Thursday, April 28, 2011

Government uses privately accumulated "ambient data" - The Information

Here is the location for this:
"We are swimming in an ocean of ambient data," Robert Kirkpatrick, the director of the United Nations’ Global Pulse program, said during a panel on global democracy at The Guardian’s Activate New York [here] conference Thursday. “Can we mine that ambient data in real time?”
That question captured the tone of the day-long conference on the Internet and technological change being held at the Paley Center in midtown Manhattan, where earlier Benjamin Bratton, director of design and geopolitics at UC San Diego, talked of redesigning citizenship “for a cloud computing era” and New York City’s chief digital officer Rachel Sterne asked, “How could a city be a platform the way Facebook’s API is a platform?”
During the global democracy panel, speakers Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, and Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion [here], disagreed about the dangers posed by making so much user data available to governments.


At the same time, The Guardian newspaper also reported here that Dutch police bought satellite navigation information from TomTom:
"The Dutch national newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported that police had obtained the TomTom information from the government and used it to set targeted speed traps..."

Mining "ambient information" is what makes modernity modern.

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