Archive for January 29th, 2009

Posted this on Techdirt today, but probably of interest to you, too.

Speaking to the Guardian, [OLPC founder] Negroponte says, “The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google – we’ll want people to copy it. We’ll make the constituent parts available. We’ll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.” Open hardware is an exciting new arena for innovative designs and, by embracing it, OLPC will create a new opportunity for entrepreneurs to create the best laptop for the developing world (or even the developed world). Also, instead of picking an established manufacturer from East Asia, open sourced hardware specifications will allow the developing world’s emergent technology industries to compete, strengthening the communities OLPC seeks to assist.

Read the whole post here.

(Update: Wayan Vota (who knows a whole lot more about this than I do) thinks this may just be hype)

My friend Ben pointed me to a post about how privacy in today’s world is alive and strong, and while I agree with the main sentiment, I think the post is ultimately misguided.

The argument, basically, is that people historically did not have a lot of privacy; the small communities into which we were born, where everyone knew everything, did not leave space for privacy. In fact, the much heralded “death of privacy” brought about by digital networks is really just a return to the traditional state of affairs. Laurent, the blogger in question, adds to this by saying that we are actually better off than our ancestors because:

“If you can’t control the conversation improve it! Become the one stop source of info about yourself. Have a profile, more active than any other profile for all matters related to you. This way your content will always beat others’ content, and you get your control back. Then it’s up to you to not being photographed while drunk at that Spring break party. But that was a good ideas (not being photographed) well before Facebook right?

Now that you are back in the driver seat, you have your privacy back. Just of a different kind. You have built a space that could be called “publicy”, or “the plausible me”. It is a credible space where people expect to see information about you. Whatever credible information you say in there will be taken as true by the world.” [Emphasis pre-existing.]

It’s a seductive argument, right? “Stop complaining, and start doing something!” And he’s right, but only if he had stopped there.

Instead, he encourages people to actively mislead people on their public profiles to “build [their] private” self. However, the rise of ubiquitous sensors and citizen reporting will make your efforts futile, and as soon as your credibility is shot, your public profile you spent so much time building will be useless. In fact, it might be useless already, because we live in a world of gatekeepers, there is no guarantee that your active profile will out-rank those photos from Spring Break.

And finally, he ignores a whole class of people who need to be private – dissidents, journalists, etc. It is very simplistic to think that an individual can successfully lie about their activities when digital networks are becoming so pervasive. Although in the past we could tell our small community that we were doing something else, today, GPS, CCTV, RFID and a bunch of other acronyms make your activities known to a wide range of third parties who can suck all the data up and store it for far longer than the memory of a tight-knit community. And best of all? Today, you cannot leave the tight-knit community which is the world.