Panel
Digital Me: The Right to Privacy vs. the Public Good
- The panel is projected to be a "painless and fun" experience for attendees.
- Individuals will likely need to make personal determinations regarding acceptable levels of government data collection in the future.
- Most Facebook users have historically failed to adjust their privacy settings, indicating a reliance on provider-side security.
- Obligations for privacy protection may shift from individuals to service providers who must conform to user wishes.
- Commercial incentives for surveillance are expected to decrease over time as it becomes less sustainable to spy on users.
- Government data collection is viewed as an irreversible fact of life that alters societal structures and impacts freedoms of speech, association, and religion.
- Future interactions with the information economy may drive companies to prioritize success over surveillance.
- Data collection methods are described as a "five-mile gill net" that captures indiscriminate amounts of information.
- Law enforcement efficacy in dragnet data collection may be diminished as relevant data becomes mixed with irrelevant information and subsequently lost.
- Online bank fraud losses in Los Angeles alone are estimated at $500,000 per week.
- A new field of informatics focused on data balance sheets does not currently exist but is expected to develop, eventually enabling segmentation and virtualization of data.
- Storage costs in cloud environments like Amazon S3 are approximately $0.03 per gigabyte per month, with annual cost reductions of 30% to 40%.
- Encryption advancements capable of fundamentally changing the landscape are still years away.
- Artificial intelligence systems surpassing human capabilities in most domains are projected to be approximately 10 years away.
- Legal provisions under the Patriot Act, specifically Section 215, are scheduled to sunset on June 1st and will expire if not renewed.
- European data protection laws are forecasted to be enacted within the next 12 months.
- Security systems cannot be built to be absolutely secure, and all user actions are expected to be detectable in the current privacy climate.
- Presidents and politicians cannot guarantee total public safety, a conclusion drawn from the 9-11 Commission.