Week 8: Privacy, Identity, and Personal Information (25 April 2005)
The concept that having someone's "true name" gives you power over them goes way back into mythology. It's a theme that recurs often in fantasy and science fiction books.
One of the most powerful (and prescient) of these stories is Vernor Vinge's True Names, which you'll be reading this week. (I'm providing a link to the online version in the readings, but I highly recommend purchasing the book, which has a number of interesting essays to accompany the original story.)
What information do we consider to be private, and why? What information about yourself are you willing to share on a web site, for example? With your classmates? With your significant other? With your children?
Public/private boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred by publising tools like weblogs, the Google effect, and increasingly wide access to databases of personal information. This week we'll be reading and thinking about those issues.
Excerpt: Of all the topics discussed this quarter, identity theft, and the effect of technology on the concept of identity are issues that I've had little interaction with prior to this week's reading. While the identity theft and privacy issue were...
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Excerpt: The true name of a particular character in many different fantasy and science fiction novels is often associated with power. Just look at J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Harry Potter series to see an example of...
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Excerpt: True Names is a Sci-Fi novel by Vernon Vinge written in 1979 riding the wave of Cyber world futurism as was prevalent in the 70’s ,later on carried forward by William Gibson (the author of neuromancer). The hero in this...
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Excerpt: The article ‘The naked crowd’ discusses about the need for personal exposure and the level to which a personal life can be made public. The sociologist Anthony Giddens writes about how hierarchy and relationships were a way of developing...
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Excerpt: Back in High school my brother like most people had the habit of scribbling most his personal information in a leather bound notebook, which was mostly telephone numbers of his friends, accounts, his plans(he made some ).It wasn’t particularly hard...
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Excerpt: “Verification, Not Identification” is the inspiration behind Steve Brill’s personal ID card. The company Verified ID and the verification system they are developing is a private, voluntary, biometrically secure identification system. They have re...
Read More: Verification, Not Identification
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