Tag Archives: data retention
Data Retention, Protection, and Privacy
The aim of this post is to identify a few deficiencies in both data retention and data protection laws and argue that privacy advocates and government officials to defend privacy first, approaching data protection as a tool rather than an end-in-itself. Continue reading
Review: Delete – The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009) is a powerful effort to rethink basic principles of computing that threaten humanity’s epistemological nature. In essence, he tries get impress upon us the importance of adding ‘forgetfulness’ to digital data collection process. The book is masterfully presented. It draws what are arguably correct theoretical conclusions (we need to get a lot better at deleting data to avoid significant normative, political, and social harms) while drawing absolutely devastatingly incorrect technological solutions (key: legislating ‘forgetting’ into all data formats and OSes). In what follows, I sketch the aim of the book, some highlights, and why the proposed technological solutions are dead wrong. Continue reading
Google Dashboard – Does It Need Another Name?
While my complaint might be seem a bit trivial – call Google Dashboard something distinctive – I really think that for the end-user it is critical for distinctive feature sets to hold distinctive names. Why not call it ‘Global Data and Privacy Settings’ or something along those lines? At least then you’d find it as the top hit on a Google search… Continue reading
Thinking About a ‘Privacy Commons’
I’ve been bothered by some of the models and diagrams used to express the ‘privacy commons’ because I think that while they’re great academic pieces, they’re nigh useless for the public at large. When I use the term ‘public at large’ and ‘useless’ what I am driving at is this: the creative commons is so good because it put together a VERY simple system that lets people quickly understand what copyright is being asserted over particular works. A privacy commons will live (or, very possibly, die) on its ease of access and use. Continue reading
