A 1967 prescient article by Arthur R. Miller shows that forty years ago, EHR and a national criminal data base seemed just around the corner, just as they are today. 

As today's rapid advances in computing technology fuel heated debate over the proper ethical, legal and practical boundaries to state and commercial data collection, it is easy to forget that although the technology is novel, the issue is nothing new.

A long tradition of dystopian novels, such as Kafka's 'The Trial', Zamyatin's 'We' and Orwell's '1984', warned of the dangers of the overbearing, bureaucratic state while, in grim reality, the oppression of people under communism was facilitated by a massive exercise in the collection and collation of information. Computers were rare and primitive in East Germany, yet the state maintained secret files on a quarter of its population and perhaps one adult in seven informed on their friends, neighbours and colleagues to the Stasi. 

The one unifying theme in past predictions of the future is their hopelessly dated nature today, but noted American legal scholar Arthur R. Miller did write a prescient article "The National Data Center and Personal Privacy" in the Atlantic Monthly of November 1967 warning of the dangers posed to personal privacy by computerised Government data banks. His arguments, further developed in 'The Assault on Privacy: Computers, Data Banks, and Dossiers'  in 1971, remain interesting less for their occasional paranoia regarding Governmental intentions than for their similarity to concerns raised as if novel today.

The upcoming identity conference in New Zealand is going to be a high spot for ID management in this part of the world; indeed anywhere.

In 2 weeks, I will be heading to New Zealand to participate in Managing Identity in New Zealand - Identity Conference 2008.  Among the other speakers will be Stefan Brands to talk about Credentica & its purchase by Microsoft, which we first celebrated in A great day for privacy: genuine privacy respecting, user centric Identity Management has hit the mainstream the day after it was announced.

As a consequence, I have been brushing up on latest developments in ID management in New Zealand.  The short version of that story is that, at least among the Anglo cultures, the New Zealand government almost certainly takes the prize for seeking to provide privacy respecting, user centric ID management.

See for example igovt public consultation at Vikram Kumar's fabulous Identity & Privacy blog; while you're there have a wander round his site.  Martin Stewart-Weeks from Cisco introduced me to the site. 

We're putting ourselves in harm's way, according to the latest research from Symantec.

Sure, social networking is fun, catching up with old school friends, flashing through their photos, seeing how their lives have developed, it's a really neat way to keep in contact with people. But it's also a great way to provide fraudsters with a wealth of information that can then be used to access your existing bank accounts, or even create new ones.

The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report reviews known vulnerabilities, analyses network-based attacks, and tracks the occurrence of malicious code based on intelligence data gathered from two million decoy email accounts in 30 different countries, as well as 40,000 sensors spread over 180 countries. To create the report Symantec also draws malicious code reports from over 120 million client, server, and gateway systems that have deployed its antivirus product.

And our latest findings were concerning for Internet users placing personal information on trusted websites such as on social networking sites.

Can Metcalf's Law be applied to personal data management?

It is often said that if data about someone is already in the public domain, then that information is no longer private. Sounds reasonable, but I reckon that can become an insidious furphy.

"The data is already public" was the chief debating point advanced by proponents of searchable white pages. They argued that because publicly available paper white pages reveal everyone's phone numbers, surely having a searchable database didn't change anything. But a searchable digital white pages really is different. And not just quantitatively -- it makes reversing names from numbers vastly more efficient -- but also qualitatively.

For one thing, the very act of searching generates new types of information, much of which is private (and commercially valuable). For instance, whomever owns the searchable white pages also gets to know stuff like who else is interested in my phone number, and why. The owner can synthesise brand new information, none of which is accessible to me, even though nothing other than my 'already public' number has been revealed.