ORGCon was very enjoyable. In a nutshell, you could sum it up as: there’s some bad shit happening when it comes to misuse of technology, but also there’s plenty of people trying to push back. I’ll try to jot down a few of my notes and thoughts from it while they’re reasonably fresh. First up, Snowden’s keynote.
Tag: privacy
Remember this chestnut from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google at time?
“We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”
That was nearly 9 years ago.
Thinking about privacy, and what we choose to reveal and not reveal on online, following the session in Utrecht. It made me remember ‘gevulot’ from the book The Quantum Thief.
Gevulot is a form of privacy practised in the Oubliette. It involved complex cryptography and the exchange of public and private keys, to ensure that individuals only shared that information or sensory data that they wished to. Gevulot was disabled in agoras.
Gevulot comes from Hebrew meaning “boundary”.
Our team away afternoon at the start of November was a trip to The Glassroom, a ‘pop up tech store with a twist’. It was set up in a space in central London, by Mozilla and the Tactical Technology Collective, and upon entering it looks pretty similar to an Apple store. Cool white colours and ‘products’ on pedestals, even a Genius bar (though here named the Ingenius bar).
The topics of the exhibit were personal data, personal data security, and privacy. It’s purpose was to get us thinking about the kind of information that is stored about us online, who owns that data, and what they are doing with it.
We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.
— Eric Schmidt, when he was CEO of Google
I like the idea of digital assistants. Just not ones provided by big corporations with profit motive to hoover up my personal data.