flynn23 wrote:
The problem is not whether people can opt out or not. At some point, opting out will make you a second class citizen, or even a criminal in some places, because having data about you will be required to make certain transactions or participate in basic services.

I should be clear - what I was discussing at WWW2007 wasn't about providing people with a way to opt out of services - it was about providing a way for people to opt out of data collection while still using the services...

Basically - these services need to collect data in order to do business. This causes some social problems, leading people to collectively push for log/data destruction (at least in the EU). What can these services do?

They can empower their users to see what is stored about them and control it themselves. This can work for two reasons:

1. These services don't need to know everything about me in order to do what they do. They can get by on some information. If I have the ability to control what they are storing, I can remove anything sensitive and let them have the rest of the information.

2. People who complain about the privacy impact can be shunted at the dashboard, where they can opt out of some or all the data collection while still using the service - its an answer that will satisfy a significant number of critics.

Basically, its a middle ground position that allows the services to operate and people to use them without the same privacy impacts and without a broad scaling back of the information the services have access to.

So far, in the US, the political will to reign in data collection by these services has been too weak to make this option attractive, but its possible, neh likely, that Canada and the EU will get there first as their privacy regulations are far more sophisticated then our own.

In fact, what Google has done with Dashboard is not nearly this sophisticated. A huge let down after reading the press coverage.

RE: Fuck You Eric Schmidt