left alone, together

The word itself ‘privacy’ doesn’t appear even once in the American Constitution, and as a legal principle, it wasn’t until 1890 that Louis Brandeis formulated it in a way we would recognize today. The spark for Brandeis’ historic treatise was the sudden emergence of the telegraph and portable cameras; more specifically, his socialite law partner Sa... See more

The challenge before us is to figure out the ground rules of privacy in Web 3, where the ‘contextual privacy’ that has shaped both user expectations and government regulation in Web 2 no longer hold at all; in fact, they’re utterly fipped.

We have more public information than ever, but what if there is also less transmission of more personal information between people—especially between generations. What is lost if our digital heirlooms become inaccessible to close relatives? What is lost if estates do not donate prominent people's cloud data to university archives?

He also brings up its implications in the modern tech ecosystem. The Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons are like panoptic overseers that can force legibility even on the most impenetrable, messy datastreams through machine learning algorithms and hyper-scale pattern recognition. The trade-off here may not be conscription (not yet anyway), but there is... See more