Can New Technology Protect Our Privacy?
from the technology-gives-and-technology-takes-away dept
With all the talk about John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program, Declan McCullough is wondering if there are ways we can use technology to better protect our privacy. Since it’s looking like technology may be used to take away our privacy, it seems to be the right time to look for ways to use it the other way, as well. He names a couple of different proposals for building systems that would better protect privacy. The question is, though, if anyone will actually use such systems, or if everyone will just go along not really caring that privacy doesn’t exist any more.
Comments on “Can New Technology Protect Our Privacy?”
Does it matter?
As the Economist pointed out some time ago, the Industrial age saw a mass migration from the country into cities, away from the low-privacy environment of villages into the anonymity of cities.
The Information age is seeing a regression into a village-like lack of privacy. Is it really so bad that people aren’t strangers anymore? How many modern writers have whined about the “alienation” of modern life?