I’ve been contemplating and discussing the idea of a pervasive recommender system. I’m find most people find it creepy moreso than intriguing. I don’t know if it would always have been like this, but particularly in this modern age of corporate malfeasance and secret government torture facilities people just don’t trust organizations to act responsibly.
I’ll be honest that I don’t necessarily like it all that much myself. It kinda makes me skirmish to guess how much Google knows about me.
Privacy has been called the ability to pretend to be like everyone else. As a researcher I want as much raw data as possible. What steps can be taken to make people feel comfortable?
Two main things come to mind:
- Allow a complete separation of a person’s recreational and professional personas. If I’m a respected writer by day and dress up in a bunny suit for sexual pleasure at night, privacy is the capacity to keep those two lives separate.
- Give the user complete control over their data. At any time if I can see the specific information I have entered into the system from any source and I should be able to modify or at least delete it. If there are derived attributes that is the organizations discretion to disclose. Some dating sites create an emotional stability score. They don’t tell members because having a computer tell you you’re unstable is slightly insulting to many.
