personal data
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Down and Running
I hit a storage crisis yesterday when I needed to copy a lot of fresh photos to my laptop’s hard drive, and it was clear that I would soon run out of room there. The laptop is a 16-inch 2023 M2 MacBook Pro with an 8TB hard drive—the most loaded and maxed-out computer I could Continue reading
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A Cure for Corporate Addiction to Personal Data
I wrote the original version of this post for the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal. You can find it here. Since images from archival material in the magazine no longer load, and I want to update this anyway, here is a lightly edited copy of the original. Bear in mind that what you’ll read Continue reading
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A Conversation with ChatGPT About Personal AI
What follows is a conversation I’m having with ChatGPT about personal AI. I guarantee it’s unlike any conversation about AI you’ll find anywhere else. If we want truly personal AI—the kind that is yours and not just a corporate service, this starts to point the way. Me: I am thinking about what personal data could—or Continue reading
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Personal Agentic AI
“Agentic” is hot: As an adjective, it is typically used as a modifier for AI. Hence this coincidence: Not surprisingly, Gartner puts Agentic AI first among its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025: Here is one Gartner explanation, among many: Theme No. 1: AI imperatives and risks drive organizations to protect themselves Trend 1: Agentic Continue reading
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Does personal AI require Big Compute?
I don’t think it does. Not for everything. We already have personal AI for autocomplete. Do we need Big Compute for a personal AI to tell us which pieces within our Amazon orders are in which line items in our Visa statements? (Different items in a shipment often appear inside different charges on a card.) Continue reading
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Why selling personal data is a bad idea
This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from studying this proposition for the last twenty years or more. The business does exist. See eleven companies in Markets for Continue reading
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If Your Privacy Is in the Hands of Others Alone, You Don’t Have Any
In her latest Ars Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates Continue reading
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Three thoughts about NFTs
There’s a thread in a list I’m on titled “NFTs are a Scam.” I know too little about NFTs to do more than dump here three thoughts I shared on the list in response to a post that suggested that owning digital seemed to be a mania of some kind. Here goes… First, from Walt Whitman, Continue reading
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Just in case you feel safe with Twitter
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen (@firstpersonpol) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. This is it: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Norwegian Data Protection Agency today fined Grindr $11.7 million following Continue reading
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So far, privacy isn’t a debate
Remember the dot com boom? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do. That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end. Sure, it’s hard to imagine that when we’re in the midst of the mania, but the end will come. When it Continue reading
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Will our digital lives leave a fossil record?
In the library of Earth’s history, there are missing books, and within books, there are missing chapters, written in rock that is now gone. John Wesley Powell recorded the greatest example of gone rock in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon. Floating down the Colorado River, he saw the canyon’s mile-thick Continue reading
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Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone?
Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone‘s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your information. By using our site and products, you are agreeing to the policy. That policy is supplied by Rolling Stone’s parent (PMC) and weighs more than 10,000 words. In Continue reading
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The Great Trivializer
Last night I watched The Great Hack a second time. It’s a fine documentary, maybe even a classic. (A classic in literature, I learned on this Radio Open Source podcast, is a work that “can only be re-read.” If that’s so, then perhaps a classic movie is one that can only be re-watched.*) The movie’s Continue reading
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Getting past broken cookie notices
Go to the Alan Turing Institute. If it’s a first time for you, a popover will appear: Among the many important things the Turing Institute is doing for us right now is highlighting with that notice exactly what’s wrong with the cookie system for remembering choices, and lack of them, for each of us using the Continue reading
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We can do better than selling our data
If personal data is actually a commodity, can you buy some from another person, as if that person were a fruit stand? Would you want to? Not yet. Or maybe not really. Either way, that’s the idea behind the urge by some lately to claim personal data as personal property, and then to make money (in Continue reading
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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process. One would be equally smart to bet against the mania for the Continue reading
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For privacy we need tech more than policy
To get real privacy in the online world, we need to get the tech horse in front of the policy cart. So far we haven’t done that. Let me explain… Nature and the Internet both came without privacy. The difference is that we’ve invented privacy tech in the natural world, starting with clothing and shelter, Continue reading
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Data is the New Love
Personal data, that is. Because it’s good to give away—but only if you mean it. And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking. I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say “data is the new oil.” That’s because a massive personal data Continue reading
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Let’s get some things straight about publishing and advertising
Synopsis—Advertising supported publishing in the offline world by sponsoring it. In the online world, advertising has been body-snatched by adtech, which tracks eyeballs via files injected into apps and browsers, then shoots those eyeballs with “relevant” ads wherever the eyeballs show up. Adtech has little or no interest in sponsoring a pub for the pub’s Continue reading
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Daily Tab for 2016_06_07
For today’s entries, I’m noting which linked pieces require you to turn off tracking protection, meaning tracking is required by those publishers. I’m also annotating entries with hashtags and organizing sections into bulleted lists. #AdBlocking and #Advertising Jack Trout died. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (co-written with Al Ries) did for advertising what The Elements of Style Continue reading