No, it’s not the name of next season’s hit TV show. It’s about how privacy may soon be a quaint notion from an earlier, simpler time before the Internet of Things (as Sun described it in 2003). Privacy will be overtaken by events (OBE).
EDS' Next Big Thing Blog mentions an MIT initiative for a Physical Markup Language (PML). This PML is MIT’s proposal for a standard way of presenting and accessing data about things and how they move, age, change temperature, shrink, transfer or interact. From the project design overview:
Since most physical objects of interest to industry and commerce are those designed and built by humans, they tend to have shared features, such as shape, symmetry, materials and function, as well as business processes, ownership and transaction. Furthermore, many industries, such as healthcare, manufacturing, defense, logistics, transportation, disposal and many others, describe similar characteristics in different ways. By offering a unifying language, these characteristics can be shared and translated across industry groups, multiplying the amount of available information. Automated, industry specific translators may be written allowing the shared information to be presented in familiar ways.
Having all that data gives rise to enormous opportunity for analyzing processes, saving money and creating new businesses. What’s more than a little scary is how fast technology moves and how difficult it is for regulatory policy to keep up.
Here’s a real-world example of how far policy is behind technology. Just this week the American Bar Association issued a new ethics opinion on metadata in electronic documents. According to the opinion, lawyers may now examine and use information in documents’ metadata, even if those documents were provided by an opposing attorney.
I believe the practice of mining (and scrubbing) metadata in legal documents began at least three years ago, but it took this long for the issue to build enough critical mass for regulation or, in this case, just an ethics opinion.
That's not the perfect example, but it's the one that got me thinking about unrealistic expectations of privacy in a digital networked world where documents have audit trails and click streams are captured. No one wanted to believe Sun's Scott McNealy who said in January 1999 that we have "zero privacy anyway." Once all the "things" in our lives are communicating, what kind of privacy can we expect?
I fear our process for creating and implementing policy is not up to the task of regulating technology. We can't and shouldn't slow down innovation. What can we do to speed up policy? Or will we have to re-think our definition of privacy?
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