{"id":907,"date":"2007-10-05T00:07:40","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T06:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=907"},"modified":"2007-10-05T00:07:40","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T06:07:40","slug":"your_life_is_an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=907","title":{"rendered":"Your life is an open mine"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a disturbing article<\/a> at the BBC News site, Michael Geist, an expert in Internet Law at the University of Ottawa, describes how technology is eroding the legal foundations of privacy:<\/p>\n

\n

privacy law has … emphasised the distinction between personally identifiable information – information that can be traced to a particular person and is therefore deserving of legal protection – and non-identifiable information that does not enjoy any legal protection. Technology threatens the ability to easily distinguish between the two as powerful computers and ever-expanding databases make it easier to identify individuals from what was once thought to be non-identifiable information.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is what makes most of the “privacy protection” measures routinely rolled out by the internet giants little more than PR fluff. Even as they play up various techniques for “anonymizing” personal data, they are perfecting data-mining algorithms designed to see through anonymous information, to connect the dots back to you. Given enough data, enough computing power, and enough smart programmers, the term “non-identifiable information” becomes an oxymoron.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a disturbing article at the BBC News site, Michael Geist, an expert in Internet Law at the University of Ottawa, describes how technology is eroding the legal foundations of privacy: privacy law has … emphasised the distinction between personally identifiable information – information that can be traced to a particular person and is therefore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}