You are not alone in caring

Scott McNealy of SUN reportedly said a while back that “Privacy is dead. Get over it”, thereby encouraging further the sense of inevitability about spam, identifty theft and other wonderful consequences of our age. That the world did not revolt at the very utterance tells us either how sophisticated we are in ignoring the social forecasts of those who lead the tech industry or how passively we accept our world being shaped by others. You know where I stand on that particular dividing line and it therefore was with no small pleasure that I read this month’s Scientific American article on Latanya Sweeney of CMU’s Laboratory for International Data Privacy. She is leading groundbreaking work with her team aimed at providing better tools for individual privacy but what really caught my eye was her statement on what really needs to change: “Ultimately engineers and computer scientists will have to weave privacy protection into the design and usability of their new technologies, up front”. Yes indeed, a new kind of engineer and computer scientist is needed. Sound familiar?