Privacy from Corporations is Privacy from the Government
What the Internet companies don’t have they can’t give to the NSA
Consider two different types of privacy issues: 1. privacy from governments, which is well regulated by law in both Europe and the United States 2. privacy from corporations, which is well regulated by law in Europe, but not generally in the United States
The latest revelations of how the government accesses user data stored by corporations makes it clear that these two issues are closely related. In particular the vast stores of data that Internet and telecoms companies gather is a mother-lode that is just too tempting for governments to ignore. The more corporations know about us the more the government knows about us.
Of course corporations do not gather this data for the benefit of the government, rather they gather it because it is very valuable to the prevailing Internet business models enabled by advances in machine learning technology. Currently any U.S. corporations that tried to significantly increase the inherent privacy of its users would be at a business disadvantage relative to its competitors.
One way to avoid this race-to-the-bottom of privacy protection would be to have the U.S. companies subject to more stringent privacy protection regulation. By having privacy protection laws applied equally to all companies a single company would no longer be at a competitive disadvantage in protecting user privacy.
Then with our privacy better protected from corporations, our privacy would indirectly be better protected from the government.
How could this come about?
Citizen of the United States could push their government to adopt privacy legislation at least as strong as that of the European Union. The political culture in the U.S. has been to avoid such regulation of private businesses, but maybe now this can be regarded as a way to provide protection indirectly against government intrusion into privacy.
Citizen of European Union countries could push their governments to examine whether existing privacy laws are really being respected by U.S. corporations. For example they might consider whether the current “safe harbor” mechanism is a loophole for avoiding complying with European law. If U.S. companies were forced to behave like European companies, then not only would it enhance the privacy of European citizens, but it would tend to enhance the privacy of people worldwide.
A cynic might say that this will never happen, because it goes against the inherent interests of so many powerful corporations willing to spend a lot of money lobbying legislatures. However there is a techno-utopian undercurrent in Silicon valley that I think is shared by the people running the Internet companies. There is a widespread honest, idealistic belief that their technology can make the world a better place. And that could motivate them to accept policies that are not purely profit maximizing, including those that will help protect user privacy.
In the meantime, if you work for an Internet company, consider as you design your systems whether you can meet the requirements of your business model in a less privacy-intrusive way. Do you really need to store that piece of data? Maybe it can be stored encrypted with the key retained by the user? Maybe it can be stored only as a secure hash? Better still, try innovating on the business model to find ways of making money in new ways that do not involve collecting and storing large amounts of user data. Can you make your user your customer and not your product?
Why don't I wear green on St. Patrick's day?
[Originally posted a version of this on Facebook on St. Patrick’s Day, 2013]
Why don't I wear green on St. Patrick's day? Well, when I grew up in Dublin many decades ago, I knew no one who wore green. Instead people would wear either a special badge or perhaps a sprig of shamrock on their lapel. Later when I came to the U.S. I discovered that not only do some Americans actually drink beer dyed green on St. Patrick's day but many of them, even those with tenuous or no links to Ireland, make a point of wearing something green on that day. Like an anthropologist I slowly began to understand some of the peculiarities of American culture and I came to realize that the wearing of the green was part of an odd Hallmark'ized coloring of the American calendar which also called for particular seasonal colors for days around Christmas, St. Valentines' Day, and Halloween. But it would seem odd for me to wear green, to be more Irish in America than I had been in Ireland, so I didn't, and out of stubbornness I still don't. This can be confusing to my Irish-American acquaintances, and I worry that they might consider my pointedly non-green attire as a rebuke of their heritage.
The truth is I did not consider myself Irish when I grew up in Ireland – with the brashness of youth I styled myself a citizen of the world, and considered my moving to London after college as inconsequential as someone growing up in Vermont moving to New York. In fact it was many years later, after my peregrinations had taken me to New Jersey, that it dawned on me that the label that could be applied to me was not my romantic notion of “citizen of the world” but rather that most clichéd label, “an Irish emigrant”.
Over time I have come to be at peace with my Irishness. I have even discovered a liking for traditional Irish music. My politics are still firmly anti-nationalistic, but now their target has broadened: I am as much sickened now by jingoistic nationalism from parts of American society as I was then by anti-Britishness from Irish Republicans. My views on religion are still the same, but now I am as appalled by the science-denying American fundamentalists as I was then by the socially repressive Catholic Church.
But still there is much to celebrate on this day. The most important thing brought to Ireland in that 4th Century cultural transformation associated with the semi-mythical St. Patrick was the gift of written language and of Latin, thus joining us into the great stream of European culture dating from the Greeks. Through ups and downs of the subsequent seventeen centuries we have shaped an Irish culture in which the written word is valued, and we have punched above our weight in world literature.
And in the end, the exuberance of the American celebration of St. Patrick is mostly harmless, and indeed I take it as a good natured recognition and appreciation of the value that the Irish have brought to the American melting pot.
So everyone, hope you had fun today and felt good vibes while wearing green if you chose to do so. Wishing you sláinte as I take a sip from my nightcap, my all time favorite beer – Racer 5 IPA from Sonoma County, California.
AWS Missing Tools
http://code.google.com/p/aws-missing-tools/
Amazon AWS has some great monitoring tools for your cloud instances and other parts of your AWS cloud infrastructure. However one notable missing out-of-the box feature is the ability to monitor disk usage of your instances, something crucial for reliable large-scale deployment.
However it turns out there is a way to add custom metrics, including disk usage, that incorporate smoothly into your AWS monitoring dashboard:
- Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Linux – Amazon CloudWatch
- aws-missing-tools – Extensions to Amazon’s AWS CLI Tools – Google Project Hosting
Transit of Venus
Not surprisingly, HP Labs has many astronomy geeks, and after photographing my own modest Venus image I came around the other side of the building to find a crowd had gathered around several large telescopes, including one that was projecting this dinner-plate sized image of the Sun on a borrowed whiteboard. In addition to Venus, note the sunspots in the bottom left.
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Using FireFox (3.5) to convert html to pdf
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How to use the git protocol through a HTTP CONNECT proxy – Thoughts on Systems
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(7) What are some of the most ingenious algorithms in computer science? – Quora
Great collection of CS algorithms.
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This is now a beta location new location for my blog. Once I sort out some remaining formatting issues on so of the old articles on the new location, I am going to retire the old location.
I finally decided that WordPress installation on a shared Dreamhost server was just too slow. So I made the leap to the Jekyll platform.
Instead of hacking around in WordPress’ PHP I can now customize my blog in Ruby and Coffeescript. And because the blog is statically served I am hosting it out of S3, giving much faster, scalable performance.
For those that care, you can see the source behind the blog, which started as a template by Kris Brown.
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uClassify – URL API Documentation