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.
When I talk about information, I sometimes describe it as being volatile, like gasoline or acetone. It has similar properties to these substances, which evaporate and dissipate rapidly. They are very difficult to contain once exposed to the air.
Jeff Jonas has a post ruminating on how personal information multiplies in enterprises. It’s a good illustration of how “volatile” it is. It helps to illustrate how difficult a task it would be to ask organizations to provide access to customers’ personal information, for example. It helps show that the best protection for privacy is keeping information bottled up. Once you open the gas can, don’t expect to be able to collect the atoms of gasoline you’ve released.
The prescription? If you want to keep all your gasoline, put it in a sealed container. Likewise, if you want to keep your privacy, don’t tell people stuff.
Sorry if these observations require too much personal responsibility, effort, and discretion, but I think that’s the way it is with things that have these properties.
At Burning Man last week, I came across a young fellow whose backpack had been stolen – with it, his ID, car keys, and credit cards. Among his stresses was getting on a plane to return home without ID. I explained to him that the TSA doesn’t require you to show ID, they just pretend to require it, and I told him about the Great No-ID Airport Challenge. Even the local sheriff who took the report on the theft didn’t know what the TSA’s rules were.
I also explained to the stressed young man that merchants and his credit card association would absorb the liability for wrongful use of his credit cards. His remaining problem was conjuring car keys from Reno out to the Black Rock Desert. Now that’s a tough one.
In the Q&A after his speech Tuesday night at PFF’s Aspen Summit, one of the questions with which Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was clearly most voluble and at ease dealt with the market for advertising. He rightly touted how Google has paid out billions of dollars to small and medium-size businesses, users of Google’s AdSense program. (Full disclosure: A project of mine, WashingtonWatch.com, is one.) And, without giving away the Google playbook, he discussed some of the directions Google’s advertising efforts will be going.
Along with newspaper advertising, he spent a good deal of time discussing location-based advertising. He enthused about the possibility of all those mobile computers people carry (still often called “phones”) helping people find the things they need as they move from place to place.
For example, Schmidt talked about how he could be driving down the street and get directions for all the places to eat in a given area. Because he had eaten pizza the night before, his phone might direct him to a burger joint. And then, Schmidt hastily added, he would turn off his phone.
The Federal Communications Commission is a drag on progress in telecommunications and a threat to free speech. It often comes in for criticism, as it did this week at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit. But it has never been more enthusiastically criticized than by Dr. Gene Scott.
[Disclaimer: When a lawyer writes about economics, things can go dreadfully wrong. My terminology may be way off the mark – and maybe my thinking too. I welcome constructive corrections in the comments.]
Harvard University’s Samuel W. Morris University Professor of Economics Dale Jorgensen kicked off this morning’s session of the PFF Aspen Summit with a talk entitled Whatever Happened to the New Economy? [ppt here – Shane Tews, reading over my shoulder, wants me to mention the pretty colors!] In it, he examined both growth in the IT sector and growth in other economic sectors thanks to their adoption of IT. One of the delights of IT is that innovation in this area propagates out across the economy, magnifying the benefits to society.
I was interested in a slide he put up showing the “Relative Prices of Computers, Communications, Semiconductors, and Software and Computer Services Industry Output, 1960-2005,” slide seven in the PowerPoint. Each area showed consistent decline in price over this period, except Software and Computer Services, which has remained essentially flat.
I was curious about whether and how open source software was measured in Professor Jorgensen’s data, so I asked him during the break whether it was.
If Eddie Vedder sat stone silent for 30 seconds, everyone would know that he hated George Bush. Eddie Vedder is hate for George Bush. He is the Jeremy to George Bush’s recess lady. Bleeping out Eddie Vedder’s criticisms of George Bush is censorship in the same way umbrellas censor the sun.
But maybe reheating the tempest in a teapot about some AT&T-owned site bleeping some political comments from a big rock star is a good way to while away the August doldrums.
Jon Stokes at Ars has penned a little fantasy about how this Pearl Jam/AT&T ‘censorship’ thing – the most discussed, widely available, and obvious censored information ever! – may bring ‘net neutrality regulation back to life.
About six months ago, I did an elegant back-of-envelope calculation about the Western Hemisphere Travel Restriction Initiative’s cost in terms of lost freedom and commerce. I came up with an estimate of about half-a-billion dollars (net present value).
If that estimate was a little too airy, here’s a more clear cost of WHTI: $944 million over three years. That’s the direct cost we’re paying through the State Department for the WHTI rules.
So now we’re at around $1.5 billion. Will $1.5 billion+ in damage to the United States’ people, possessions, infrastructure, and interests be averted thanks to WHTI? No. As a security measure, it’s Swiss cheese.
WHTI does more harm than good. It is a self-injurious misstep – precisely what the strategy of terrorism seeks to cause.
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.