My Digital FootPrint

What Privacy Is For? Julie E. Cohen   Georgetown University Law Center November 5, 2012 Harvard Law Review, Vol. 126, 2013   Abstract:          Privacy has an image problem. Over and over again, regardless of the forum in which it is debated, it is cast as old-fashioned at best and downright harmful at worst — anti-progressive, overly costly, and inimical to the welfare of the body politic. Yet the perception of privacy as antiquated and socially retrograde is wrong. It is the result of a conceptual inversion that relates to the way in which the purpose of privacy has been conceived. Like the broader tradition of liberal political theory within which it is situated, legal scholarship has conceptualized privacy as a form of protection for the liberal self. Its function is principally a defensive one; it offers shelter from the pressures of societal and technological change. So characterized, however, privacy is reactive and ultimately inessential.   In fact, the liberal self who i

The Value of our Digital Identity report recently published by   Boston Consulting Group , based on a new empirical consumer research, offers a new perspective. The most important takeaway from this research is that it quantifies the current and potential economic value of digital identity: "The report shows that the value created through digital identity can indeed be massive: €1 trillion in Europe by 2020, or roughly 8 percent of the combined GDP of the EU-27. For European businesses and governments, the use of personal data will deliver an annual benefit of €330 billion by 2020—bringing growth to an otherwise stagnant economy. For individuals, the value will be more than twice as large: €670 billion. Much of that will be due to online services such as Facebook and Google that can be offered free of charge—thanks to business models that monetize personal data—yet are highly valued by consumers"

Source: Department of Homeland Security, Privacy Office 2012 Data Mining Report to Congress - February 2013 You can download  the full report   here  - Great if you cannot sleep but unsure of the value!

http://www.deadsoci.al/ a network giving a virtual voice to the dearly departed enabling you to continue to be social after you die? Even after you die, your digital self (should/ can/ could) live on. “We create this digital footprint when we’re alive and it’s just a logical next step that some people will want to utilize something that makes it so that footprint doesn’t abruptly end,” says DeadSocial founder James Norris. “We spend so much time pruning our social profiles, it’s down to individuals to decide whether they want their accounts to die when they do.” What happens to our social profiles has become a point of contention. Some families have wrestled with networks to regain the deceased’s account, and others have been disturbingly active from the grave thanks to system errors. And anyone who knows someone deceased wonders what to do: Do you post on her Timeline? Do you send a DM to aid the grieving process? Or do you just stare at their page, frozen in time?

The   World Economic Forum  has published its 3rd report on personal data: Rethinking Personal Data:   Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage . The other reports are on the WED site Rethinking Personal Data   The report says we must solve simplicity and elegance of design for usability so people can see the data generated by and about them. The last part of the executive summary calls for "stakeholders to more effectively understand the dynamics of how the personal data ecosystem operates. A better coordinated way to share learning, shorten feedback loops and improve evidence-based policy-making must be established." The second chapter covers the context of data use, where everything surrounding data use affects people's privacy expectations and the choices of institutions using their data. It's great seeing this level of nuance brought to a general business audience. This report is notable for highlighting the role of the   persona

Would you believe it ….Your digital footprint says a lot more about you than you think ! Researchers at Cambridge University ( study press release ) published at http://www.pnas.org/ distilled Facebook data to predict some personality traits or behaviours such as “sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender.”  Well if you give off the signals (links, likes, pages) it is quite easy to determine…. The analysis is based on 58,000 volunteers who offered to share their Facebook “likes.” Using the information gleaned from Facebook, the researchers were able to accurately tell a man’s sexual orientation 88 percent of the time, whether they were white or African-American 95 percent of the time, and whether they were a Democrat or Republican 85 percent of the time. Even religious affiliation, specifically determining if a person was Christian or Muslim, was pr

This is a screen shot from the old blog when on the Posterous platform as a reminder of the nearly 400,000 views.