Data privacy here and abroad

<p>The NYT Week in review ran an interesting article about data privacy today. I have been having ongoing conversatoins with colleagues about this kind of stuff, and was excited to see it so prominently featured in the Times.</p> <p>A few months ago at a conference=, Dan Robinson and I were talking and he asked "Imagine if you could see the file that choicepoint and experian have on you? Imagine if american;s could see the information that the private companies keep." There would be a revolution.</p> <p>Well, perhaps that revolution is coming. AS the times reports, over 50 million americans have had personal data compromised this year through criminal actions and incompetance. </p> <p>The Times article tries to explain why this is a pretty uniquely American issue:</p> <p><cite>[l:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/weekinreview/07dash.html|More fundamentally, these two systems for dealing with data arise from a cultural divide over privacy itself. In broad terms, the United States looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right.]</cite></p> <p>American's need to tell the government that we want our lives back, we want to controll out data and our digital identities.</p> <p>One of my colleagues, [l:http://fen.net/|Fen Lebalme], is a leading thinker in this field, what is becoming known as "persistent identity on the web", his work with [l:http://identitycommons.net/|IdentityCommons] offers a promising glimpse at the way things could be if we took some drastic steps away from the current system whgere private companies own our data and profit off of it, and to a system where we once again own our data and control how it can be used.</p>