News Analysis

Opinion

Privacy and Re-Decentralization

As a society, we're discovering that viewing technology in isolation is insufficient. We really need to have a holistic, joined-up view of how IT works. All over the world as the economy dips, we see authoritarianism on the rise. As technologists, we are culpable in not having foreseen this – in having believed technology is amoral and that we can continue to focus on cool stuff and not worry about what people are going to do with it.

The biggest challenge may be the centralization of personal data – not just facts, but opinions, too. Global data giants are delivering "cloud" services that may be implemented by distributed systems but are centrally controlled. That offers a control point for authoritarians.

We need to find a way to take Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest out of the center of the diagram and put them as nodes in the diagram. It's not that they are inherently bad, but they create a "hostage to fortune" by having so much information and so much control in places where authoritarian governments can, with the stroke of a pen, decide to make it impossible for you to have the freedoms that the UN Convention on Human Rights declares as inviolable.

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