Thanks for this talk – if you *ever* come to Vancouver, do let me know! Would love to chat more. Also, glad you finally moved to WordPress! I noticed a big change in the layout and design of your blog, much cleaner!

Best wishes

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/03/krakozhia.html

Caught in a crack in the system, without speaking english, led to one man having to lead a very public existence all of a sudden. BOH.

Thinking back to what you’ve said, going back at least as far as ETech 2004, is it a fair argument that all the sociological research and advocacy is basically not going to change what actually gets built, particularly at engineer-driven places like Google? It might put out a few fires after the products launch or the default settings get changed, but I’m pessimistic that it will affect the design and testing process. Right now it’s more like parallel conversations: you can make your call to arms, and it will generate lots of discussion and good ideas, but it’s not going to penetrate workforces hired to grok data, not people.

In short, I get the feeling that you’re going to spend a lot of your writing and speaking time on post-mortems and accident reports, each of which will push out the limits of acceptable practice with regard to user data a bit further. And I’m not sure if you’re going to enjoy that.

One other comment, if I may be so bold. I gazed down through your ‘tags’ for this blog, and I looked for the tag which was used the least – it is ‘ideas’ with only a single blog entry. C’mon now, you can do better than that. Try starting, by listening to Norman Bodek at the Lean Blog dot org site. Norman Bodek reckons that employees in the US have less than 10 ideas, every 10 years. Compared to the companies in Japan, where they have maybe 1000 new ideas each year.

http://www.leanblog.org/podcast/audio-podcast/

Another thing, that might serve to put this into a ‘social’ context, of how people work together and interact, was a recent scanadl in Ireland, where patient X-rays go un-looked at. The Irish Times – Friday, March 12, 2010 featured a story about hospitals in Ireland, ‘System ensures services go to those who shout loudest’. Anyhow, I don’t know how this relates back to privacy. But I know it involves something social, on some level. I hope to see the ‘ideas’ tag used a bit more often. Over and out. BOH.

You got me thrown off my group blog once one time, for getting way off topic. Howard Rheingold said I was bang outa line, outa line completely. I was collaborating with him and some other fine folks on the cooperation commons blog. You can read the particular offending blog post of mine here:

http://www.cooperationcommons.com/cooperationcommons/blog/brian-ohanlon/119-mining-projects-online

It was in reponse to an Apophenia entry dated February 5th 2007, about those walled gardens. I went to a lot of work to root out that old post, so I hope you appreciate it. The memory of Howard’s stinging criticism is still vivid in my mind though. No, he was fighting a losing battle in terms of keeping me on topic. My own personal blog is available if you click on my name above. I notice you move about Havard circles nowadays. I was watching the PBS documentary, Faces of America, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. today. His interaction with one member of a native tribe was interesting. Asked to offer a DNA sample to do a full genome mapping, to figure out here origins, she refused. Apparently, she asked her tribe, and they said it was their history too – it was not hers to give. I like what Elizabeth Warren is doing, in looking at credit references for individual people too – it seems as though, defaults in one credit line can trigger same in others etc. All very weird and wonderful ways, to look at what privacy might be in 2010. I mailed you a link to the Bulletin Board history documentary series to view online. I found it interesting, one contributor said he set up a ‘gay and lesbian’ bbs for the Washington area in 1986. Many people at that time, he said, thought they were the only ones in their area. Is that some sort of dimension to do privacy also?

Brian O’ Hanlon

Unilateral reach … hmm… Does it really? Who has their hands on the data, who allows use of the data via public API’s, who is it who states the terms and conditions over those public API’s, who regularly announces deals with industry partners for piping data over those API’s? Companies don’t already have mature schemes in place for data cleansing once those data have gone beyond the bounds of their systems? Sorry, technical fixes abound and are standard practice. Too, industry standards are quite common. It’s only a question of whether people want to do right by their end users, try to reach some common ground, or whether they’d rather stick with the broken approach we have now because it’s in their self-interest. Ayala up above has it pretty close to right. “Imaginary conditions…” That’s funny – this suggest you are opposed to other efforts by these very same web properties to institute other standards?

I don’t see how you can be opposed to industry taking responsibility to fix its broken technological framework and for Danah’s position. Or are you opposed to her critique? Danah indicates she’s most fond of people who debate her. Given that you appear to be against users controling their data once it’s made its way past the first layer of API’s, and thus against end users, I gather she wouldn’t like what you’re saying. Then again, she says she’s an activist (though her position here is not) and you seem to express a similar outlook (though your position in this conversation is pretty close to reactionary).

Your straightforward privacy fix, which, after hundreds of words, you still haven’t begun to specify, rests on the tidy premise of “a few of the largest social media web properties” having unilateral reach into the rest of the web and all its “interrelated piece parts.” They don’t. Nor should we wish them to.

The Internet is a medium of many, subject to negotiation by many. Were it a cogwheel of industry, Tor and WikiLeaks and bittorrent and Skype would be ‘fixed’ instead of thriving. The imaginary conditions you attach to all web-based interpersonal disclosure don’t even cover the conversation we’re having now.