It’s nice in the movies that the bomb always has an LED to tick away at the clock and blue and red cables to give you a fifty – fifty choice.
The big question we have to face in the future is how much choice do we really have? That is the point, IMHO, of Commerce Department General Council Cameron Kerry’s discussion with the Wall Street Journal http://on.wsj.com/elSIHC about establishing a privacy office.
However the issue is not a US centric discussion. It is about the use of web. Much to the chagrin of nay sayers, Not only is the Web alive and well, it is going to become even more media saavy. But the question is will we have the ability to be anonymous on the web.
How many times has a website asked you to enable cookies? Imagine that you phone had the ability to report your information in some degree to these sites independent of the information your shared? These abilities we have to speak about when speaking about privacy. Do Location Based Services represent an opportunity or an invasion of privacy.
With the government’s hopes of medical database the differentiation of persons and data are contemplated. From a statistical point of view you can accomplish the goal of protecting the individual by never enabling the unique to be queried. Now the question is will the same rules work when trying to add LBS into the mix?
The reality is that LBS wants the unique… They want to catch your eye as you walking by starbucks. The carriers are already paying for mobile ads that target your if your are not on their system. Now imagine that they have that refinement as you pass their place.
Let me add to the mix, let me have a bell go off (after all media is part of Media in HTML5). Now the cat gets to know when the mice are out.
These kind of issues are not what was foreseen in any telecommunications act. It does not represent problems that have equivalents to my knowledge in any large scale in the past.
It represents our future.
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