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Revision of How to protect our privacy in digital world from Sun, 2010-02-21 12:30

This is not a complete research and i didn't clean it up yet

Today, with Internet and all these electronic devices we can be connected to anyone at anywhere. Is this good? it depends, because everything comes with its own price. for using this technologies we have to giveaway a big part of our privacy and freedom!

The question i'm going to answer here with your help, is one of the most challenging questions of the modern world. The reason is because this question itself contains hundred of difficult sub questions.

The most dangerous of the modern days is the fact the Governments and Terrorists can misuse this information.

Note : Privacy is nonreturnable , once you shared it there is nothing you can do to take it back.

First Question : What is privacy ?

The problem with this concept is that there is not any unified meaning for it. It's highly depends on personal perspective. Some people consider sharing their family photos on the Internet as a threat to their privacy , but some people even share their wedding photos or their new born baby.

What it's so important (Not complete yet) ?

Imagine you want to go to specific country and they just refuse to give you passport , and when you ask them why they don't respond, so you might ask yourself why? why they don't give to me? but you don't know that ten years ago while you were chatting with your friend via gtalk you said some very terrorist stuff you were joking of course, but the computer AI written back then couldn't understand jokes. or maybe you weren't joking and you've been quite serious , but for gods sake it was 10 years ago , who cares, it turned out the some people do. You can't do anything about it, because you shared private piece of information unknowingly and there are people that are using it against you.

Now days we're surrounded by social networks like facebook , hi5 and cloud services like google desktop search, google docs , etc. we don't have any control over our information on this services, they say that they will remove our information while after we delete them. but history proved that there is no trust in corporation specially giant ones. there is only money , power and benefit.

The question is how dangerous it's , as a pro developer for over 10 years. i must says that abusing this information in various ways is child's play, almost any skilled developer can retrieve or generate any kind of statistic based on this actually very accurate.

more than 300 million people are using Facebook , they share every bit of information accurately with their friend. they even tag photos to say who's in it. if Facebook does not sell this information i must say they are stupid, because for Facebook as corporation this information are just tool valuable to ignore. they're actually priceless. there are many many companies after this information.

Although it sounds quite disappointing , but it doesn't mean that there is no solution, they might be expensive or experimental but if we really care about our private life. my information is mine , i should be able to destroy them anytime anywhere i want. no one has the right to take control of my private information. i'm not saying that we shouldn't use social network. people which are using them either don't know how dangerous they can be , or can't reguse to use them because veryone else does and we can't isolate our self. we're living in 2010 that's almost impossible.

For solving this problem we need to united, get together, work together. something that Internet makes possible, and we should use it. i propose a foundation , run by people contribution and donations , it will have board of directors including , site webmaster , law , hiring manager, fundraiser , these people make decision by voting and ask us for participation when it's possible. these people themselves will be elected by us every year.

registration on this site should be validation because we don't want anyone to interfere and fake vote for their chosen directors, hiring manager has to select people already involved in privacy protection.

Update : There is a foundation called Electroinc Frontier Foundatoin (EFF) , and they are actually very active and known.  I'll get in contact with these guys soon.

Want to know more ?

I read a Novel by Dan Brown called Digital Fortress while ago, the book is old (1998!) and it's fictional but it contains very valuable information and most of it is based on facts , you can read the Interview with Dan Brown , i was specially interested in his answer to this question "What was your inspiration to write Digital Fortress?"

The Website of the book is no longer available but it's still accessible here , and also here is author's website

Ideas

Just an idea (I'll put it in the right place later) : After watching an interview with Mark Shuttleworth i think an idea is getting shaped on my mind. What we need today is non centralized servers, it can become possible using cloud computing , but the ones that giant corporations offer. The ones we offer, our computers can become nodes and they can host other services to run in a isolated environment, or share extra resources thorough the Internet. I know it's complicated and i don't have any practical plan or how it can be implemented. But imagine this. A Facebook that runs on it's users' computers. None of this computers have the whole information, you can simply block your own information if you no longer like to share it.

Another idea : Another solution which i think is practical (not for everyone because it requires personal site or blog on a private server) is separating our personal information into two categories personal and private. Many social networks now days offer API and it's possible to integrate them into our sites. So it possible to give people we trust access or limited access to our private information without forcing them to register on our website. We can remove this access whenever we want and since our information is stored on our own server we can fill a bit more secure. Yes people with private access can still copy this information and put them on the Internet , so we need to be more careful when we give someone access to private section but anyway even if someone does it, that information is not as credible as something we share our self. Now days anyone can fake photos via Photoshop or modify videos or texts.

To be continued...

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