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"Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, thinks part of the solution might be for people to take
by kenko 12y ago
"Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, thinks part of the solution might be for people to take responsibility for tracking public data about themselves."
The perennial solution in the new neoliberal world: general, pervasive problem that affects everyone systematically? Take responsibility for yourself and damn everyone else!
- throwaway7767 12y agoAnd the best part is that "taking responsibility" in his view means participating more in social networks, and being proactive about sharing. It's as if he sees people's concerns about privacy as just being about not having wrong information disseminated. That's not what it's about at all - it's about keeping private information private.
- kenko 12y agoOh, his followup is equally daft: "“I don’t believe that, in many cases, people ‘lost’ any control over their information at all, because they never really had any real control even before the Internet existed,” Mr. Cheshire said. “We often conflate privacy through obscurity with inaccessibility, control or security.”" You used to be able to find out certain information (if for some reason it had been reported on) in records offices or, like, on microfiche at your library ... therefore pervasive data-gathering on everyone in a more or less instantly accessible way hasn't changed anything materially. Moreover, conclusion "so you never had control anyway" is only one of several possible results here; another is "so there was a problem all along which, since it's now exacerbated, we should really fix".