I was planning to write about this topic myself, but Steve Gillmor says it far better than I would’ve in his memo to Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie. And he nails it on why attention is even more important these days:
“In a world where we recoil from attempts by spamsters, spyware, and identity thieves to steal our most personal data and use it against us, here comes Big Brother to demand our attention metadata without offering any service in compensation.”
Update: Upon reflection, it could be argued that right now Microsoft already has the upper hand here since user data in Windows is stored on the local computer rather than on the web (where governments can access it en masse). So, government access to web-based data is the single most critical issue facing the move to an Internet OS – i.e.: if your business wants to get people off the desktop and onto the web, you’d better take this issue seriously.
But if I encrypt my data before moving it online… which we should probably be doing now anyway…
If you encrypt your data you (possibly) delay them getting to it. Sure, there are encryption schemes that haven’t encrypted yet. That doesn’t mean they won’t be decrypted down the road. As everymore powerful computers are developed and governments continue to take more and more private data into their collection (sometimes when we know about it and others when we don’t. No, I’m not a conspiracy theorist.) it needs to be accounted that the government may be accessing your data. Right or wrong, it could be happening. I think that’s Nick’s point.