While you have slept - more about the big brother

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.  

Plato vs. Aristotle

Carole-Ann Matignon recent Blog posting was entitled:  "Plato or Aristotle", the two great Greek philosophers, that were once labeled as those in which the entire western culture is a footnote to their writings.   In this context, I guess that Carole-Ann meant the major difference in their outlook of life.  Plato saw the individual as part of a society, while his student Aristotle, saw the society as a collection of individuals.  The difference is -- who is in the middle: the society or the individual.    Carole-Ann's posting was in the issue of privacy, or data accumulated on people, which in some cases it is good for the society in general, a government agency, an ability to get credit decisions and more, but can harm the individual's interest.    This is an issue that is also dominant in dilemmas about event processing for years, the relatively ease in obtaining information about  events, in a world full of sensors and cameras, and the privacy considerations.


Security and privacy in event processing is one of the topics we'll discuss in the DEBS tutorial about non-functional properties of event processing in DEBS'11.  Stay tuned for me.