Month: August 2010

Facebook vs criminals 1-1?

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27 August 2010

13:30

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Social Networking, Sweden, Teens

BACK FROM VACATION!
And what do I find? Social media is making news again. I saw an article about how Facebook prevents criminal justice. People use social media to identify criminals, which leads to their witness being questioned.
But it’s not all bad, sometimes it can help the police track down criminals to0, as the article also mentions.

And then we have the case where it just gets sad. This news reports that earlier this week, two teenage schoolgirls got taken to court for bugging the teachers staff room. How they got caught? One of them bragged about it on her Facebook-page.

Google CEO’s latest privacy statement

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17 August 2010

17:59

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Anonymity, Reputation

I was reading the web article Google CEO Schmidt: No Anonymity Is The Future Of Web this morning where Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying:

Privacy is incredibly important. Privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. It’s very important that Google and everyone else respects people’s privacy. People have a right to privacy; it’s natural; it’s normal. It’s the right way to do things. But if you are trying to commit a terrible, evil crime, it’s not obvious that you should be able to do so with complete anonymity. There are no systems in our society which allow you to do that. Judges insist on unmasking who the perpetrator was. So absolute anonymity could lead to some very difficult decisions for our governments and our society as a whole.

Some espouse that the loss of anonymity will endanger privacy. I can see both sides of the argument and again, as I stated in my post on March 2nd – Do I want to be anonymous? Yes! Do I want to be authenticated? Yes! that it is all about balance. Can I, or should I, be anonymous when I want to perform on-line banking? No. Is it anyone’s business what I look at, or when, or why, when I surf the net? No.

So again, it’s not either-or, but a balance. Sometimes anonymity is desired, and sometime non-repudiation.

So you like cookies?

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10 August 2010

08:16

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Information Privacy

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Here is a good article that describes how cookies work. It is important to know that with the EU amendments to the Directive on Data Privacy, it will become law in member states to inform the user that a cookie is being dropped on their PC. This falls in line with the general collection of personal information in that the data subject must be informed that personal information about them is being collected, and they must consent to this.

An interesting demographic shift is happening

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5 August 2010

14:13

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Out of the Box

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Yes.. about five years ago I moved to an island that has no bridge connection, so you have to take a boat to get there.. five years ago this was considered to be quite impractical, although I did not see it this way as I work remotely quite a lot, we have broadband on the island and also it is only an hour travel to get into the centre of the city.

Seems that the idea is catching on, just this year at least three of my work colleagues are moving from out of the city into the country, one is moving into the mountains and another 7-8 hours by car up north back to her roots. The question that has driven them is why live in the city when we can work wherever we like!

Broadband is changing the demographics, along with changing expectations on work/life quality. And imagine if the dispersed family unit were to start being closer, not just virtually, but physically too again? No need to move to the work, the work can work where you live.

The wonders of technology 🙂