Tag: downside of the new economy

Downside to cameras everywhere and the near-zero cost to record data

We are being recorded and logged and photographed everywhere we go. We need to be aware.

I’m not sure we have all caught on to the extent that we are tracked.  Andy Kessler ponders where we are in his Wall Street Journal article, In the Privacy Wares, It’s iSpy vs. gSpy – Big Brother is watching us. But we are watching back.

Boundaries of monitoring

He reminds us there is a log and probably a photo from every time you interact with a toll booth, cell tower, ATM, or commercial security cameras, of which there may be as many as 30M around the country. 

As cheap as storage is, those records will be retained for years, if not decades.

Ponder the new boundaries of the monitoring:

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Can your cloud provider do *anything* they want with your data?

If you read the terms of service for one particular provider, it looks like the answer is yes.

Check out these terms of use from Prezi, which provides a cloud-based presentation tool:

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Manage the risks of your technology

The tools available today are incredibly amazing and powerful.  You can do astounding things.

I can publish several blogs at minimal out-of-pocket cost which are available world-wide. Very cool.

There are dangers, but that’s okay. We need to know the risks and then manage them.

I have two posts at my other blog, Nonprofit Update, that discuss some dangers and how to minimize them.

They are:

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Another change around us that we ought to ponder is nuclear proliferation

Sometimes the change around us is grim, like having nine countries with nukes.

When the world had the U.S. and Soviet Union staring at each other with nuclear weapons, we focused clearly on the implications. Since the fall of the Soviet Union (which reduced the nuclear war risk, the conventional war risk, and the overall level of suffering & misery around the world) we’ve spent less time thinking about how nukes affect everything else.

That is a mistake, thinks Paul Bracken, in The Second Nuclear Age.

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You can hire someone to take your online class. Um, anyone see an ethics problem here?

We Take Your Class is a web service that offers to have a tutor take your online test or complete an online project. They can even take your entire online course.

Wow.  Cheating for hire.

You can find them here on your own.

Their pitch:

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Here’s what the pain of transition to the new economy looks like

There is going to be a lot of pain as we transition into whatever the new economy is going to look like.

Just like it hurt to shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy, there will be hurt in the shift from industrial to whatever-we-name-the-new-thing economy.

Ron Fourner and Sophe Quinton describe that pain in How Americans Lost Trust in Our Greatest Institutions.

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