Hi. You'll notice I've not posted here recently, a case of taking on too many projects I'm embarrassed to say. This is still important to me, but I have other things to focus on for the moment.

If the public wants online privacy it had better fight now for laws to protect it because businesses won't and individuals don't have the clout, security expert Bruce Schneier told RSA Conference.

That's the first line of an article over at Network World dated 9 March 2010.

The article continues:

As Schneier sees it, the problem is one of balancing control over data to maximize individuals' liberty. If individuals control data about themselves, that gives them liberty. If their information is controlled by the government, they lose liberty and power, he says. "If you give an individual privacy, he gets more power," Schneier says.

In related news, ZDNet covers an innovation from the University of Washington, Seattle, that aims to make electronic communication via email as transient as a phone call. I won't waffle on here but leave you to watch the video.

Email from Facebook to me today:

Hi Philip,

We have received a request to permanently delete your account. Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days.

If you did not request to permanently delete your account, follow this link to cancel this request:

http://www.facebook.com/account_delete.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Image via CrunchBase

For those following the debacle of Facebook privacy policy changes from the sidelines, the best couple of recent posts to keep you fully up to date on the situation come from ReadWriteWeb and MediaPost. The first is one of the most comprehensive overviews of the situation I've read to date, and the latter focuses on the conversation about the matter between the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the FTC. Interestingly, the FTC is quoted as replying that this "raises issues of particular interest for us at this time".

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_privacy_explanation_debate.php

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=120823

Here's three great articles from last week. They are all worth reading in full, but I've pulled out some key quotes for your convenience here.

"In nation of exhibitionists, there's still a demand for privacy", Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 15 Jan 2010

Who actually owns an e-mail, text message or Facebook update? The person who composes it? The owner of the instrument that stores or communicates it? When supervisors view messages posted from public or company property, are they reading the equivalent of a T-shirt or a diary? Is there really a constitutional right to "sext" your mistress from your employer's cellphone?

"Privacy is neither dead not dying", Professor Andy Miah, 15 Jan 2010

Maintaining digital privacy is about a) ensuring that what we put online goes only so far as we would like and b) being allowed to keep offline those aspects of our lives that we would prefer not to share.

"F.T.C.: Has Internet Gone Beyond Privacy Policies?", Stephanie Clifford, The New York Times, 11 Jan 2010

Advise-and-consent “depended on the fiction that people were meaningfully giving consent,” Mr. Vladeck said. “The literature is clear” that few people read privacy policies, he said.

While first-party uses of data were generally within consumers’ reasonable expectations, he said, more questions arose around data brokers, data aggregators, social networks, cloud computing and mobile marketing.

...He said the commission was still looking into the issue, but it hoped to have an answer by June or July, when it plans to publish a report on the subject. Mr. Leibowitz gave a hint as to what might be included: “I have a sense, and it’s still amorphous, that we might head toward opt-in,” Mr. Leibowitz said.

What's most striking is the almost universal emphasis on the data / content the subject herself is responsible for. It's what she puts up / posts / shares / publishes / feeds about herself, and there's almost no debate about what is published about her by third parties. The debate has not yet moved on to her rights to have content that features her to be deleted, or forgotten.

Professor Andy Miah comes closest in the extract above, but it may well be the overwhelming apparent impossibility to architect a Forget Web that keeps it from being discussed. Here are a couple of responses I've received via Twitter that convey similar sentiment.

From @markpinsent: @Sheldrake Need to have a proper read. Like the idea. but not sure how it gets realised? Who decides what to forget and what not to?

From @gabbicahane: The intention is spot on, hard to police though. Collaboration is crucial. #forgetweb

If you were wondering whether anyone out there really doesn't understand the need for personal privacy, read this diatribe on Econsultancy: "Online privacy has never been guaranteed: why so surprised?".

The author asserts that we've never had online privacy, so QED we never can. Well that's it then folks. Let's go home.

Alternatively, you might spot that the author's logic is woefully illogical. Fortunately for us, the Romans never said, "Well, we've never had sanitation, so QED we never can".

Image via Wikipedia

ReadWriteWeb writes that the twenty-something Facebook founder appears to have forgotten why privacy is so important. According to the post:

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Read the article and you may find yourself wanting to leave Facebook. I have an inactive membership, and it's probably time to kill it to show my disgust at the founder's prioritisation of shareholder value over personal privacy and dignity.

I only have basic schoolboy French unfortunately so I'm unable to read the original report, but BBC coverage of a report commissioned by the French government includes the sentence:

“And [France] is considering a law which would give net users the option to have old data about themselves deleted.”