Op-ed from Bruce Schneier: “Increasingly, we are watched not by people but by algorithms. Amazon and Netflix track the books we buy and the movies we stream, and suggest other books and movies based on our habits. Google and Facebook watch what we do and what we say, and show us advertisements based on our behaviour. Smartphone navigation apps watch us as we drive. And the National Security Agency, of course, monitors our phone calls, emails and locations, then uses that information to try to identify terrorists.”

via NSA in the bluff as it tries to cover data truth | GulfNews.com.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard University, said it’s difficult for people to say no when presented with immediate benefits because any potential problems are vague and years away.“Information seems harmless and trivial at the moment, but can be recorded forever . and can be combined with other data,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve come to terms with that yet.”

via Promise and peril in an ultra-connected world – The Washington Post.

One reason, perhaps, is that these new organizations are able to make decisions in a very different way. The traditional corporation was organized to limit the amount of information that flowed to the hierarchy, a concern that matters much less online, according to David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know, and senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

via Online Collaboration: Settling the Cyber-Frontier.