[idlewords]

The audience for this talk was a bunch of librarians and fellow travelers who are bringing large archives and collections online, often at great expense. I wanted to encourage them to find new, engaged audiences for these collections, rather than fixate on how to analyze them with computers.

With regard to the dangers of surveillance, I've made a sustained argument about this in other talks. It boils down to the data being collected having great power to harm people if it is ever put to malicious use, and a lifespan that exceeds that of institutions we know how to run. My beef is not with the surveillance alone, but with the combination of surveillance and permanent storage.

[jaywunder]

Thank you for explaining that! The context is meaningful and makes your talk make sense.

On the regard of data talking into the wrong hands, I take issue to this argument because it's not a unique problem to personal data collection. Any data could be hacked - bank information, address, whatever. But that doesn't mean we don't use the internet for banking and etc. It means we try to make systems that are difficult to hack. It seems like you'd want data collection not to happen on websites like Facebook and Google, when hacking isn't a unique problem to those websites.

[idlewords]

Here's a capsule summary of what I'm pushing for: http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.htm

[iyn]

I agree with that, but I have a small suggestion until these points are reality: you can consider adding/enabling SSL/TLS for your blog. Thanks!

P.S. I really like your posts and your tweets are hilarious, please don't ever stop.

[rubidium]

Ok, this tweaks my curiosity. Why would one put SSL on a static personal/blog type website (assuming one doesn't care about the google penalty)?

[mbrock]

Otherwise network operators can sniff, alter, and generally fuck with the integrity of the site and its users.

[b2m9]

For example, ISPs are not able to crawl your traffic if it's via HTTPS. I've worked on data sets gathered by major ISPs and it's scary how much they know about their users (especially if they also have a mobile phone with the same company). ISPs use such intelligence for personalised marketing (either for their own product catalogue or 3rd parties)

[odbol_]

The URL isn't encrypted though, is it? Since there's no dynamic content on the page, they already know exactly what you're looking at.