The Age of Technological Transparency

“Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley.

In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about the specific technologies that brought them down.”

From the article:

“Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun’s blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It’s a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not.”

Mandatory fingerprinting of European children

The European Union is working on a new rule that would require all children in the EU to be fingerprinted and entered into an international database. Currently, the proposed regulations would require all children age 12 and up to be fingerprinted, but some committee members are lobbying for an even younger age limit, possibly as young as six. The European Commission notes that “Scientific tests have confirmed that the paillary ridges on the fingers are not sufficiently developed to allow biometric capture and analysis until the age of six.”

Ben Hayes, spokesman for the civil liberties group Statewatch said “We are going from fingerprinting criminals to universal fingerprinting without any real debate. In the long term everyone’s fingerprints will be stored on a central database. You have to ask what will be the costs to a person’s privacy.” Statewatch also accused the EU Governments of making decisions based only on “technological possibilities – not on the moral and political questions of whether it is right or desirable.”

On the one hand, so long as you do nothing wrong, what difference does it make who has your information on file? On the other hand, however, the potential for misuse is huge. What do you think? Would you be concerned if your kids had to be fingerprinted and put into an international database? Or do you, like I do, see this as a positive move forwards in authentication?

Schools, libraries must block MySpace, Facebook

The House of Representatives just passed resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), 410 to 15. If it becomes law (it has to make it through the senate and then the president), schools and libraries will be forced to block social networking sites like MySpace and chat rooms; if they don’t, they will lose their federal internet subsidies. Schools and libraries will be required “to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.”

Unfortunately, the reasoning behind this bill simply doesn’t make much sense — Texas Republican Ted Poe argued, “social networking sites such as MySpace and chat rooms have allowed sexual predators to sneak into homes and solicit kids.” Personally, I thought they came in the bedroom window, but what do I know. Sure, kids have run into sexual predators on the internet. Sure, parents need to talk to their kids and be aware of what they’re doing. This law, however, takes that control away from the parents and turns it into a badly thought out nanny-state policy.

Lots of teachers and libraries use such sites to help educate kids. Vicki A. Davis is one of them. She writes a journal about education and has written extensively about DOPA and its effects. As one of her students wrote, “These lawmakers need to ban ignorance not promote it.” The potential of the internet as an educational tool is enormous, and it’s only starting to be tapped into. This bill would kill a huge portion of that potential. Time to call your senators, kiddies!