PUBLIC MARKS with search opacity

Customize geolocation data sent to websites.

Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.

speach bubble Comment

Here you are assuming that the crowd is right and the other one is wrong. It might be even true at a moment in time and not such much at another time. Losing memory, lying is a necessary part of human social relationship.

Think, for example, about someone lying about a sexual orientation to get a job.

Then there is living with your own mistakes and having to carry them all along (internet criminal record). The crowd sometimes makes things a lot bigger than it was in real, and specifically for the perception of others (the ones out of the story) a few years after. That’s not good. It makes individual carrying the burden of a poster saying all the bad things they did in the past, just because someone or a group of people decided to make it public.

It touches what most people call private life, and that I prefer to call opacity

Private life is not happening only behind walls but also in public spaces. In a physical world, it is tolerable because the opacity is bigger and that is good.

Posted by: karl at February 27, 2010 12:16 PM

As a matter of fact, IE6 were creating new elements, functions, css properties to fulfill some duties (png transparency, opacity, blinking text). They are proprietary functionalities. Webkit is different: they're following the W3C recommendations and is always up-to-date for free.

Le danger du web reste que la marée de l'ignorance à tendance à engloutir les bancs de connaissance.

karl Says:

January 2nd, 2010 at 9:13 pm

I do not use anymore the term privacy for a couple of years. The term is not anymore making sense in the framework we are living now. I prefer to use intimacy (the degree of being close with someone or an environment) and opacity (the thickness between the « me » and the others having access to « me »)

I have written a few blog posts about this topic.

http://www.la-grange.net/2009/09/22/opacite

The opacity surrounding the « me » follows these principles:

1. Global : chaque unité d’information est disponible partout sur terre.

2. Instantané : chaque unité d’information est disponible en temps réel.

3. Répliqué : chaque unité d’information est répliquée à l’identique.

4. Permanent : chaque unité d’information est conservée pour une longue période de temps.

I feel a lot of anger and frustration in this list.

Some of the items seem fine to me. I would not have written them like this ;). I disagree strongly with the last one, not because of the rationale but the form. It’s an unproven affirmation. There will be cases where it will be indeed the case and some not. :)

About geolocation privacy, the issue has hit the fan already ;) Advertising the user’s location is one way to make aware the user (or users in developping countries) of a mobile device. Blocking access to the location is *not always* a solution either. Sometimes the solution will be in how long the data can be kept, sometimes the solution will be in how the data will be used.

Repeat after me 1000 times: It is not a privacy issue, but a lack (or very thin) opacity issue. The network makes the access to information very quick and easy. There’s no need or no use to block it. There is need to be able to slow down the stream at will.