Category Archives: Civil liberties

Data banks, data brokers and citizen bargaining power

I wrote this this morning in a notebook as a follow up to my post yesterday… and since I don’t have time to clean it up now, I thought I’d present in raw, non-sensible form. Maybe there’s some value in a rough draft:
It’s like giving our money to a bank and having them turn around [...]

Privacy, publicity and open data

This one should be a quickie.
A fascinating article came out of CNN today: “Intelligence deputy to America: Rethink privacy“.
This is a topic I’ve had opinions about for some time. My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with [...]

And you wonder why people in America are afraid of the Internet

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present to you two exhibits.
Here is Exhibit A from today’s International Herald Tribune:

In contrast (Exhibit B) we have the same exact article, but with a completely different headline:

Now, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how the latter is a more accurate or more appropriate [...]