Privacy Articles
SXSW Preview: Reality Check: The Dark Side of Digital Economy
Not everything I’ve written holds up well. But in re-reading the Digital Economy for 20th Anniversary edition re-write, I’m both struck by how the book has withstood the test of time, and deeply concerned about where we have arrived. The subtitle of the book was...
Is “The World’s Most Secretive Company” Opening Up?
Apple has been called “the world’s most secretive company.” But when you look closely at Apple, . . .
At Davos, Tech Giants Square Off Over Online Privacy
Rapidly crossing geographic, gender and generational boundaries, digital technologies are shifting power from traditional hierarchies to networked heterarchies. If you want to know where society is headed, follow the technology.
Clay Shirky Interviews Me on The Atlantic
Clay Shirky, a widely published authority on the Internet’s effects on society, and Don Tapscott, an author and adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto took the time to pose tough, timely questions to each other on how social media, intellectual property laws, and generational divides are affecting politics, business, and culture.
From Personal to Corporate Privacy. My Seven-Part Series in Toronto Star.
With radical transparency, all of our identities and behaviours become flattened and observable by others — and we lose control. We need a robust system for preserving our ability to maintain multiple and separate identities in the emerging real and virtual world of ubiquitous surveillance. This is a challenge, but our fundamental freedoms depend on getting the identity question right.
The Need for a Personal Digital Privacy Strategy
The tensions between information freedom and personal control are exploding, and not simply because of the benefits of sharing information using new media. Massive commercial and government interests, along with malevolent individuals, have much to gain as each of us reveals highly granular personal information, much of it in the public domain by default.
Is privacy an outmoded idea in the digital age?
A growing number of people argue that the notion of having a private life in which we carefully restrict the information we share with others may not be a good idea.
Big Brother 2.0
Recently the New York Times reported that “Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight.”
Corporations, the Main Beneficiaries of Personal Sharing
The most powerful forces making the case for sharing personal information are not philosophers or media pundits — they are social media companies and other corporations who have a lot to gain from our social norms about privacy changing.