Computers, Privacy & the Constitution

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KateVershovSecondPaper 3 - 29 May 2009 - Main.KateVershov
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Comments would be greatly appreciated.
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 My greatest worry is that in accepting this tradeoff, even if it is conceded that it’s an appropriate one to make right now (which I am not necessarily conceding), we as a society accept the technological status quo, and stop innovating in a direction that will respect an individual’s freedom and autonomy. For example, we spoke briefly of wall-warts in class. This is an intriguing technology with a great potential to eliminate many of the problems with self-hosting and to move centralized computing tasks into decentralized peer-to-peer networks. But, without truly easy software to run it and some functionality that would provide the user with more than he or she would otherwise be able to have from centrally hosted web software, very few people will use it. Unfortunately, enhanced privacy alone is not enough to motivate most people to spend money or time on anything. Recognizing the technology’s supremacy in respecting user freedom is not sufficient to draw developers to the project either if one believes that cloud computing, particularly the version seen today, is good enough. Treating the tradeoff as an inevitable decision is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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>		Imagine the walled off garden that was once AOL (and its many predecessors). In some ways the fact that we did not end up with many different proprietary networks each with its own subscriptions and limited interconnectivity is just a fluke. Without the timely advent of the World Wide Web and powerful browsers whose distribution was free and simple, the internet as we currently know it may not have existed. The very tools which put AOL into the height of its popularity, are also the ones that signaled the end for its business model (AOL started out as a proprietary network - an online gaming company - long before the WWW). Imagine if Tim Berners-Lee had simply said "this is good enough."
 -- KateVershov - 28 May 2009
 
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Revision 3r3 - 29 May 2009 - 07:04:07 - KateVershov
Revision 2r2 - 29 May 2009 - 05:52:40 - KateVershov
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