BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet’s future in 2020 debated
BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet’s future in 2020 debated
An interesting article: transparency is generally accepted as an inevitable upward trend with some society backlash from privacy concerns.
The repondents were split over the whether the impact of people’s lives becoming increasingly online, resulting in both less privacy but more transparency, would be a positive outcome.
‘Access information’
Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards, said such transparancy would be a benefit to society.
Wires
The dramatic growth of the internet shows no sign of abating“Giving all people access to our information and a context to understand it will lead to an advancement in our civilisation.”
But NetLab founder Barry Wellman disagreed: “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.”
Mr Doctorow wrote: “Transparency and privacy aren’t antithetical.
“We’re perfectly capable of formulating widely honored social contracts that prohibit pointing telescopes through your neighbours’ windows.
“We can likewise have social contracts about sniffing your neighbours’ network traffic.”
As a technologist, I used to say “technology without policy”: technology should be a general enabler, but I didn’t have much to say about what the policy itself should be, only that there should be one. Nowadays as a ‘boundary spanner’ I realise that neither the technology nor the policy is easy and that teams that don’t work in concert with one another can overshoot what’s possible or what’s needed.
