Dark Market for Personal Data and HTTPa

A professor of law writes an opinion piece published in the New York Times that examines the Dark Market for Personal Data.  Information brokers that sell personal information gathered from any number of source.  Information that reveals data about individuals that has substantial privacy content.

Being a law professor he proposes the establishment of regulatory law similar to that that applies to the credit industry and other business sectors that deal in private information.

Application of regulatory laws that specify what must or must not be done by business is old school.  There are laws that apply to banks.  They do not work anymore because banks are complex systems that easily find ways to avoid the law or evade the law.   The simplest way to circumvent the law is to write small print into a system user (customer) agreement that says any and all personal information given by a user as a condition of use may be shared with third parties and third parties may share with other parties.  All rights to privacy are waived.  When there are enough third parties sharing enough detailed personal information about a single individual then a "personal profile" is created where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Little bits and pieces  that anyone might not independently care about releasing but when aggregated may say something that the individual has a right to keep private.

No law is going to work to regulate the aggregation of information for commercial and even intelligence purposes.

Tim Berners-Lee is a systems creator, kind of an information systems law maker.  That is where law has to be made in the information age.  Not laws about what input or output of anything is regulated by the rules for the operating systems that process it.  He proposes HTTPa as a means of regulating privacy information and I examined that concept in this prior blog entry.

An information age operating system can be viewed as a system of designing and applying laws for the operation of application programs.  That is what law books did.  A practitioner of the law had an office full of them.  They created in the narrative form the legal operating system.  Books are old school and so linear.  Learning their entire linearity by plodding through all the law books a word at a time and being able to navigate its entire conceptual structure in a relational manner in the mind of a lawyer in order to practice it was and still is an art.

The new art of regulation is practiced by information system designers and applied by programmers.  In order to change the system to regulate it new laws must be devised and written into the operating system at the exact critical controlling point.  It is not sufficient to state what may or may not be legally input or output from a system.

If personal privacy is to be protected it will not be done by old school law makers and laws on the books.  It will be done by information systems designers and programmers that implement their designs in the operating system controlling/supporting the application programs that run on the system.

The old school lawyer has old school control thoughts.

HTTpa is an example of new school legal control through operating system operating system management.

I wrote about HTTPa way back in the linear time line of this blog.  One of the features of Google that I use often is specifying the time frame of a search when I want to see the latest result.  This link is the result of a search on the term HTTPa in the time frame of the past week.   I am so pleased that this excellent idea appears to be taking off so fast.  So fast that I hope it will quickly catch up with the capability of the system to aggregate private information that violates the social right of personal privacy and its protection.  It is an excellent example of insertion of a rule at a critical system control point to regulate the the core of system processes.

There are fundamental critical control points in any system at which the entire system may be regulated with a simple rule.  Our governance operating system has many of them.  For example "One man one vote"  that core controlling law was changed to "One Person one vote" and the entire operating system rule changed the function of all application programs to comply with the rule.

One person, one HTTPa.  Any single piece of private information or aggregated information about any individual must be connected to/associated with that person's systemic HATTPa and traceable through all application programs back to the original input of HTTPa linked personal private information to assure that the individual person associated with that HTTpa authorized the release and use of that information and it was used by authorized receiving entity in accordance with the terms of privacy agreed to by the person it relates to.

Individuals have a right their privacy and the control of it.  HTTPa is a systemic rule that would protect that right.  Transparency of information through HTTPa is the means to protect privacy.  When privacy is violated it is a crime done in full public view as a function of the system design to make it transparent and expose it.

Oh, how I wish that the Banking operating system was design to give such transparency to its application programs.  That, of course, is what the banking operating system was designed exactly not to do through an elaborate maze of smoke and mirrors that nobody really understands.  Make a fundamental key change in the system to break the creation of money free from the financial application of money and it would be a better more transparent system based on a well established rule called institutional checks and balances on power by the separation of the law (the governing operating system) from the application of the law (governance administration) and justice control of the relationship between the operating system and its application.

Tim Berners-Lee has a habit of creating fundamental systemic ideas that catch fire and scale quickly because they are essentially elegant.

The Privacy Revolution is Here:

"A new era is upon us. That is why Berners-Lee is speaking out to the world, supporting companies that heed the battle cry. Berners-Lee recently joined MeWe's advisory board to help launch our next-generation communication network. The silver bullet of MeWe and other companies such as search engine DuckDuckGo is that they are engineered with "Privacy by Design" as opposed to "Privacy Band-Aids after the fact." In MeWe's case, there's no data scraping, facial recognition, or tracking cookies. The revenue model is based on respecting members as partners, offering optional services and products that are helpful to their lives."

Old School lawyer/law makers Washington have no idea how to design the nor regulate systems in the information age.  They are only tools of those creating the information operating systems controlling our society that also produce the money to keep big business in charge of a bunch of puppets.  Law makers in Washington can't even make any laws anymore, they do not even go through the motions very well as evidenced by producing really nothing, having no control of the operating system as our elected representatives.  They will not initiate privacy regulation.  Tim Berners-Lee will.  Un-elected officials rule the system.  There are many of those ruling it for their own benefit.  Tim-Berners Lee is one of the few un-elected offficial working for us.

Let's see how many politicians grasp and run with the ideas of Tim-Berners Lee.  What politicians will take up Tim Berners Lee call for an internet bill of rights and systemic controls to assure they are protected?  An Internet Magna Carta That is something that politicians would do for the public good.  They do not do that anymore.  Data Sharing Needs Accountability.
  
Father Of The World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Reflects On The First 25 Years  Forbes 10/13/2014:


“The idea that privacy is dead is hopelessly sad,” Berners-Lee said. “We have to build systems that allow for privacy…People have the right to see how their data is being used.” As examples, he indicated that individuals’ personal medical data should be accessible to doctors and first responders, but not to insurance companies who might use the data to reject potential customers or raise their rates.  He went on to say, “We should build a world where I have control of my data and sell it to you. Users should have control, access to and ownership of their data.”