Flipping Internet Privacy on its Head
Earlier this week, I enjoyed a lunch with Mike Muller, CTO of ARM. We discussed many areas of technical computing, including the software ecosystem. He and I shared many of the same perceptions of how things work.
As we were discussing technology startups, he brought up an interesting point about privacy. He explained that if we had been thrown into the current internet from the very beginning, society would have rejected the standards of privacy we now permit. The internet is now full of private individuals doing private things and giving up all that privacy to whatever internet service they use.
Photos, realtime personal GPS location, private messages to private individuals, financial information, religious and political beliefs, hopes, desires, dreams, and more. It’s obscene how much we put online. And consider that all of that information is not our personal data. It’s owned by all sorts of other entities. They can do with it all sorts of things. We can’t control it.
Sure, they have made steps to provide some privacy. Mike’s argument is that those steps are weak and most people do not exercise them.
His claim is that if we had been dropped into today’s privacy frying pan, we would have rejected it. Rather than agreeing to a corporations EULA to use a site, we would require corporations to agree to our private, personal EULA if they want us on their platform.
It’s an interesting and forward-thinking thought. The current privacy environment is ripe for abuse. Reform will only occur when bad things happen.
Another argument he made is that the only way to ensure privacy is to enable protocols at the sensor that mark data as the private possession of a private individual. Protocols would have to be fundamentally restructured to ensure privacy.
One funny story he told is that of http://pleaserobme.com/. This site was designed to raise awareness about privacy concerns. It listed realtime information on houses whose owners were likely not home based on social media posts.
The big reason Snapchat blew up (recent reports say Facebook offered $3B to acquire Snapchat and then Google offered $4B) is because kids got on there to have more privacy from their parents. Facebook is not private enough for them.
Mike, if you’re reading this, sorry for posting our private conversation on this public blog!
What are your thoughts in internet privacy?