In the current moment much of the concern about privacy online and otherwise has been overwhelmed by Trump, inequality, racism and other matters. The NSA and other spies, government and corporate, are not taking a vacation. I wrote earlier about this in “The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can conduct with your own life’s metadata” in July, 2013.
Recently I revisited Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life, the MIT project to visualize a tiny portion of the metadata ((metadata = a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. In the case of email this includes date and time; to, cc, bcc recipients; and subject line.)) of our lives, our emails. Continue reading
When you walk up to an ATM machine you conduct a two factor authentication before you make a transaction. You must physically have the card (factor one) and insert it in the machine and then you have to know the pass code (factor two). This combination makes it very unlikely that the person performing the transaction is not you. 
There has rightfully been considerable outrage over this week’s revelations that the Federal government has been sucking up information on virtually every aspect of our lives, email, telephones calls, pictures, credit card and banking transactions, and so on. Unfortunately almost all of this discussion is taking place without a useful sense of the scope, scale, and trajectory of the government’s war on terror.