Digital Trail – Hard to be invisible these days

1. Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology.

Rather scary to imagine. Does make the Big Brother allusion fitting.

2. Google and its vast farm of more than a million search engine servers spread around the globe remain the best example of the power and wealth-building potential of collective intelligence. Google’s fabled PageRank algorithm, which was originally responsible for the quality of Google’s search results, drew its precision from the inherent wisdom in the billions of individual Web links that people create.

At least that was true until all the advertising became a part of Google and we had to start wading through “sponsored” links, etc. It seems to be better now, except that Bing now invades my space when it is sometimes unwanted, a tendency I’ve also found with other tool bar search boxes.

3. For the commercial use of such information, he has proposed a set of principles derived from English common law to guarantee that people have ownership rights to data about their behavior. The idea revolves around three principles: that you have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.

Tell it to Erin Andrews or any of the other celebrities who have their images, etc., splashed all over. Yes, they have in some ways put themselves out there, but we choose to put ourselves out there in ways as well. There is a common saying in our teachers’ lounge about “weighing your public utterances.” A word to the wise…

4. “Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.” From MIT researcher

Not quite sure what to make of that. I like privacy. It’s not necessarily a big part of my life in a small town, but it is important to me. Old-fashioned values I guess.