In the everyday physical world, we have lots of privacy technologies. For example, our clothing. Also our walls, doors, locks and latches. And every day we can decide for ourselves what we wear -conspicuous or inconspicuous- or whether and for whom we want to open the door, or close the curtains or not. In other words, privacy is a setting!
We also have conventions that respect the privacy of other people, their possessions, and their personal spaces. We have not yet developed equivalent technologies and conventions in the digital world. This is why privacy is such a big issue right now: we as individuals still lack easy and common means, for example, to tell websites when it´s okay to be tracked and when it´s not okay. But we do have an opportunity to say what´s okay and not okay in the development of "The Internet of Me and My Things" — where each of us (and our things) are what Craig Burton calls "an enterprise of one."
Doc Searls, Marcel van Galen and Phil Windley have all been working on defining and building out tools and services for these enterprises of one in the networked world, and means for programming what happens as those spaces and things interact with entities other than our selves. In this round table, we will discuss what has been developed so far, and how an ancient and deeply human value — privacy — will manifest with our personal lives and possessions in the Networked world.
