Alex Reid

We are losing our privacy slowly every day and not because of the government or big business. We are losing our privacy because we, as individuals, are the ones eroding it.

I call it ‘Little Brother’ and this New York Times article sums it up very well. It’s one of the leading reasons I started doing reputation management for artists.

“… the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.”

CBS News reports about the security risks associated with copy machines.

Brian Bowman

Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer introduced a motion this week (PDF) endorsed by Mayor Gregor Robertson that will have the city develop open standards for city documents, maps and other data, to be released online.

It’s a big step for civic transparency.

It’s also a vert smart move for Vancouver because they know that “software companies” will aggregate that data for public usage just like Google Transit did when Vancouver made their bus schedules available in open standard in late 2007. By making the information that already exists (and paid for) available to the public for free, the City is allowing open source developers to connect the dots; effectively crowd sourcing the bulk of the programming work, for free.

EveryBlock is a perfect example of what could come of this. Using data from eleven major American cities, volunteers gather whatever city data is available (definitely not open format) and relate that information (crime incidents, bike rack installations, building permits, restaurant inspections, graffiti clean-ups, etc.) to maps of those cities.

For example, the San Francisco Police Department releases daily information about its daily calls and EveryBlock lists that information “whether they’re made by citizens or police officers and whether they involve criminal or non-criminal activity. Each report says where the incident was reported, when police were called and when the report was entered into the system. Also included is the incident’s type (homicide, noise nuisance, fight without weapons, etc.).

Finally, each report includes the incident’s result, which essentially tells you what responding officers found or did in response to the call. This might be an arrest, the issuance of a citation or a report’s cancellation while the officer was en route.”

But what Vancouver is doing will really expand what EveryBlock has already illustrated with limited and sparse information. Vancouver’s City Manager has already been charged with digitizing archival records, indexing, publishing and syndicating all data using “prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats” – all to be unlicensed.

Reimer suggested that City Council meeting videos will be on YouTube within months.

“They’re tiny little things, but they have so much ripple effect in the community,” she said. “There’s probably a few more thousand people that we could be talking to out there if we could send them videos [instead of written material.]“

We Live In Public TRAILER from We Live in Public on Vimeo.

A new documentary We Live in Public which screens today at the Sundance Film Festival follows Josh Harris, a dot com entrepreneur turned artist as he explored media, technology and social interaction at the turn of the century.

The UK government has leaked their plans for a £12 billion program to tap every phone call and email originating or received in the UK under the guise of anti-terrorism measures.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers – thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

Essentially the security services want a “live tap” into every phone call and email message.

So far not much is being said except that the opposition Conservative Party’s only qualm with the program is the integrity of keeping the information safe from leaking. I find it shocking that the security services are having such a difficult time knowing who is bad and who is good that everyone is suspect.