I met some of the university’s finest computing brains recently, and one of them let me have a go on his Microsoft Surface Pro 2. It’s so advanced you can run Adobe Creative Suite from it. I asked if I could have a go at drawing a picture on it (it turned out to be a pretty cool ninja), then he asked if I might like to help a friend out with a competition entry.

Intrigued, I went for a tour of the amazing lab, was told about MixFab (winner of CHI Best Paper 2014) and met Pauline Anthonysamy who wanted a hand drawing her thesis. She had already got through to the second round of a prestigious EU competition and part two was to make a short video of her work. Being an old hat at helping out on these things (!) I agreed to help, but mentioned that Future Everything might get in between our work dates.

Her research is very definitely non-trivial. She has pioneered a code that automatically detects privacy policy changes and privacy settings mismatches, and flags up these issues to the user. I myself, have been the victim of this recently – I thought I was untouchable on Facebook, but those sneaky so-and-sos had been and made ALL my posts publicly visible. I’m just glad I hadn’t needed to go for any job interviews.

This made me think about Jaron Lanier, Web 3.0 and semantic processing. The web already KNOWS everything about us – do we want it to be able to make these hierarchical connections without permission? Do we want the web to have a philosophical overview of the meaning of our lives? Nobody warned us in the beginning what all of this would mean – I feel that children should be told that once you go on the web – THERE IS NO GOING BACK.

I tried briefly to delete myself from the internet, cancelling subscriptions, emailing services I had signed up for, only to find that I existed without permission on several site. One was 192.com – apparently I have been signed up as living at addresses I have never even heard of (electoral fraud) and for a small fee (!) you can get information as to my current whereabouts. Forget the backlash about National ID cards – this is far worse. And the worst thing of all? I allowed this to happen. Having an unusual name it was bound to crop up once or twice via third parties, but I have 9 pages of google results (that was last check around 3 years ago). Google suggested I change my name.

So when I hear the words ‘open data’ I begin to worry. Combine open data with Web 3.0 and you might end up with a hacker’s free-for-all on your entire life. The NHS Care.data project attracted criticism as third party companies had the possibility of matching up anonymised patient records with applications for health insurance – it wouldn’t even be that difficult. There are, of course, other less threatening uses of data. The Codefellows in Manchester had access to public data and attempted to make sense of it, but were very strictly controlled when it came to identifiables – perhaps too much.

Where might we draw the line? We should know some things, we want to know others. It is when the we is a commercial entity or person of malicious intent that the warning klaxon shouts loud – and those aren’t the people we have any control over.