The daily deluge of news stories about the use and abuse of personal data continues. Led by the US and UK governments, government-intelligence coalitions seem to have adopted the position that it’s ok to trash citizens’ rights to privacy and security because a) we shouldn’t have been surprised that they were doing this, because b) they’ve been doing it for a long time and c) and everybody else is ... »
A friend of mine has just quit Facebook. Her last post was: “It’s not you, it’s Facebook. I tried again, but I just don’t like Facebook”. The interesting thing about this particular person was that I’d always seen her as a Facebook enthusiast, with almost daily posts of news, photos and links, and a wide circle of friends who she interacted with via Facebook. And professionally she works in PR and... »
The issue of privacy, or more generally and accurately the issue of who owns what data, and the rights and obligations associated with the use of that data have clearly shot up the public agenda. A term that a few years ago would have been associated with what you could and couldn’t do or say in your own home is now the topic of daily discussion in the context of Google, Facebook, the NSA and GCHQ... »
The murmur of debate and discussion concerning the proper use, and increasing abuse, of their citizens’ personal data by governments has risen to a crescendo since the first of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US’s NSA PRISM and the UK’s GCHQ Tempora programmes were publicied by the Guardian in June 2013. Alongside that there has been a steady stream of continued exposure of the way in which... »
In a previous post I argued that trust was a central and massively important part of what is involved in being human, and social, and living a good life. And I’m aware that that sounds terribly soft and earnest and, in these cynical times, hopelessly naïve. So I’ve been looking at what economists, often a pretty hard-nosed and unromantic lot, have to say about trust. It turns out that what they ha... »
In previous posts we’ve noted that when new technologies are introduced it often takes people time to work out the social rules that need to be used to tame and domesticate the raw technology. The mobile phone is a good example of that: just because it is possible to make and receive calls anywhere, at any time, doesn’t mean that we want or have to allow people to do that. So in the few years sinc... »
Social psychologists have a neat equation that summarises the drivers that shape our behaviour: B = P x S where B=behaviour, P=person and S=situation What’s implied by this is that what we do and how we do it is partly driven by the kind of person we are: extroverted or introverted, generous or mean, nervous or confident and so on. That’s the individual psychology bit. But another large part is dr... »
Although it seems like it’s been around forever and life would be unimaginable without it, the Internet is young. From the first inkling of the idea (possibly in 1962, when J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 wrote a series of memos outlining a “Galactic Network”) and its commercial and general public “birth” about 20 years ago, its growth and impact since then has been massive. An... »
Since Edward Snowdon, the US whistle-blower, first leaked details of the NSA’s PRISM and related programs on June 7th, two clear themes have emerged within the ensuing debate. The first is the notion of exchange and the need for this exchange to be equitable. President Obama and others have sought to justify the PRISM program in terms of the exchange of privacy in return for (increased) security,... »
