HM.Requirements: Human.Data -- Privacy, Public,Laissez-Faire (was Re: Long and Not Much to the Point: Re:HM.applications-Profiling-Level of Details/Abstraction)

[Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga <rkthunga@humanmarkup.org>]

 I recognize full well that most of us already have extensive
> > public dossiers, but the one saving grace in all of this is that there
are
> > currently barriers due to semi-opaque semantic/ontological barriers that
> can
> > effectively only be handled by human intervention. I worry that as we
> create
> > HumanML standards, we tear down those barriers, make the larger system
> > extremely transparent to those parties that definitely do not have our
> best
> > interests at heart.
> >
> > Unfortunately, I'm not sure I see a solution here. We need to be
cognizant
> > of the issues, which is a big part of the point I'm circling (very
> > circuitously) around. We need to recognize that what may be good for a
> > business or government may not be good for the society as a whole. Call
me
> > the civil libertarian of the group, but I fear sometimes that if we do
not
> > recognize the social consequences of our actions as designers, that we
may
> > end up bringing on a future that none of us would want.
> >

Certainly, there are things we must be cognizant of.  There could be
calamities brought about through the greater availability of human
information.

Nonetheless, we are working at the level of greater information and the
inherent benefits of this alone.  Thus, the ultimate good is from simply
carrying the legacy of the Internet forward, and the legacy of the First
Amendment forward, by providing an extra layer of the conveyance of human
expressions.  People will promote information that is harmful or misleading,
but (at least my belief) the overall extra awareness and transparency will
be for the greater improvement in human interaction.

Thus, another "HM.Requirements" topic we may want to consider is regarding
the collected 'human data', or whatever term we finalize for the repository
of collection of human characteristics:

  "Privacy vs. Public availability vs. Laissez-Faire"  -- up for discussion

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Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga