Guilty By Association

dmf writes "News.com is running a little piece about Microsoft's forays into researching aspects of social computing. With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links, political groups finding potential donor lists, marketing departments finding affinity groups, and other easily imagined data mining opportunities could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?"

Comments

Other mappable relationship environments?

[nokilli]

You mean like this? Won't be long before /. is mined for this data, regardless of what the robots.txt file says about it.

Security

[Ctrl-Z]

All I can say is that if you transmit private information over an insecure channel, you should not be surprised at the results.

No problem

[Orien]

That is why you don't put REAL personal info in your $CHAT_PROGRAM profile. As long as it thinks that I was born on 1/1/1900 and live on 123 main st. Beverly Hills 90210, I'm not worried about data mining. :)

If it can be used at all, ...

[burgburgburg]

information always will be used against you when convenient.

That's why there should be privacy laws saying that information is non-usable unless explicitly permitted. Right now, it's bass-ackwards.

Being watched is inevitable

[clacour]

Being watched and tracked (and having "privacy" essentially disappear) is pretty near inevitable, for the same reasons that patents (both hard and soft) are increasingly a bad idea, and open-source software is inevitable.

Technology has marched on, and the world has changed (again).

All the trends in technology over the last 10 years say that privacy as we have known it, is headed for extinction. Cameras that get smaller and smaller, remote controlled robots, hacking into wireless LANs, PLUS all the electronic interactions (like RFID) that are coming, PLUS computers getting cheaper by the day... This all adds up to privacy basically being impossible.

Proprietary software is doomed, because the Internet made the level of interactivity that open-source software needs possible. For exactly the same reasons that the medieval guilds (with their proprietary methods for things like ironsmithing and glassblowing) were doomed once the movable-type printing press was invented, proprietary software cannot compete. In the near term (5-10 years), it will still have a solid space in niche markets, but I'm not even sure that will last. It certainly isn't going to last in mainstream software arenas like OSes and databases.

But that same increase in processing power and decrease in communication delay means that doing things like examining every electronic transaction that someone performs (and building a detailed profile of their life from it), is not only beginning to be possible, it's very nearly inevitable. Even the most paranoid of you out there (and on Slashdot, the percentage of paranoids is a good bit higher than average) would not want the sort of draconian methods that would be required to prevent it. (No computers and no networks, for instance.)

The proper solution, I think, is to change our culture, so that it doesn't matter that someone knows the kinks in my soul.

I am mostly connected to reality, so I'm not holding my breath on this cultural shift, but I really only see three possibilities:

We turn Luddite and roll back the clock technologically. (Not likely to happen voluntarily by most of this audience, but some of the non-technical types turning Luddite IS all too possible.)

Privacy gets moved to the same status as apprenticeship - it's something that existed historically, and it's occasionally useful for analogies, but it's not part of anybody's life anymore. This could either go the Japanese route (I believe the usual phrase is something like "Nakedness is frequently seen and never noticed." In other words, commenting on someone's quirks is far more shameful than having said quirks to begin with.), or simply an open acceptance that other people do things differently than you.

The third possibility is the one that worries me. That's a totalitarian society (probably theocratic) that uses this information to control people to a degree that has heretofore been unbelievable. I don't think such a state would last very long at all, but the creation and destruction of it would get really, really ugly.

The US is the only culture I have extensive first-hand experience with. I would strongly prefer to see us go to option 2B (taking the attitude that you can live your life any way you want as long as you don't hurt me).

That fits wonderfully with our stated national beliefs. It's an absolutely lousy fit with what our behavior says we believe. The behavior (IMO) says we urgently want #3.

That's the big reason the 3rd option worries me. I can very easily see a theocratic state as an intermediate step to the live-and-let-live one. If anyone has any practical, pragmatic suggestions for how to create such a cultural shift (one suitable for a total absence of privacy), speak up now, because the situation could get critical within 10 years, and is almost guaranteed to get critcal in 20.