A couple of linked posts that have been delayed while I was ill…
Berkeley’s danah boyd explains how personal feelings of vulnerability should be given priority when analyzing systems that lend themselves to data collection, privacy invasions, and security failures. Where YASNSs, browser-trackers, search-trackers, ISPs, and the like all meet creates “ickiness”; we’re not comfortable with Google + A9 + Dodgeball + Friendster building the dossier on us any more than we were the gov’t doing so, but the commercial version is more extensive, more invasive, and yet harder to avoid because it is so insidious, has so many apparently “good” uses. People designing systems and tools must go beyond password protection: boyd says we must “Encourage them to minimize vulnerability in their design, not simply protect privacy.”