Bradley Harowitz is a Dangerous Man

Irish writer Oscar Wilde once said, "All great ideas are dangerous." I don't know if he was right or not. As a lover of Liberty, I'm not inclined to come down on ideas at all, but there is one man and his ideas that I've recently read about that makes me a little edgy.

Bradley Harowitz is the head of technology development at YAHOO! and is responsible for building innovative search technologies. Sounds harmless enough, right? Sitting around coming up with ideas on how to access information quicker and better sounds like a great thing to spend money on. Just look at the interworld thingama-jiggy we have today. Without people like Harowitz, it wouldn't be possible.

What happens, though, when Bradley wants to bring his search engines to the real world? That's exactly what he's proposing here, in his BBC column today. Here's the example he gives:

"Imagine this scenario: I am in a supermarket and I pick up a can of tomatoes and I place it in the shopping trolley. Immediately my mobile phone flashes green to indicate to me that it is a good buy. I go down the aisle and choose a bottle of wine but this time my phone flashes red to suggest I reconsider.

This is only possible when we have a universal resolver for every entity in the world.

What do I mean by universal resolver?

On the internet we have something called DNS - the Domain Name System.

When I type in yahoo.com there's a service set up in multiple distributed servers around the world which helps "resolve" the mnemonic "yahoo.com" (easy to remember!) to a numerical IP address (hard to remember!) which machines can understand.

The service translates yahoo.com into a specific IP address so I don't get mistakenly sent to another website.

We do that very well for resolving domain names but we don't do it very well in the real world for resolving entities.

What do we mean by entity? Frankly almost anything qualifies: a person, a place or a thing, real world and digital objects, even concepts or ideas."

You think we have problems with Internet Stalking now? Just wait until we have Harowitz giving the world the ability to find anything, anywhere, anytime.

Admittedly, Harowitz points out that we already have this technology in place, with companies like Amazon tagging everything in their inventory with unique numbers. Books and CDs are one thing. But people?? Throw in the RFID tag scare and we've got a scenario that not even Equality 7-2521 could fathom. Ok, I'm beginning to hear echoes of my grandfather's voice... "The boy's got an overactive imagination!" Though I'm not sure if it's me he's referring to, or Bradley Harowitz.

Right to Privacy

And here we are again discussing the individual's right to privacy. How much privacy do we have a right to, and when? Complete privacy, if we wish, and all the time? That would be absurd I'm sure you'll agree. We certainly do not have the right to complete privacy when going out into public, say to the mall or to school or the workplace, meaning we cannot walk in anonymously, wearing a mask and expect to deal with people in a normal fashion. And so we arrive at degrees of privacy. At the store and so forth, we have a right to a certain amount of privacy. The people around us do not have the right to access my bank account information, for example. But they do have the right, I would think, to look face to face at the person that has entered their establishment.

And therein lies the problem. The internet has become more than a collection of information, or a giant digital reference section of the collected world's libraries. It has evolved into so much more. The world wide web is now an international community of people, sharing ideas, engaging in commerce, creating, destroying, building new cultures even. And in such a place, the question lies open still, how much privacy are you really entitled to, when dealing with other individuals in such a manner. Today when you access the internet, you can no longer say, "but I'm in the privacy of my own home. I should be given complete privacy if I desire."

This most certainly is not the case anymore. You have gone much outside your living room, outside your house, outside your country in many cases and are dealing with more human beings in the blink of an eye than our grandparents dealt with their entire lives.

It's a complex problem. How do we create the correct balance of privacy and disclosure? What IS the correct balance? And who should have a say in how much of my information is open to the world? I don't want to be tagged! Is anyone else feeling helpless at this point? And why is Morpheus ringing in my head??

"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

Perhaps I'm being a bit melodramatic, but really... where does it end? What I don't want to happen is to have the next conversation about the internet go something like this,

"What is the internet? Control. The internet is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this." [holds up a Duracell battery]