An open data world? |
| In 2005, I coined the acronym EBIE for exclusively bilateral information exchange. Googling just revealed to me, that Ebie is a railway station in Osaka, but otherwise in the sense suggested by myself exists today - in the year 2013 - only 2 times in the world wide web: (1) On exactly this (old) page of mine; and (2) on my headline page. It can be concluded that my essay from 8 years ago has not been extremely influential in the meantime. |
| Therefore, against my final suggestion to return 'little bits of our privacy back to society', the general trend still goes into the other direction: we still vigorously defend our holy privacy and react with indignation to recent revelations about the poor security of our information exchange, that for quite some time seems to have been everything but exclusively bilateral. Big Brother apparently was listening for all of the time. |
| So what? Why should anyone be surprised? During the last 20 years or so our communication progressively switched from analogue to digital carriers. Today, a phone call is mostly an audio file. Everybody can have easy tools on his/her computer to store, read and handle such files. Since we all use a worldwide communication network that originally was designed for military use, we should have known from the beginning that such a communication will always be exposed to some kind of experts who know how to handle these files. |
| It has always been the job of secret services to acquire information. For these professional listeners, the era of digitized communication must appear as some kind of paradise. They finally came to the fulfilment of their fondest dreams: the worldwide communication network lies clear before their eyes. They can see everything, like a fisherman that all of a sudden sees all the fish dwelling in his pond. However, what is transparent for the fisherman is also transparent for the fish: They might escape his catching attempts even more easily than before... |
| I pledge for a radical change of the rules. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs (Matthew 10:27). Jesus himself gave us this advice. I still think of it as a good idea, as the best and most parsimonious way to eliminate all assymetries of information flow. If we use technical facilities based on huge investments (e.g. satellites...), we should shamefully blush while insisting on our right for privacy. |
| No one can have any right to keep the content of an information exchange with any partner totally to themselves, if the resources of billions had to be invested to allow this exchange. If you want to tell your partner a secret: Fine! Go ahaed and meet him/her! Whisper into his/her ear, if you are too afraid of other listeners. But if you want to enjoy easy worldwide communication with everybody, you also should be ready to pay the price (and I'm not talking about the few dollars per month for internet use). |
| I'm not afraid at all of anybody listening to what I am talking about with my wife at the telephone. Neither are we conspiring to rob a bank, nor do we plan to kidnap the Dalai Lama. If you would like to know what we are planning for dinner: you're welcome, be our guest. And certainly you are allowed to know about the appointment with my dentist. Why not? On the contrary, I would even appreciate some more participation from outside in my sometimes a bit monotonous private life. |
| I'm not kidding: we should try to convert our electronic exchange of data back to some kind of public market place, with billions of voices chatting around the globe. Everybody should be entitled to hear everything, as far it is exchanged electronically via data files. I would love to see such an open data world. Maybe such a development would finally result in a truly honest and equal and graceful world. |
| 11/13 < MB
11/13 > 3/14 Freedom & Society |