The only way I see reasonable expectation of privacy is if a law is specifically passed that says that you have it
Wow, that's a very strict interpretation of the "reasonableness" test.
From the article: "your vehicle can upload its position to road authorities, so they can use variable road tolls as a traffic management tool--raising the price on busy stretches during rush hours. How do you like the notion that someone somewhere always has the position (and speed) of your car logged?"
Significant privacy concerns emerge with the development of such technologies - the flow of personal information in the context of highway travel will be altered. I've written about this, for those who are interested.
This is a major threat to the privacy of personal information in the context of highway travel. And very similar initiatives exist to install such systems on American cars & highways. I've been engaged in research on DSRC and the design of Vehicle Safety Communication technologies. Much more info can be found here.
The issues and concerns raised here relate directly to an informal seminar I attended yesterday with Prof. Sherry Turkle of MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Prof. Turkle spoke about her research for her forthcoming book on "evocative objects" - technologies we use to think with, to think about ourselves and our relationships. Her work has focused on "relational artifacts," robots designed to forge relationships with people - especially useful for both children and the elderly. Examples include the therapy robot Paro (a baby seal) and Hasbro/iRobot's My Real Baby.
During our discussion, important value and ethical issues arose in the design and use of such "relational robots." These robots are meant to create bonds and simulate "authentic" relationships. They react to voices, track their owner's eyes, respond and project emotions, and so on. Yet, they remain robots - all these actions and reactions are programmed - pre-determined. So, how do the designers decide what emotions to program and which to omit? In an effort to be realistic, My Real Baby gets happy as well as sad. If you bounce her when she's happy, she gets more happy; if you bounce her when she's fussy, her fussiness only increases. How should she react, then, if she is abused? It is not hard to imagine a child (especially one who is herself a victim of abuse) to violently shake, strike or otherwise "abuse" the doll. How should this evocative object respond? Should she show pain? Begin to cry? Eventually "pass out" or even "die" if the abuse continues? How "real" should the robot be in order to create an "authentic" relationship?
[In the end, the designers wanted the doll/robot to react as a child would, with pain and sadness. However, the company's lawyers stepped in and were concerned that any type of response by the doll might encourage further abuse (stimulus-response theory), and they didn't want to be accused of actually encouraging abusive behavior. In the end, the doll simply did not react to abuse.]
Other ethical dilemmas related to the design of such robots included whether they should be capable of deception or betrayal, two common features of human relationships. Or, should they "die." On one hand, the experience of death as part of the life cycle is an important part of psychological development and would add to the "authenticity" of the relationship. On the other hand, one of the benefits of these robots seems to be the avoidance of the emtional damage that can happen when a "real" companion (whether a human friend, or even a companion dog) dies.
I agree. While its easy to poke fun at what appears to be yet another Internet-related French identity crisis, there are large issues at play here, including the hegemony of the West in general, and the United States in particular, in the creation & distribution of content on the Internet, the pervasiveness of Google, and the general implications of the Googlization of more and more of the world's information.
Doesn't the patent office earn revenue based on the number of patent applications and patents granted? If so, then its in their own best interest to accepta as many applications as possible - and to grant as many patents - even the undeserving ones.
responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses
Nice. Let's just hide the data from the person its associated with, but allow everyone else to see/use it. I wish ChoicePoint had this option.
What the lede of this story doesn't tell us is that this "Imagining the Internet" project is merely rehashing predictions of the Internet from the 1990s, not what today's thinkers imagine what the Internet will be in the future.
It's interesting that the main AP story (picked up by the Washington Post, LA Times, and others) label the perpetrators as "hackers" who "penetrated the company's computer network." Nowhere in the original MSNBC article is there mention of the criminals hacking into a system. Rather, that reports indicates that "suspects had posed as a ChoicePoint client to gain access to the firm's rich consumer databases." Changing the story into some malicious hacker who infiltrated their computer seems to take ChoicePoint off the hook (except for thin database security), when they need to be held to task for not properly vetting the companies they contract with and allow access to their data.
Slashdot Mirror
And you think M$FT is building this for philanthropic purposes?
or do you think it requires a lot more than a semi-qualified community to approach the problem?
Gee, that's not a loaded question, eh?
That pretty much sums up the problem here: design is architecture and architecture is design.
The only way I see reasonable expectation of privacy is if a law is specifically passed that says that you have it Wow, that's a very strict interpretation of the "reasonableness" test.
Significant privacy concerns emerge with the development of such technologies - the flow of personal information in the context of highway travel will be altered. I've written about this, for those who are interested.
and it baffles me that this is a /. article......yawn....
Why is this a /. article? It was in the MSM 24 hours ago.....
To see what this might look like, check out this page from a Berkeley student working on 3D city modeling.
Hell, I submitted this same story 3 hours earlier and it got rejected. Must be my breath or something...
This is a major threat to the privacy of personal information in the context of highway travel. And very similar initiatives exist to install such systems on American cars & highways. I've been engaged in research on DSRC and the design of Vehicle Safety Communication technologies. Much more info can be found here.
My Honda Civic has a black box to record crash data, but $100 million space craft don't. Um, duh.
During our discussion, important value and ethical issues arose in the design and use of such "relational robots." These robots are meant to create bonds and simulate "authentic" relationships. They react to voices, track their owner's eyes, respond and project emotions, and so on. Yet, they remain robots - all these actions and reactions are programmed - pre-determined. So, how do the designers decide what emotions to program and which to omit? In an effort to be realistic, My Real Baby gets happy as well as sad. If you bounce her when she's happy, she gets more happy; if you bounce her when she's fussy, her fussiness only increases. How should she react, then, if she is abused? It is not hard to imagine a child (especially one who is herself a victim of abuse) to violently shake, strike or otherwise "abuse" the doll. How should this evocative object respond? Should she show pain? Begin to cry? Eventually "pass out" or even "die" if the abuse continues? How "real" should the robot be in order to create an "authentic" relationship?
[In the end, the designers wanted the doll/robot to react as a child would, with pain and sadness. However, the company's lawyers stepped in and were concerned that any type of response by the doll might encourage further abuse (stimulus-response theory), and they didn't want to be accused of actually encouraging abusive behavior. In the end, the doll simply did not react to abuse.]
Other ethical dilemmas related to the design of such robots included whether they should be capable of deception or betrayal, two common features of human relationships. Or, should they "die." On one hand, the experience of death as part of the life cycle is an important part of psychological development and would add to the "authenticity" of the relationship. On the other hand, one of the benefits of these robots seems to be the avoidance of the emtional damage that can happen when a "real" companion (whether a human friend, or even a companion dog) dies.
I agree. While its easy to poke fun at what appears to be yet another Internet-related French identity crisis, there are large issues at play here, including the hegemony of the West in general, and the United States in particular, in the creation & distribution of content on the Internet, the pervasiveness of Google, and the general implications of the Googlization of more and more of the world's information.
Doesn't the patent office earn revenue based on the number of patent applications and patents granted? If so, then its in their own best interest to accepta as many applications as possible - and to grant as many patents - even the undeserving ones.
Yeah, becuase Google's personal data collection/storage policies are sooo much better.
responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses
Nice. Let's just hide the data from the person its associated with, but allow everyone else to see/use it. I wish ChoicePoint had this option.
How did this story get approved?!?
What the lede of this story doesn't tell us is that this "Imagining the Internet" project is merely rehashing predictions of the Internet from the 1990s, not what today's thinkers imagine what the Internet will be in the future.
It's interesting that the main AP story (picked up by the Washington Post, LA Times, and others) label the perpetrators as "hackers" who "penetrated the company's computer network." Nowhere in the original MSNBC article is there mention of the criminals hacking into a system. Rather, that reports indicates that "suspects had posed as a ChoicePoint client to gain access to the firm's rich consumer databases." Changing the story into some malicious hacker who infiltrated their computer seems to take ChoicePoint off the hook (except for thin database security), when they need to be held to task for not properly vetting the companies they contract with and allow access to their data.
Wonderful - now with only a few keystrokes I can ensure that capitalism is better served through our computing efforts. Yay!