Though activists, academics, reporters, and regulators had sent up warning flares for years, it wasn’t until quite recently that the era of enchantment with Silicon Valley ended. The list of scandals—over user privacy and security, over corporate surveillance and data collection, over fraud and foreign propaganda and algorithmic bias, to name a few—was as unending as your Instagram feed. There were hearings, resignations, investigations, major new regulations in Europe, and calls for new laws.
Even though the Silicon Valley companies now regularly faces scandals in which it has violated its users’ or workers’ trust. Privacy people care a lot about misinformation, but misinformation people might not be so worried about privacy. Almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel. And some people don’t have a problem with Amazon or Apple or even Facebook at all—which is why we included dissents for many of the top companies on our list.
internet
The blueprint of the computer & internet in 1934? /
Traite de documentation : le livre sur le livre, theeorie et pratique was the blueprint of today’s internet. Written by the French-speaking Belgian author Paul Otlet (1868-1944).
In 1934, Otlet laid out this vision of the computer and internet, he wrote about radio and television as other forms of conveying information, writing in Traité de documentation that "one after another, marvelous inventions have immensely extended the possibilities of documentation." In the same book, he predicted that media that would convey feel, taste and smell would also eventually be invented, and that an ideal information-conveyance system should be able to handle all of what he called "sense-perception documents".
Otlet also had other interests and ambitions that he shared with Henri La Fontaine. They were both idealists, peace activists and internationalists. Their lobby work pushing internationalist political ideas were embodied in the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (forerunner of UNESCO).
You can check out, but you can't leave /
As the Internet infiltrates commerce and social life more each day with our help, more users are aware that their personal information is becoming less and less personal. These experts on privacy admit and agree that not only should there be more innovation that closes the rift between consumer privacy and sharing practices, but there also needs to be new technology deleting your data from the web.
Never thought about how to disappear or at least reduce your presence on internet? In fact, it is not difficult, with a little effort and a software called “DeleteMe”.
DeleteMe is a partially human-powered service where their employees take on the onerous duty of contacting data brokers on your behalf. That's an important step because many of them have been known to add your data again, just months after removing it. Since January 14, DeleteMe Mobile comes with one free entry removal or 3 month subscription $24.99.
