From  Barbara Liskov -- Q&A: Turing Award winner on the cloud, women in IT and the dangers of data mining

"What's going on is thinking about, 'how do we conceptualise the problem?
What can different techniques accomplish?' Security is not only about data it's also about
tracking what you're doing so everything you do on the internet can be collected and people
can mine that information so there's another kind of breach of confidentiality that's lurking there.
And so there's immense problems lurking - coming up in the future.

We're talking about things like identity theft which is already happening...

We're talking about government eavesdropping - which as you know is already happening also…

These are problems that are clearly ahead of us that need to be dealt with.

Does Google know too much/have too much data?
Well you know if Google ever decided to misbehave I think there'd be big trouble.

I mean people put a lot of trust in Google and actually all the other online providers.

--

With artificial intelligence techniques it may be [possible] to come up with a much better way of finding

what you're looking for. That's something I think we can expect from artificial intelligence in the future.

Unfortunately those very same techniques will allow very efficient data mining of the patterns of your use

on the internet and so forth - so there's the good side and the bad side.

<snip>

Many of us have watched twitter start, and while its been around for a while, there has been a lot of buzz about it recently.

There is great economic incentive to build software like twitter that bifricates the market and acts as a force multiplier for commercial enterprises but little incentive to build software which aggregates the mass of data such that the consumer is empowered with the information to make better and better decisions. Ultimately, the aggregated data resides in the hands of the few companies building such tools.

Big brother is watching every word you say, every step you take, every sound you make they are watching you.

Comments Welcomed.

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