Comments on: From the Ephemeral to the Eternal

By: Miss Ceiline Milan

Miss Ceiline Milan — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 13:17:51 +0000

From Ceiline milan
Abidjan Cote d'ivoire
West Africa.

INTRODUCTION.
Dearest,

Please do reply me through my private mail box above.and also send me your direct mail to reach you. It is my pleasure to contact you for a business venture which I intend to establish in your country. Though I have not met with you before but I believe, one has to risk
confiding in succeed sometimes in life. There is this huge amount of eight million U.S dollars($8,000,000.00) which my late Father kept for me with a Fiduciary Fund Holder in Abidjan before he was assasinated by unknown persons during this war in Cote d'ivoire.

Now I have decided to invest these money in your country or anywhere safe enough outside Africa for security and political reasons.I want you to help me claim and retrieve these fund from the Fiduciary Fund Holders and transfer it into your personal account in
your country for investment purposes on these areas:

1) Telecommunication
2) The Transport Industry
3) Five Star Hotel
4) Real Estate Management

If you can be of an assistance to me I will be pleased to offer to you 15% Of the total fund. I await your soonest response.

Best Regard
Miss Ceiline MilanFrom Ceiline milan
Abidjan Cote d'ivoire
West Africa.

INTRODUCTION.
Dearest,

1) Telecommunication
2) The Transport Industry
3) Five Star Hotel
4) Real Estate Management

If you can be of an assistance to me I will be pleased to offer to you 15% Of the total fund. I await your soonest response.

Best Regard
Miss Ceiline Milan

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 20 May 2004 17:24:24 +0000

John – Have you read David Brin’s _The Transparent Society_? I’d be interested to hear how you think his arguments about reciprocal transparency fit with your evolving ideas.

By: John Battelle

John Battelle — Sat, 08 May 2004 22:52:50 +0000

Hey Alex – I don’t entirely agree. While it is true that the modern world has already draped a cloak of data and video trails around us, they are disconnected and difficult to track, providing, in essence, a sense of privacy for most (but apparently not for you or McNealy, or Kevin Kelly, for that matter, with whom I’ve debated this back in the Wired days). But “eternal data” is a new beast entirely, I’d argue, and the implications are more far reaching than just privacy. I didn’t mean for this post to be only about that issue, though securing it (agreeing to a social contract regarding it, in other words) seems foundational to building upon it as a platform. A big issue is also ownership, as Arnaud points out, as well as what applications and services can be imagined and built on top of such data. I hope to explore these ideas in future posts.

By: Arnaud Leene

Arnaud Leene — Sat, 08 May 2004 12:05:09 +0000

We should talk about the ownership of this (private) trail information. It is clear that the user should own his own profile, whether it is his surfing trail, credit card trail or whatever. A user's profile is also his weblog, the comments on someone else's weblog, his music list, his SNS-profiles, FOAF file, anything that he does, writes, speaks, etc. The more explicit this information, the better is the profile. Only the user knows his own profile, not what companies mined in his trail. Take responsibility for your profile.

So be in control again. A user should make this profile explicit, as some users are already doing in their weblog. Make sure that this profile represents yourself (or one of your personae) or otherwise the world might invent your profile and they might guess wrong. And publish this profile on your own website, weblog, whatever. The user becomes a writer and a publisher. This profile information could be published under some Personal Commons arrangement, i.e. personal information that is available to the world.

This user profile has value for companies. Companies can access this profile under a Personal Commons license in a standardised and legal way. Then they can adapt their interaction with a user accordingly. They might even give discount if an user profile is available, as it makes their live cheaper (less marketing cost). This profile can also be the basis of the various Social Networking Services, which can then focus on their business: networking. A user's wishlist and transaction trail is no longer available to just Amazon, but all book shops.

Once this profile has more value than the trail we leave behind, the user is back in control. Next step will be to regulate access, so we know who had access and what the profile was used for. And hopefully we can come up with some enforcement in the even longer term.

By: Alex Salkever

Alex Salkever — Sat, 08 May 2004 08:42:44 +0000

I think you are making a mistaken assumption. Very little of our behavior was ephemeral before during the PC Era. Video cameras took in our every move at 7/11s, bank machines, and inside most chain stores. Our credit card companies tracked our purchasing habits, as did the supermarket chains with their little club cards. Car repairmen tracked the mileage on our cars. Blockbuster tracked the videos we rented. What IS different now is that this datastream has become more easily accessible and, in many cases, totally accessible to all. We never had any privacy before. It just was harder for people with no time/money/strong inclination to pierce the veil. You could have easily ordered up the President’s credit report a decade ago. The point is you wouldn’t have thought of doing so. In that sense, the Internet has eliminated the illusion of ephemeral existence that we all had. McNealy had it right a long time ago. You have no privacy. Haven’t had any for several decades. Get over it or encrypt everything you do, cut up your charge cards, rip off your license plates, buy a bunch of wigs and get plastic surgery. Oh, and move to Mexico.

By: Philipp Lenssen

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 07 May 2004 09:11:36 +0000

Interesting stuff. Would like to point you to my previous post:

Googling Paranoia
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2003_05_23_index.html#200334462

By: Steve Krause

Steve Krause — Fri, 07 May 2004 02:41:55 +0000

Where you shop, when you shop, and how much you spend has already made the jump from ephemeral to eternal–if you use a credit card. A lot of people do. Has round 1 of this issue already occurred?