pardo on privacy at total.pardo

pardo on privacy

an uncultivated rant follows:

you would think a blog that purports to be the “synergy of all things civilized” would have had an author who was savvy enough to take up the mantle of privacy during its three+ year run.

you would think the guy who’s bread and butter is based on securing his rather large company’s network and data would have been more concerned about the rampant degradation of privacy rights and the rapid loss of all cultural gatekeeping.

you would think…

how does the world balance the wisdom of the crowd with the cult of the expert? how do we avoid becoming the next AOL user # 1172891?

i have spent a great deal of time learning from the text books about the different ways to keep a company network protected from you war time hero fools out there that would have at the data contained therein. even fractured a few rules to “learn” how you’d do it.

but never did i consider the threat that all this damn information out there poses.

go ahead, do a zabba search on yourself. take the shock. swallow hard - your info is out there. everywhere. everyone knows.

does ubiquitous access to information make us better or worse as a society? do you want, what alarmist andrew keen says, everything to be absolutely knowable? Or would you rather have Adam Greenfield’s notion of “Everyware” - tiny embedded computers in clothes, walls, and beer mugs?

i’m sorry, but a credo of Do No Evil no longer cuts it for me. how many times do we have to learn from our mistakes? time to cut the ties.

if i have learned anything about data mining and OLAP, its that these process and algorithms don’t play well in the wide swath. why do you think google keeps offering free honeypots software to the masses? altruism, it is not. unadulterated data collection made fun and easy by your friends at google. 10 to the 100 project indeed! (fuck you, keen. i will refer to and quote my amateur ass any damn well time i want)

its time to get under the proverbial radar and get flat. very flat and scattered. am i ringing the bells? no. but i see the wool now. yeah, this stream of consciousness piece is an admittance of dependence on the very thing that can hurt. research shows the internet and the use of hyperlinked documents to read (learn, meh.) new concepts through the fog of continuous partial attention is rewiring the unwitting brains of those of us who use (read: believed) the powers of the internet as a modern day oracle at delphi.

am i swayed by the logic nicholas carr - IT public enemy #1 - who claims IT doesn’t matter? yes and no. but i see where he and others much smarter than i could ever be are going - IT as a utility like water, gas, electricity - plug or connect to the “grid” and get your files, all neatly indexed by the “oracle at mountain view” for feeding to the hungry advertisers, or worse, a panicked uncle sam - shredding rights with impunity in the name of homeland security. what happens when “con”cast becomes a de facto agent of the us government (as some would argue, they already are in limine of such compromise) - not unlike actions taken by yahoo and at$t (dollar sign purposeful) to date in the war on terror.

so, i hear you thinking as you read my rant that ol’pardo must be up too late some nights looking for conspiracy whilst clutching his ragged copy of the standard orwellian horror tome. rather, you should do your own thinking. keen is right, 2+2 CAN be made to equal five. and we all need to be careful when the amateurs out there try to make it so. i harken back to the episode of ST:TNG Chain of Command, Part 2: THERE….ARE….FOUR….LIGHTS!