There are many things to be concerned about, but it is worth having a fuller discussion about the problem.
I think we are all talking about passive surveillance - My views are that mass passive surveillance has always been with us. We are surveilled by our neighbours and strangers all day everyday. Until recently that was entirely based on the facial biometric recogniser "Human Eyeball v1.0".
Generally our neighbours do/did nothing with their metadata collections - maybe some salacious gossip, occassionally criminal behaviour.
Privacy has till now been the politeness of our neighbours.
However on the Internet everyone is now a neighbour. A Good Thing mostly but it has implications for that metadata store. PRISM shows what a meta-metadata store looks like, and history shows us what will be done with it.
It is worth noting that what in civilian circles is called "private" most governments see as "secret". They are going to freak when we really start handling Big Data. Even now I would be surprised if the Chinese / Russian intelligence services have not hoovered up all Facebook and LinkedIn.
Those PhD Students from MIT 10 years ago will be doing some interesting work for the government now, and thier connections will map the halls of weapons researchers and government quite well. OpenMapping, satellitte and UAVs, a flood of data will pierce everyone's privacy.
Anyway, people now are able to monitor others not physically close to them. Some like NSA are going for total knowledge, others like Tesco or Walmart have a more narrow focus but deeper focus (I am pretty sure the NSA will not know my wife is pregnant before I do. Or that Gen. Alexander is really in for it!)
But we have no framework for dealing with this, no laws or even ideas of laws we want. The idea of Big Data will give us such benefits that "stop progress" is not a viable response. But what is? Data cannot be labelled. So ...
There are many things to be concerned about, but it is worth having a fuller discussion about the problem.
I think we are all talking about passive surveillance - My views are that mass passive surveillance has always been with us. We are surveilled by our neighbours and strangers all day everyday. Until recently that was entirely based on the facial biometric recogniser "Human Eyeball v1.0".
Generally our neighbours do/did nothing with their metadata collections - maybe some salacious gossip, occassionally criminal behaviour.
Privacy has till now been the politeness of our neighbours.
However on the Internet everyone is now a neighbour. A Good Thing mostly but it has implications for that metadata store. PRISM shows what a meta-metadata store looks like, and history shows us what will be done with it.
It is worth noting that what in civilian circles is called "private" most governments see as "secret". They are going to freak when we really start handling Big Data. Even now I would be surprised if the Chinese / Russian intelligence services have not hoovered up all Facebook and LinkedIn.
Those PhD Students from MIT 10 years ago will be doing some interesting work for the government now, and thier connections will map the halls of weapons researchers and government quite well. OpenMapping, satellitte and UAVs, a flood of data will pierce everyone's privacy.
Anyway, people now are able to monitor others not physically close to them. Some like NSA are going for total knowledge, others like Tesco or Walmart have a more narrow focus but deeper focus (I am pretty sure the NSA will not know my wife is pregnant before I do. Or that Gen. Alexander is really in for it!)
But we have no framework for dealing with this, no laws or even ideas of laws we want. The idea of Big Data will give us such benefits that "stop progress" is not a viable response. But what is? Data cannot be labelled. So ...