Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
Betcha didn’t know that January 28th is Data Privacy Day. That’s the day on which it’s customary to give gifts of cash and money to your favorite privacy advocate. No, not really. Though Hallmark hasn’t gotten a hold of it, it is a day on which some extra attention gets paid to privacy issues.
There you have it! Data Privacy Day! The one day this year, among many, that you should lavish your favorite privacy expert with gifts and praise. And gifts.
Overheated rhetoric around information policy and intellectual property damages the quality of the debate. In this paper, featured speaker and Syracuse University information studies professor Milton Mueller warns against pouring these debates into old ideological molds. Doing so preserves controversy rather than fostering the discovery of common ground. (Or “commons” ground—couldn’t help it!)
I don’t know that this forum will solve the problem, but I know it will be interesting. The sign-up page indicates that the event will be streamed.
Yours truly and WashingtonWatch.com get a little mention too. Media darling Jerry gets top billing because he’s so darn good looking. And yes, a very clunky early version of WashingtonWatch.com was launched in 2001. The story slightly overstates the capabilities of my project, but we’ve got improvements along those lines in the works.
I was reminiscing last night with my Cato Institute colleague Dan Mitchell about a favorite TLF post of mine: the Persuade-o-Meter. Woo! I slay me!
Dan is very excited about the blue curtain that Santa Claus brought him for Christmas. It matches the ties of his two favorite recent presidents. And he made this video to show it off.
The founder of a would-be Google competitor or spurned search engine optimizer (I can’t tell which and won’t credit his site with a link) takes to the pages of the New York Times to argue for “search neutrality.”
Though good ironic comeuppance for Google, “search neutrality” regulation would ossify an innovative business and deprive consumers of the benefits of competition.
It may be possible to wring consistency from the “open” manifesto Google SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg published earlier this week, but I can’t.
He correctly extols the virtues of openness in technology and data for its pro-competitive effects. Closed systems may be profitable in the short run, but they are weak innovation engines:
[A] well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don’t have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won’t.
But his paean to openness draws a tight line around Google’s profitable products: Continue reading →
With weather-related travel trauma so prominent on my Twitterscope, and with news that the federal government is banning flight delays, I stopped short when I read this techology pitch:
One of the biggest hassles of travel has to be keeping track of those pesky hotel key cards and then trying to remember which way to fit the darned things in the wide variety of door locks. But that may soon change.
New technology’s been introduced and will soon be test marketed in Las Vegas hotels that allows guests to use their cell phones — any cell phone model at all — to unlock their hotel room door.
I’m not persuaded at all. The difficulty of managing hotel keys doesn’t even rate on my list of travel hassles.
The solution offered up is:
a simple system in which a computer generates a unique series of tones (that sounds kind of like those digitized cell phone ringtones used early this decade) that is then sent to the mobile device. When the tone is played outside the designated guestroom, a microphone incorporated in the locking system IDs the tone and unlocks the door.
Ohhhhh-kay.
There might be value to this technology or (more probably) others like it. Getting secure credentials onto people’s phones has a lot of promise.
But this iteration? Should it survive testing, and the easily imaginable failure modes and attacks on it, it might provide a scintilla of convenience in hotels.
If you don’t like sharing information about your interests with content publishers so they can sell advertisers a chance to win your attention, your remedy is closing your browser. It’s that simple.
He says users should email web companies the following terms: “By collecting, storing, selling, trading, reselling or exploiting for any commercial purposes any information about me, your site agrees to pay me a licensing fee of $100 per month.”
That’s a non-starter from the get-go because users might be worth $10 per year, depending on the company. Negotiating a deal where your use is actually tracked, a price is negotiated, and a payment is securely made would be more privacy invasive than the current state of affairs.
And that model has already been tried. It was called AllAdvantage.com. If ad rates rise again, an “infomediary” might be viable again, but we won’t get there with a silly “campaign” to undo the interest-data-for-content deal.
If you don’t like it, you can just close your browser, or pick carefully among the services that don’t use advertising (like Twitter, so far). That’s a perfectly acceptable choice, and life can be lived well without free Internet-based content.
So, go ahead! Live your values! Walk your talk! Close your browser.
In a classic example of the 5:00 Friday news drop, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that it is extending the REAL ID compliance deadline. Forty-six of 56 jurisdictions, it reports, were not able to implement even the interim measures it proposed requiring by December 31st when it last extended the deadline in May of 2008.
The DHS statement insists that a full compliance deadline on May 10, 2011 remains in effect. What that really means is that there will be another false crisis as that deadline approaches, and the DHS will extend the deadline yet again.
The better alternative is to repeal the national ID law and the worthless, expensive pseudo-security it represents. It is not to revive REAL ID under its alternative name “PASS ID.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.