"We live in an era of unprecedented access to information, and many political parties campaign on platforms of transparency and openness. And yet, at the same time, we are gradually shifting the policing of cyberspace to a dark world largely free from public accountability and independent oversight. In entrusting more and more information to third parties, we are signing away legal protections that should be guaranteed by those who have access to our data. Perversely, as liberal democratic countries we are lowering the standards around basic rights to privacy just as the centre of cyberspace gravity is shifting to less democratic parts of the world."
I find it intriguing and a bit disturbing when I connect the fictional story "Ready Player One" to the non-fictional documentation is "Black Code."
Ready Player One describes a world where the "internet" has basically become a virtual, alternate world that has been crafted by its creator. A giant game, where life is defined entirely by your game avatar. Black Code describes the present, disturbing, process where more and more control of our personal information is being controlled by those who control the internet.
The real worry, as described in Black Code, is that the controllers of the internet are becoming less and less "controllable." The private companies like Google, Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, and a worldwide gamut of ISPs, work in a variety of regimes where personal information is not protected. In some countries, the internet is under control of criminal forces, or dwells in the very gray area of government/corporate control. It is in those regimes that companies like Google are left to make decisions about how they maintain the privacy and personal information of their users.
In many cases, personal information is freely shared with authorities, and the customers don't even get a notice about it. Sprint, for example, in the US, actually was so overwhelmed with requests for personal information from the FBI and police, that it coudn't keep up. So, in response it began charging for the "service" and now makes a pretty penny, to the tune of 8 million such requests!
