Just a comment on advance policy work on geoprivacy, like Geopriv: I think developing privacy laws and policies in a vacuum is a recipe for disaster. Europe adopted some seemingly harmless geoprivacy laws back in 2002 (OK I howled about it then, including to the EU privacy czar, but no one cared). When last I checked, EU law precludes things like geography-based personalization, like the stuff Nathan Eagle does, because you cannot store location-tracking information with user-identification in the EU ... like EVER... even if you inform the consumer. A whole class of applications is now verboten there. Rather I think we should adopt the "agile" methods: being reasonable about privacy as companies, describing company privacy policies explicitly on web sites and so forth, testing applications and policies out in the market, and refining. Sue the companies if they fail to implement the policies they claim they have. There are many reasons for doing it this way, but one reason is that people and society adapt to technology; it isn't just technology having to adapt to "the way people will always think". For example, I am on the middle-aged side and I have watched society adapt to the "privacy invasion" that I think is almost inevitable with the Internet. While I myself am a "transparent society" type, thinking it is fine if everyone knows my personal life (as long the behavior of authorities is also transparent), I am still amazed at how open my younger peers are as a whole class of people. From Facebook to MySpace, there is plenty of evidence that people are revealing more personal aspects of themselves in a more public way than ever before, fearlessly. I think this openness provides for a more rational and human-diversity respecting society, and celebrate it. And yet, when I reveal information about myself in this same way, it just feels a little weird. Don't get me wrong; I think people should be able to choose to turn location-tracking on and off whenever they want. It's just that when you try to develop laws or broadly-applied policies in advance of technology, you often fail. I guess a great example is P3P "Platform for Privacy Preferences", which is the "encoded privacy policy" system standardized by W3C and embedded in IE. It is largely ignored today, and the consumer doesn't even know it is there. I mean the consumer can turn on-and- off access to different web sites based on the encoded policy, but who actually does this? I think about the vast effort put behind this P3P technology in the late 90s and think it was just a huge waste. Dan R. Greening, Ph.D., CEO BigTribe Corporation, http:// dan.greening.name/contact.htm On Jun 28, 2006, at 8:00 PM, Andrew Turner wrote:
At the same time, the sociotechnical problems that have long been expected from these systemsbprivacy invasion, privacy confusion, LBSpam, data-quality control issuesbare not yet real on a large scale, however well- characterized they may be. This is partly because LBS developers have adopted successful design patterns from other "read/write web" contexts, but also because the user base is just not that large or diverse yet.
THis seems like just the time to start developing standards that make sense and look to the future. Lets not design another static HTML, that then has to wait 10 years for Javascript to make it dynamic (without flash). There isn't "lock-in" yet, so we can develop GeoPriv, anti-map-spam, etc.
_______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@lists.burri.to http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]