Suchergebnisse

Many governments have been endeavouring to force providers of communications services to gather data about their customers' electronic traffic and store that data for lengthy periods of time. The purpose of this is to enable law enforcement agencies to gain access to data when they want it. These initiatives are commonly referred to as 'data retention' measures. This document commences by providing a brief and necessarily superficial presentation of the nature of the proposals and the issues arising from them, primarily from an Australian perspective. However, the primary purpose is not to contribute to the already-substantial literature on data retention. Rather, the paper argues that there is a need for, and a lack of, a body of principles whereby such seriously privacy-threatening proposals can be evaluated.

Corporate marketers have promoted technologies as means to monitor the behavior of all manner of things. Governments have suspended their disbelief and permitted agencies to buy technologies and install monitor systems. Some corporations have imposed similar schemes on their employees and their customers.

The first generation of cyborgs is alive, well, walking among us, and even running. Pacemakers, renal dialysis machines and clumsy mechanical hands may not match the movie-image of cyborg enhancements, but they have been the leading wave. The legs of sprinter Oscar Pistorius, and implants of both the cochlear and RFID varieties, make more substantial changes to individuals. They also pose greater challenges to society as a whole. Cyborgisation will give rise to demands for new rights. People who have lost capabilities but have not yet got the relevant prostheses will seek the right to have them. Some people will demand the right not just to recover what they are missing, but also to enhance themselves. Others will demand the liberty not to have prostheses imposed on them. Enhanced humans will seek additional rights to go with the additional capabilities that they have. The political processes involved in lobbying for and resisting these desires will take many and varied forms. Professional engineers have an obligation to anticipate these developments, and to brief political, social and economic institutions on their nature, impact and implications. They have to date failed to do so. The rate of change is sufficiently brisk that action is urgent.

Corporate marketers have promoted technologies as means to monitor the behavior of all manner of things. Governments have suspended their disbelief and permitted agencies to buy technologies and install monitor systems. Some corporations have imposed similar schemes on their employees and their customers.

Privacy impact assessment (PIA) is a systematic process for evaluating the potential effects on privacy of a project, initiative or proposed system or scheme. Its use has become progressively more common from the mid-1990s onwards. On the one hand, privacy oversight agencies and privacy advocates see PIAs as an antidote to the serious privacy-intrusiveness of business processes in the public and private sectors and the ravages of rapidly developing information technologies. On the other, governments and business enterprises alike have struggled to encourage public acceptance and adoption of technologies that are very apparently privacy-invasive, and have been turning to PIAs as a means of understanding concerns and mitigating business risks. This paper distinguishes PIAs from other business processes, such as privacy issues analysis, privacy law compliance checking and privacy audit, and identifies key aspects of the development of PIA practice and policy from their beginnings through to the end of 2008.

Privacy impact assessment (PIA) is a systematic process for evaluating the potential effects on privacy of a project, initiative or proposed system or scheme. Its use has become progressively more common from the mid-1990s onwards. On the one hand, privacy oversight agencies and privacy advocates see PIAs as an antidote to the serious privacy-intrusiveness of business processes in the public and private sectors and the ravages of rapidly developing information technologies. On the other, governments and business enterprises alike have struggled to encourage public acceptance and adoption of technologies that are very apparently privacy-invasive, and have been turning to PIAs as a means of understanding concerns and mitigating business risks. This paper distinguishes PIAs from other business processes, such as privacy issues analysis, privacy law compliance checking and privacy audit, and identifies key aspects of the development of PIA practice and policy from their beginnings through to the end of 2008.

The first generation of cyborgs is alive, well, walking among us, and even running. Pacemakers, renal dialysis machines and clumsy mechanical hands may not match the movie-image of cyborg enhancements, but they have been the leading wave. The legs of sprinter Oscar Pistorius, and implants of both the cochlear and RFID varieties, make more substantial changes to individuals. They also pose greater challenges to society as a whole. Cyborgisation will give rise to demands for new rights. People who have lost capabilities but have not yet got the relevant prostheses will seek the right to have them. Some people will demand the right not just to recover what they are missing, but also to enhance themselves. Others will demand the liberty not to have prostheses imposed on them. Enhanced humans will seek additional rights to go with the additional capabilities that they have. The political processes involved in lobbying for and resisting these desires will take many and varied forms. Professional engineers have an obligation to anticipate these developments, and to brief political, social and economic institutions on their nature, impact and implications. They have to date failed to do so. The rate of change is sufficiently brisk that action is urgent.

Abstract
Background and Purpose: The term 'social media' refers to a cluster of applications and online services that support human interaction and content broadcasting and sharing. Current services are isolated islands or 'walled gardens', and are based on a business model that is highly exploitative of individuals and their data.
Design/Methodology/Approach: Surveys of the refereed literature have been undertaken on several occasions during the period 2012-13. Reviews were conducted of social media services that are reasonably described as 'consumer-oriented'. Media reports on those services were uncovered. The available information was then subjected to analysis, including reflection based on prior research conducted by the author.
Results: Required characteristics of consumer-oriented social media, and barriers to emergence and adoption of such services were identified. That provided a basis for proposing means to overcome those barriers. Key impediments to the emergence of such services were identified, and means of overcoming the impediments outlined.
Conclusion: An alternative, consumer-oriented approach is feasible, involving open architecture, inter-operability and portability features, fair terms and privacy-sensitivity.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to document the development path of a specific concept during its first 20 years.


Design/methodology/approach
– Evidence was extracted of the citation-counts of relevant articles, uses of the term in other articles that do not cite the original articles, and uses of terms with similar meanings. Examination of the data took into account insights from epidemiology, memetics and diffusion of innovations theory.


Findings
– The concept has had insufficient impact to overcome the weaknesses in theory and practice that it was intended to address. It has lacked champions. It has proven to be sufficiently fit to survive, but not to flourish.


Research limitations/implications
– Google Scholar has a wide catchment area, and hence provides a basis for tracking the path of development of new ideas. However, the tools remain fairly blunt, and do not, for example, enable efficient extraction of patterns of citation over time, or the nature of the uses made of terms by the citing articles.


Practical implications
– Neologisms take on a life of their own, losing the associations that they were intended to have with other ideas, and shedding their embedment in a body of theory. For a new term to successfully project a meme, its proponent must enthuse a critical mass of early adopters to apply it, and to generate a further round of adopters.


Originality/value
– Concepts are seldom tracked over time. This paper shows that a new term and its associated body of theory require more than publications in top-level journals if they are to have significant impacts on academic research and industry practice.