Privacy and the Survailance society

Something I think we need to discuss is the increasing trend over the last thirty years is the rapid shrinkage of the level of personal privacy that we as individuals enjoy in the western world. This has happened in a largely ad hoc manner without consultation as the rise of information technology has allowed business to database it's consumers and their every purchase, government to increasingly, though to a lesser degree than the private sector, document its citizens,. CCTV camera's are spreading in cities following our every move spread between public and private ownership. The internet has allowed a greater ease of communication at the expense of all communication being public, open to all who wish to view it. People now willfully self publish on web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, myspace, facebook, twitter, etce,etc their lives to the greatest detail. Everyone now carries mobile devices that can track their physical location and film anything the CCTV might miss.
so the question is, is a CS society a post privacy society? Given the total disregard so many people seem to have their own privacy is the idea of a private personal self separate from society at large a twentieth century notion to be forgotten in CS state? Or should a CSCS be built from the ground up to maximize the privacy and anonymity of its citizens while still allowing those who wish to to participate in 2.0 culture?
If the later is the case i would be tempted to argue for a centralized ministry of Information to act as a bulwark between the citizen and any other information gatherer, be it state or company. Every scrap of information that is collected today is collected only by them and is only released under strict conditions. Beyond that it could actively anonymize its citizens on the net. It could be Multivac for the 21st century.

Definately the latter. We want to attract people to the city; not put them off from ever coming ;-)

America was the last "Land of the Free"; the CSCS will be the next.

My question would be, you may fell that, way, so do I , but does the momentum of western society agree with you?

I'm not sure that I understand your question. Are you implying that 'western society' welcomes mild intrusion of their civil liberties in favor of increased security?

more like tolerates intrusions of their privacy because the companies that do it have more money.

I'm saying that clearly a large number of people are perfectly happy to give their privacy way in return for the web 2.0 consumerist western lifestyle.

Yes, obviously there is a balance to be achieved between freedom and security.

A centralized Ministry of Information is a great idea. Right now businesses have a disgusting amount of private information being held in databases, just asking to be stolen and misused (credit card fraud anyone?).

This would allow consumers/citizens to remain anonymous in their purchases, the business guarantee being the good word of the MI.

but do we call it MI or BB?
Maybe Ministry of privacy.

I liked your original name of Ministry of Information. Ministry of Privacy or BB (I'm assuming Business Bureau?) would limit its use somewhat, while a MI would be able to be more broad in its purpose.

Big Brother.

maybe they would be a subset of the judicial branch, one that would give 'information warrants'?

The point would be to have an entirely seperate secure department into which all the personal information created in a modern iformation age economy would flow but which out of it would only ever come the specific legitimately required authorized piece of data needed by another department or company.
Putting it under the authurity of the judicial branch would definately not meet that level of trust.
If they had it they could just go endlessly fishing in it, running any data mining algorithm they thought up.

I wouldn't trust the British Government with it.

In terms of mistrust or incompetence? Or do you just distrust their competence? Because the DNA database has never been breached, I don't think, and that would be more the sort of model here.

But can you really do that for every thing about everyone?

Think of the cost

It's already happening, only instead of a single building your data if flying out to a hundred different companies, a thousand diverse servers a dozen different government deparments and it's entirely a crap shoot how secure or unexploited any of your data is today.

I mistrust their competence, as they have a habit of leaving disks containing the bank account details of millions of tax payers on trains and such.

If Inland revenue can do that, how secure do you think RBS, ebay, play.com, google, BT is with your data?

Not very? It's a good thing they don't have it.

But then again, they are probably more secure. A company that loses peoples data gets sued, a government doesn't.

Here in Britain we can't take the government to court. In America we can.

You never use google? they keep ip linked searches for 18 months.
A company that loses data doesn't report it. They don't want to be sued. or lose money.