![]() In a single slide Phil Windley summarizes what happened after that. ![]() The end-to-end principle was back-burnered when client-server (aka calf-cow) got baked into e-commerce in the late ’90s. I see two reasons why privacy is now under extreme threat in the digital world - and the physical one too, as surveillance cameras bloom like flowers in public spaces, and as marketers and spooks together look toward the “Internet of Things” for ways to harvest an infinitude of personal data. ( Here’s what The Onion prophetically reported about this irony more than two years ago.) Worse, the institution we look toward for protection from this kind of unwelcome surveillance - our government - spies on us too, and relies on private companies for help with activities that would be a crime if the Fourth Amendment still meant what it says. Yet this kind of thing is beyond normative on the Web: it is a huge business. This is why no store on Main Street would plant a tracking beacon in the pants of a visiting customer, to report back on that customer’s activities - just so the store or some third party can “deliver” a better “experience” through advertising. ![]() Private spaces in public settings are well understood in every healthy and mature culture. That’s because privacy is mostly a settled issue in the physical world, and a grace of civilized life. Clothing, for example, is a privacy technology. White opens with this sentence: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” Sixty-four years have passed since White wrote that, and it still makes perfect sense to me, hunched behind a desk in a back room of a Manhattan apartment.
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