley should not be mistaken for fame. When you sift through the birthday party pictures of a friend of a friend, you are not mistaking her for Lady Gaga. That isn't her 15 minutes of fame. That is your private life colliding that of a person you could imagine being friends or colleagues with, but aren't. Call it the valley of intimate strangers.

The fascinating and troublesome thing about the valley is that the rules of engagement there are not clearly defined, and it's likely that they will stay undefined. Some of us talk about our relationships online; some allude to them indirectly; some keep them behind a cone of silence. Jarvis was so eager to blog about his cancer diagnosis that he felt almost restricted when he had to wait for his son to return from camp so he didn't find out via a tweet that his dad was sick. But at the same time, Jarvis draws the line at talking about his personal finances. ("l'll blog about my penis," he says, "but somehow it makes me uncomfortable talking about how much money I make — I'm still too American, I guess.")
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... In the old days, life was set by default to be private unless you happened to be famous. Now, we have to choose whether we want to venture into the valley of intimate strangers, and how exactly we want to live there. That requires a k

steven_b_johnson privacy facebook

Excellent critique by Danah Boyd, which brings class issues and other questions of power into the equation.
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Facebook was originally a counterpublic, a public that people turned to because they didn’t like the publics that they had accessed to. What’s happening now is ripping the public that was created to shreds and people’s discomfort stems from that.
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facebook danah_boyd commenting privacy socialmedia

"...rough unedited crib of the actual talk" delivered by Danah Boyd at March 2010 SXSW conference.
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Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It's about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.
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privacy danah_boyd socialcritique

Article by Simson Garfinkel on "Protecting an inalienable right in the age of Facebook," i.e., privacy.

Privacy matters, as Garfinkel eloquently argues:
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Privacy matters. Data privacy protects us from electronic crimes of opportunity--identity theft, stalking, even little crimes like spam. Privacy gives us the right to meet and speak confidentially with others--a right that's crucial for democracy, which requires places for political ideas to grow and mature. Absolute privacy, also known as solitude, gives us to space to grow as individuals. Who could learn to write, draw, or otherwise create if every action, step, and misstep were captured, immortalized, and evaluated? And the ability to conduct transactions in privacy protects us from both legal and illegal discrimination.
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But Garfinkel argues that it's not the case that merely "opting out" of "some aspects of modern society" (i.e., abstinence) should be the way to secure it. You should have a right to privacy, and still be able to participate in online activity or electronic/ digital transactions.
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Now, however, abstinence no longer guarantees privacy.
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In this environment, the real problem is not that your information is out there; it's that it's not protected from misuse. In other words, privacy problems are increasingly the result of poor security practices.
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privacy security online_privacy simson_garfinkel

Mobile City asks all the right questions (in this case, about video glasses, a visual sort of iPod or Walkman device). Eg.: "...it’s another addition to the array of media to shield off private media consumption in public places. Just like the Walkman/iPod earbuds privatized personal music listening, these glasses may do something similar for watching video/TV. The same ol’ question arises again: what does this mean for publicness of places?"

What does it mean for the publicness of places? Or, alternately, what does it mean for polite anonymity, for protective anonymity? At what point does privacy become just a big too ...aggressive and impolite for civic intercourse?

anonymity cities privacy public_space technology

I've had this open in a browser tab for days, wanting to bookmark it, but hesitating because I found it impossible to describe, tag, or in any way categorize. So, let's just say it's "wow" and one of the best recaps-cum-predictions amongst the blogs. Read it.

architecture cities cloud_computing creatives economics ideas predictions privacy reference wow