02 December, 2013

A smart Dish reader on the web and privacy

A Dark Cloud Over Our Heads? � The Dish:
When the first wave of industrialization hit, it created really bad environmental and labor problems. We lived with them for a long time, then we started to push back through government regulations. Those problems have been mitigated in rich countries, but not everywhere.

This current wave of industrialization has bad side effects as well. It’s eating everyone’s privacy. Right now, we’re all blissed out on the benefits of the tech. I have a device in my pocket that lets me search through most of the world’s information. That’s pretty cool. And the screw hasn’t really turned yet on the problems – we haven’t had the inevitable wave of scandals that will come when some political party uses the security infrastructure to punish their opponents yet, we haven’t had corporations smearing their competitors by leaking personal info, etc. All of that will come.

When it does come, we’ll have big fights about taming the new industrial concerns like Google, certain business practices will be heavily regulated or banned, new tech will be deployed to solve these problems, etc. Eventually, the average voters will win out over the big money. But it’s way too much work, way too costly, and way too threatening to important business models to put any fixes in place until average people have begun to feel genuinely threatened. We’re still some distance from that point.