1984... "We're ALL Winston Smith now - and our common enemy is the Big Brother State"

Young people willingly give up their privacy on Google and Facebook because they have not read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four unlike previous generations, a leading academic has warned. Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at Sheffield University, said that large corporations were hovering up private information and modern generations did not realize it was wrong. He said that older people who had grown up reading George Orwell’s 1984 about ‘Big Brother technology and ‘ authoritarianism’, were in a better position to resist the creeping erosion of privacy.

... That is why the software and governance of vehicle automation must remain distributed. It can be commercial as long as every individual can benefit economically. Google would have to ask you, and certainly pay you, after every trip to be able to make any use at all of the data that emerges.

To pay is to offer something of value in exchange for whatever. It does not necessarily mean handing over a roll of greenbacks, which is what Lanier means here. In this case the thing that Google is proffering in return for our information is that ride in the driverless car. If we don't think the deal is worth it then we'll walk to our destination, or hop, or hail a taxi via Uber. The ride is the thing of value that is being offered in exchange, so Google is already paying.

Common to both of these stories is the mistake that private sector information-gathering is the same as (and thus as dangerous as) mandatory state collection of the same data. They're simply not the same thing at all. The state has, within its jurisdiction, a monopoly. That's rather what a state means, in fact: and a monopoly means that one cannot opt out. Given that the state can force people to bend to its will, what we allow a state to do to us should be very different from what we might allow private actors to do.

Google takes too much information? Use DuckDuckGo. Facebook too much? MySpace is still around, isn't it? We have choices here and each of us can make our own. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, the entire point of which was to detail what happens when the state won't allow us any choices at all.

read full article at The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/11/privacy_invasion_by_the_state_is_far_worse_than_by_private_firms_worstall_weds/