[ExI] openness again

[Chris Hibbert]

Well, I've been on the list for a long time, too, though I'm not a 
frequent poster, and I've also been a privacy advocate and activist for 
quite a while. I wrote the original FAQ on SSNs in the Usenet days, and 
posted it on the Internet when that first started getting popular. I've 
testified before the California legislature on privacy in toll 
collection systems, and I worked with the Santa Clara County government 
for several years to get them to follow their (since repealed) laws 
requiring every department of the county government to file annual 
disclosures of what information they collected and how they used and 
protected it.

Brin's *Transparent Society* changed the conversation significantly, and 
is still worth reading. Some of what he predicted has come to pass with 
increasing surveillance of the cops by the citizens, and with drones 
seeing more and raising more ire.

Personally, I took a long hiatus from actually working on privacy issues 
while I worked on agoric systems, payment, security, encryption and 
prediction markets, but now I'm back working on privacy at Google, where 
I support Google's Transparency Report, which reports on how Google 
responds to government and other requests to hide or remove data, as 
well as publicizing and encouraging efforts to secure email and the web.

I've long maintained that the issue with privacy is all tied up with 
security. SSNs make the issues clear: some industries think your SSN is 
your secret password, and others insist that you display it publicly. If 
we went totally toward Brin's vision of transparency, or totally to an 
encrypted world, either way, social views could adjust and we could 
figure out how to make things work. But as long as we continue to live 
in an environment where having secrets is crucial to survival (bank 
accounts, health records, sexual preferences, political views for some 
people and in some contexts) and the platforms on which we store our 
data are uniformly insecure and routinely penetrated, we're going to 
continue to have issues.

Chris
  --
We are made of the stuff of stars, given our selves by time.
Our duty, as living things, is to be sure that pain is not our
whole story, for we can choose to dance.
     ---Sherry Tepper, Six Moon Dance
  (also see http://lfs.org/newsletter/025/03/SixMoonDance.shtml)

Chris Hibbert
hibbert at mydruthers.com
http://mydruthers.com
Prediction Market Software:  http://zocalo.sourceforge.net