Privacy is dead, Davos hears

[IDemo]

Imagine a world where mosquito-sized robots fly around stealing samples of your DNA. Or where a department store knows from your buying habits that you're pregnant even before your family does.

That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, where the assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.

"Welcome to today. We're already in that world," said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.

"Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible... How we conventionally think of privacy is dead," she added.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/01/22/privacy-dead-davos-hears.html

[djean111]

1. I do think that the Davos attendees will be able to purchase privacy.

Or pay others to scrub up after them or delete anything gathered. And they can, of course, purchase information about the rest of us, with impunity, IMO.
It is the rest of us who have no privacy.

[Octafish]

2. After the death of privacy, would the death of Civil Rights follow?

"I don't think we as a society want 100 percent privacy," said AT&T chairman and chief executive officer Randall Stephenson, speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. "But I think the debate is right."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/privacy-dominates-digital-future-discussion-in-davos/

[randome]

3. Mosquito-like robots stealing DNA means the world will already be vastly different from now.

It's annoying to hear these 'prophesies' sketch out a world that's exactly like what we have now, except with one or two differences. The future is never that easily mapped.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Remember Minority Report?

2002 film, from a 1956 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick.

Saw the movie,the plot was interesting but it was the details that I found very scary...the character walks thru a mall and stores call out to him.
and small robots, the size of tarantulas, can search out people.

1956....wow.

[Trillo]

5. Seems there's still plenty of corporate and government privacy.

Is it a case of listen to what they don't say?