"Reality Mining" Resets the Privacy Debate

An anonymous reader sends us to the NYTimes for a sobering look at the frontiers of "collective intelligence," also called in the article "reality mining." These techniques go several steps beyond the pedestrian version of "data mining" with which the Pentagon and/or DHS have been flirting. The article profiles projects at MIT, UCLA, Google, and elsewhere in networked sensor research and other forms of collective intelligence. "About 100 students at MIT agreed to completely give away their privacy to get a free smartphone. 'Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who's nearby.' ... Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. ... 'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,' Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.'"

Comments

Re:Privacy as a recent phenomenon

[Score Whore]

That's kind of a bad example, many cultures have had no problem with nudity.

Could you please define "cultures" for me? I'm thinking that on one hand you are viewing each little tribe wandering in the wilderness as a distinct culture, even though each one consists of a few hundred individuals at most. And if you stuck them all in a jar and shook it you'd not be able to take the mixture and separate them back into their original "cultures" by examining their behaviors. On the other hand you're placing the entirety of the United States, Canada, Mexico, all of Europe into the same culture.

Christianity and western culture is really fucked up when it concerns nudity and sexuality when you compare it against other peoples, cultures and times.

Yeah, because Indians walk around nude all day long and don't have smoke breaks, they have fuck breaks. Then there are the Chinese going back thousands of years with their phobias against clothing and monogamy. And let us not forget those whores the Japanese. Or the Arabs with their glory holes on every corner going back centuries.

Yeah it's the Western Christians who are uptight.

Many modern people are more primitive then many ancient cultures in their behaviour and ethics.

And at least one slashdot poster agrues from his conclusion. Defining primitive to mean "how western cultures act" makes it easy to castigate western cultures as primitive. Nimrod.