Re: Is Privacy Dead ? A helpful hint.

Hi Gannon

Sorry for not being around - I've been pretty badly sick for about a week and a half or more - the medications I'm now on have finally got me up and about again, well, so much that I can feel motivated to reply to emails again.

Thought 1) - putting some notes on those links (such as the Australian one) on how to use them and what they are designed to show (in plain English remembering that your audience on list is International and not necessarily tech savvy  would be an advantage :)

2) ...A report released at a "Coordinated Time" does
> 
> not reflect the habits of human communities trying to reach
> a consensus. Until everyone has seen a "fact", it's News.

OK - so let's take that as a premise for below - it's simple and relatively self evident, however it should be noted that a) a fact is a fact regardless of whether consensus is reached. Not "seeing" it, or for that fact, believing or accepting it, in no way stops it from being a fact. Case in point - some guy once proved using the awesome power of science that the Earth circled the Sun, and not the other way around.

I would venture to say that what you are really saying is that a piece of  raw data (we'll give it a datatype of say "Rumor") cannot be substantiated into a datatype of "News" until after a period of T=T+n seconds. Cr (Correllation of the rumor) = 0 (never substantiated) or 1 (substantiated), and if Cr = 1, the number of occurrences of Cr over T increases exponentially as the number of viewers/potential reporters/ observable locations increase.  Or something like that.

> While information travels at the speed of light, *consensus*
> has a fixed path exactly 24 Hours + 1 Second long.  That
> means, if you issue a report at time T, exactly 24 Hours + 1
> Seconds later the whole world has seen it and a consensus
> can form.

No - you could only say that at 24 Hours + 1 second there is the potential for the whole world to have seen it. You're assuming equal access to communications and equal desire to seek out any given piece of information.

>   Meta Data does not travel "through the
> grapevine",

No - but some will ALWAYS travel WITH information, and without it, information will lose trust and provenance. Case in point - the "creator" or "author" and the "date" metadata fields".

> although "normal data" does - when a report is
> issued in Washington, London sees it as News 4 hours later
> and sees it as Meta Data 24 Hours + 1 Second after arrival.

But that cannot hold true if your premise that information travels at the speed of light does. London gets the report at the time of release, and receives the metadata attached to the report at the same time.

Now - for extra credit, how does the discussion relate to e-government in plain English terms? (And don't take it as anything but gentle encouragement :) I've seen similar discussions on metadata come out of e-gov metadata conference sessions, and it is of particular interest and application to defence, intelligence and law enforcement communities in that sense.

Cheers from my sickbed

Chris Beer (iPhone)

On 10/10/2010, at 8:51, Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com> wrote:

>> Meta Data (e.g. facts) propagate as a wave as well as a
>> particle.  A report released at a "Coordinated Time" does
>> not reflect the habits of human communities trying to reach
>> a consensus. Until everyone has seen a "fact", it's News. 
>> While information travels at the speed of light, *consensus*
>> has a fixed path exactly 24 Hours + 1 Second long.  That
>> means, if you issue a report at time T, exactly 24 Hours + 1
>> Seconds later the whole world has seen it and a consensus
>> can form.  Meta Data does not travel "through the
>> grapevine", although "normal data" does - when a report is
>> issued in Washington, London sees it as News 4 hours later
>> and sees it as Meta Data 24 Hours + 1 Second after arrival.