Back to Chris Taylor's - this time he wrote a guest blog in the Forbes blog entitled "While you slept" dealing with issues of privacy. I have written before about the big brother aspect on using sensors within the smarter planet. This is other aspect -- a lot of information are flowing on us from various systems, social networks, and various systems. A smart program can look at what we published in blogs, twitter, facebook and others and determine on our political opinions, religious beliefs and others. It seems that the combination of sensors, activities on social media, and other systems make us give us our privacy and many people don't seem to be bothered -- they allow everybody to see their pictures on facebook, or read what they write there. There are people who report in Twitter on what they are doing 30 times a day including all their happy and frustrating minutes. It seems that there is a growing section of the population who are giving up their privacy from their own will, and other people who are not aware that their privacy is been invaded. I guess that this is one of the characteristics of the current web generation - losing privacy. Of course, event processing can help in drawing conclusions about a person. Chris ends his posting in call for companies to be aware and set up policies and strategy and for government to regulate.
An interesting comment to my previous posting on smart cities, said as follows: Even if I am a big supporter of event based systems, I have a question on this topic. Can you explain me, who is the owner of the event based routing, filtering integration services?I hope, that you do not think about weather the government, or some industrial companies, cause this would empower them to rule the world.There need to be a self organizing way like e.g. the Internet, but getting there will be even a larger competition than introducing the web, because of already competing companies in that market segment.I have written before on the big brother when talking about the previous NY governor whose felling out of power began when a computer program indicated him as suspicious in money laundering. This reminds my of somebody who told me that he is afraid that information is gathered in computerized systems and used for other purposes, that person lived in NY, and moved at some point to live with his girl-friend in New Jersey. He did not want to change his NY address for various reasons (among them not to bother changing his driver licence). He said that he never used EZPASS to pay for toll roads, since somebody could conclude from the fact that he drives every working day in the "garden state parkway" northbound, that he actually lives in NJ.
So the question is -- using all the smarter planet services will have the possibility to gather much information about the individual, who owns this information and what can this information be used to. Governments typically do not own infrastructures, but they have powers to make laws that will compel infrastructure owners to provide information, they do it today. Actually Internet service providers has a potential to know a lot about us. The same goes for events, if we'll have smarter planets, there will be a lot of events about individual person floating around, and if somebody will be able to join events from various sources, this somebody have a potential to know much about us. I guess that here there will be a need to have some legal structure that will prevent infrastructure suppliers as well as governments to abuse this information, like the bank secrecy laws in Switzerland.
After returning from a business trip, and a few days family vacation to celebrate the Purim holiday, I am retrurning to the Blog. One of my loyal readers, Eran Toch, has suggested the topic of this posting by sending me an article saying that the former NY governor, Mr. Spitzer, has started his way down of his high office, when caught by a "anti money laundering" program that looked for simple pattern of three events. Well - this is a classic event processing pattern, and it seems that it has changed the life of a few people (starting from Eliot Spitzer himself, and in a chain effect, many other people). This reminds me of a visit that a group of Eurpoean journalists visited the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel in 2003 or 2004, and I was asked to give them a talk about CEP (I am not sure even if we already used this name) - after giving them some example of use cases, all of a sudden one of the journalists had the association to Orwell's big brother, and after he mentioned it, there was some philosophical debate between some of the journalists to us, whether this technology has a potential to be a nightmare for human rights. My opinion is that many technologies can be abused, but can also used for good causes - criminals (and auditors) can use patterns to find flows in systems, and organizations can use similar patterns in order to trace the same criminals that are trying to take advantage of flows... No matter how used -- event patterns is very powerfull, and its impact on our life has not even scratched the surface of its potential.
