25 March, 2008

It's mine, you can't have it

I forgot this was coming out: the Guardian has published an article on online privacy/anonymity by Zoe Margolis (aka Abby Lee), someone who's had a specific interest in the issue.

The wide-ranging comments thread is particularly interesting too.

There's a fine example of how 'innocuous' traffic analysis for ad-targeting could be hijacked by those with skewed morals – imagine if your access to the internet was regulated by someone who considers that "p*rn is inherently harmful" and masturbation (in private) is, by definition, shameful.
Those are the genuine opinions of a presumably well-intentioned person, not a conspiracy-theorist's nightmare of a repressive government or a shadowy corporation; they're not fictional sci-fi, but the moral grounding of someone who could stand for government or become employed by an ISP today.