[bane]

Well, open standards do not mean open data. The U.S. government also prefers open standards and open source for example. Open standards and open source means that they aren't stuck with vendor lock-in. If a vendor supplies them with proprietary tooling and then the vendor goes away, they're sunk.

In other words, just because the NSA builds and uses Accumulo, doesn't mean they've been good actors with what it does.

[hosh]

Yep. Google is pursing an interesting lock-in strategy with Android. Android is an open standard, but many key apps are now put on the proprietary side. That did not stop Samsung from sneaking in the other way and developing what looks like a fork.

There are two issues with the open data.

The first is that our society is still in a transition process where we realize, there is no such thing as a trusted third party. The concept of a trusted third party is the very basis for governance and rule of law. We're seeing an emergance of technology and social constructs built around the idea of untrusted third parties, and this is still an ongoing process. It has not touched issues with privacy, yet.

The other comes from my weird perspective on life. Well, weird with this group of people :-) Spiritually speaking, there is no such thing as privacy. One of the things you quickly learn in meditation, or in psychedelic experiences, is that you cannot hide the things in your subconscious. You can try for a time, but eventually it has to come out. That applies to every individual.

When people talk about privacy, they are not really talking about privacy. Again, it is a power issue. If I know something about you that you are ashamed of, I can use that as psychological leverage to get you to do what I want, to an extent, or at least, influence your thoughts and behavior. This is a form of power. Ordinary people in societies tend to project their personal power to authority figures. Modern societies tend to have this story, this myth that power is vested in the collective, and there is no personal power. Yet, even with this denial, because people yearn for personal power, it manifests in the form for demanding privacy, rights, liberties, guns, etc.

When taken together, the transition to acknowledging that there are no such thing as a trusted third party will mean having to accept developing personal power ... and the responsibilities that come with that. We've already seen several swings and shifts related to that -- p2p filesharing vs. RIAA/MIAA, bitcoins/digital currencies, NSA, etc. So far, what has been happening is another large organization supplants the legacy organization (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), but my point is that those very organizations are tied to our notions of trusted third parties. It'll be sometime yet before we thrash our way through this, of which, the privacy concerns of FB + Rift is just a small part.