[tmbchr]™

Data Retention Directive



Not only do *you* not own your datawake with Google, but they’re happy to hand it over to anybody who asks:

Search companies like Google are also subject to laws that sometimes conflict with data protection regulations, like data retention for law enforcement purposes. For example, Google may be subject to the EU Data Retention Directive, which was passed last year, in the wake of the Madrid and London terrorist bombings, to help law enforcement in the investigation and prosecution of “serious crime”. The Directive requires all EU Member States to pass data retention laws by 2009 with retention for periods between 6 and 24 months. Since these laws do not yet exist, and are only now being proposed and debated, it is too early to know the final retention time periods, the jurisdictional impact, and the scope of applicability. It’s therefore too early to state whether such laws would apply to particular Google services, and if so, which ones. In the U.S., the Department of Justice and others have similarly called for 24-month data retention laws.

At the same time, regulators in other parts of governments have argued for shorter retention periods, reflecting the conflicts in every country between privacy and data protection objectives on the one hand, and law enforcement objectives on the other. Companies like Google are trying to be responsible corporate citizens, and sometimes we are told to do different things by different government entities, or to follow conflicting legal obligations. It’s hard enough to get different government entities to talk to each other inside one country. When you multiply this by all the countries where Google must comply with the laws, the potential conflicts are enormous. Nonetheless, Google is committed to providing its users around the world with one consistent high level of data protection.

Now take this trend and project it forward into the future by sliding ahead the time-bar:

  1. Let’s say that at some point over the next several years, scientists figure out how to upload into a computer a human consciousness, personality, or reasonable facsimile thereof. This will *most likely* be done through the correlation of massive amounts of data to create realistic patterns of behavior from which to extemporize upon.
  2. Who owns massive amounts of data on your patterns? Do you? Or does Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, etc? What about the government? What about every security camera you pass by in a given day? Who owns the footage of you captured on them - do you? HA! Fat chance.
  3. Assuming that there is at least *some* component of uploaded consciousness which incorporates data patterns to determine identity, then it would logically follow that whoever “owns” the stored data would ultimately become the one who would own the consciousness molded on top of those patterns. Or maybe my logic is all wrong on this: I’d be interested in finding out more about how existing laws would intersect in this area.
  4. In other words, every system into which you enter your information would own a little slice of you. Think about the Mii characters on Nintendo Wii. The Mii characters you create which look like you and your friends and store on your Wii system - who owns those? Do you, or does Nintendo? Is anybody else talking about this? Is anybody else even interested?






8 Reader Responses

  1. Tim Boucher Says:
    November 4th, 2007 at 11:44 pm

    connected to this node in datawake

    http://timboucher.tumblr.com/post/17739032

    see also

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_die

  2. Steve Mills Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 12:08 am

    Hi Tim,

    This is massively interesting. The data that such AI will need to fire up will be enormous, and it is going to come from “user generated content” like we, the good digital slaves that we are, provide to those that will turn this thing on.

    You are your datawake.

  3. Tim Boucher Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 12:18 am

    You are your datawake.

    Or rather you will be when artificial intelligences from the far future try to reproduce your experience of life for the purposes of entertainment and education.

    See also: immortal computing

    http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/300636_msftimmortal22.html

    They will sell you hell by saying, “But wouldn’t you want to live forever with infinite power to do anything you want FOREVER?”

    But in the hell they’ll sell you won’t fare quite so well.

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 12:19 am

    See

    http://timboucher.tumblr.com/post/18372091

    The reason why the Mormon Church (Church of Letter-Day Saints) are so feverishly intent on baptizing the dead and converting your ancestors to their religion is that they are preparing for the Resurrection, when the AI finally figures out how to bring back the energy signatures of all people who have ever existed. The point is that they are creating a long term strategy of legal precedence so that when this day comes, they will have jurisdiction over vast swaths of the newly enfleshed population and will instantly become the world’s largest religion.

  5. carlos Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 6:03 am

    As in the real world, your owners are those who control the power switch.

    Two ways around this spring to mind:

    1) Pattern recognition can be beaten by making no pattern, Fremen style.

    2) Databodyguards. Essentially these are personal botswarms that allow you to exchange data while erasing all trace of said transaction in real time. Wake eaters. A virtual invisibility cloak.

    3) Control the power switch.

    #1 creates zero data; #2 forces data retention time of zero; #3 is…

    Possession is all of the law. All you have to do to avoid being owned is be faster. All kinds of faster.

  6. Crystal Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 9:24 am

    >Or rather you will be when artificial intelligences from the far future try to reproduce your experience of life for the purposes of entertainment and education.

    This is an idea for a story I had months ago. You are thinking my thoughts, or I am thinking yours.

    I’ve bought hosting and several domain names; at some point I should begin writing again. I keep seeing ideas from inside my head on your blog, and whether I’m a receiver or transmitter (or we’re both just tapping into the same thing), I need to start getting my ideas out on pixels so I can have the enjoyment of working with them instead of the mild frustration of seeing you work with them first!

    Mark Twain wrote an interesting essay in Harper’s back in 1891 on the same phenomenon, which he called “Mental Telegraphy”:

    Now I come to the oddest thing that ever happened to me. Two or three years ago I was lying in bed, idly musing, one morning - it was the 2d of March - when suddenly a red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp, and exploded with such comprehensive effectiveness as to sweep the vicinity clean of rubbishy reflections and fill the air with their dust and flying fragments. This idea, stated in simple phrase, was that the time was ripe and the market ready for a certain book; a book which ought to be written at once; a book which must command attention and be of peculiar interest - to wit, a book about the Nevada silver-mines. The “Great Bonanza” was a new wonder then, and everybody was talking about it. It seemed to me that the person best qualified to write this book was Mr. William H. Wright, a journalist of Virginia, Nevada, by whose side I had scribbled many months when I was a reporter there ten or twelve years before. He might be alive still; he might be dead; I could not tell; but I would write him, anyway. I began by merely and modestly suggesting that he make such a book; but my interest grew as I went on, and I ventured to map out what I thought ought to be the plan of the work, he being an old friend, and not given to taking good intentions for ill. I even dealt with details, and suggested the order and sequence which they should follow. I was about to put the manuscript in an envelope, when the thought occurred to me that if this book should be written at my suggestion, and then no publisher happened to want it, I should feel uncomfortable; so I concluded to keep my letter back until I should have secured a publisher. I pigeonholed my document, and dropped a note to my own publisher, asking him to name a day for a business consultation. He was out of town on a far journey.

    My note remained unanswered, and at the end of three or four days the whole matter had passed out of my mind. On the 9th of March the postman brought three or four letters, and among them a thick one whose superscription was in a hand which seemed dimly familiar to me. I could not “place” it at first, but presently I succeeded. Then I said to a visiting relative who was present:

    “Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter contains - date, signature, and all - without breaking the seal. It is from a Mr. Wright, of Virginia, Nevada, and is dated the 2d of March - seven days ago. Mr. Wright proposes to make a book about the silver-mines and the Great Bonanza, and asks what I, as a friend, think of the idea. He says his subjects are to be so and so, their order and sequence so and so, and he will close with a history of the chief feature of the book, the Great Bonanza.”

    I opened the letter, and showed that I had stated the date and the contents correctly. Mr. Wright’s letter simply contained what my own letter, written on the same date, contained, and mine still lay in its pigeonhole, where it had been lying during the seven days since it was written.

    Necessarily this could not come by accident; such elaborate accidents cannot happen. Chance might have duplicated one or two of the details, but she would have broken down on the rest. I could not doubt - there was no tenable reason for doubting - that Mr. Wright’s mind and mine had been in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of the 2d of March. I did not consider that both minds originated that succession of ideas, but that one mind originated it, and simply telegraphed it to the other. I was curious to know which brain was the telegrapher and which the receiver, so I wrote and asked for particulars. Mr. Wright’s reply showed that his mind had done the originating and telegraphing, and mine the receiving. Mark that significant thing now; consider for a moment how many a splendid “original” idea has been unconsciously stolen from a man three thousand miles away! If one should question that this is so, let him look into the cyclopedia and con once more that curious thing in the history of inventions which has puzzled every one so much - that is, the frequency with which the same machine or other contrivance has been invented at the same time by several persons in different quarters of the globe. The world was without an electric telegraph for several thousand years; then Professor Henry, the American, Wheatstone in England, Morse on the sea, and a German in Munich, all invented it at the same time. The discovery of certain ways of applying steam was made in two or three countries in the same year. Is it not possible that inventors are constantly and unwittingly stealing each other’s ideas whilst they stand thousands of miles asunder?

  7. Julia Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 3:07 pm

    This keeps reminding me of something I read on a Lucirferian site a few years ago. The man had been to Japan and for whatever reasons he deduced that the Japanese would develop this type of technology first. People’s whole consciousness would be downloaded into robots during a time of germ warfare etc.

    The glitch was that immediately upon download the people wanted out. They instantly wanted death and they couldn’t die. I don’t know why but this always struck me as being the absolute truth even though this guy made no bones about lying if it suited his purposes.

  8. Tim Boucher Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    They instantly wanted death and they couldn’t die.

    In order to preserve life as we know it, we must preserve our right to die.



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