Maciej Ceglowski's Senate testimony on privacy rights and data collection in a digital economy

For anyone unaware who Maciej Ceglowski is, it's worth noting that beyond creating Pinboard, he also did a very excellent presentation mentioned in Tildes announcement blog post.

User data will be treated as a dangerous byproduct, not an asset.

And he had the balls to do that presentation at the Strata+Hadoop World conference, a "Big Data" conference. :P It's well worth reading/watching IMO.

p.s. I really want to see Maciej and Michael Geist do something together at some point. I think they would get along swimmingly.

Just got around to reading this. It's a very clear and readable summary of Ceglowski's ideas and proposals.

The Two views of privacy section makes an important point:

But there is a second, more fundamental sense of the word privacy, one which until recently was so common and unremarkable that it would have made no sense to try to describe it.
That is the idea that there exists a sphere of life that should remain outside public scrutiny, in which we can be sure that our words, actions, thoughts and feelings are not being indelibly recorded. This includes not only intimate spaces like the home, but also the many semi-private places where people gather and engage with one another in the common activities of daily life—the workplace, church, club or union hall. As these interactions move online, our privacy in this deeper sense withers away.

I wonder why he didn't stress (or even mention) the Consent in a world of inference argument in his oral statement. It seems rather crucial.

I've been using Pinboard for a long time. Maciej is a great Twitter follow, @Pinboard.