Personal Privacy and Public Security Are Not Antithetical

We can have real privacy and real security. They can both be achieved at the same time with a new model for information infrastructures. The new model provides not only privacy and reliability, but also manageability and sound economics.

But before we describe the new model, we have to step back. Way back. Stepping way back means asking ourselves, what does an information infrastruc­ture provide? What do people use software for? What kind of facilities do comput­ers and networks deliver to their users?

Is not the value proposition of many information technology projects very similar to the value proposition of real estate? Much of today’s software provides facilities where information is created, shared and kept—where people engage with each other in professional, avocational, or other pursuits.
In the world of real estate, a facility that provides an occupant with a set of useful, secure, and manageable spaces in which people can collaborate, pursue an agenda, get things done, or simply entertain each other is said to provide “Quiet Enjoyment.” It’s what your landlord owes you, the tenant in good standing. Quiet Enjoyment is a two-word distillation of the lessor’s lease obligations. Quiet Enjoyment means that the occupant has an enforceable right to a secure, manageable, useful space that is free from intrusion by any unauthorized parties, including the landlord.

Hanging Out Outdoors, by the Highway

Let’s consider a space where Quiet Enjoyment is absent. We have no Quiet Enjoyment in, for example, a rest area by the side of a busy highway. While it might be possible to have a business  meeting, keep your files, and let your kids play in a busy outdoor rest stop, of course you never would. We use highways to travel to buildings – facilities that are designed for these sorts of things. Facilities that provide Quiet Enjoyment.

At least that’s what we do in the physical world. Online, we meet, keep our files, hang out, educate our children and let them play in rest areas beside the busy, anon­ymous, dangerous information highway. As awareness of the hazards of the space grows, we put up stuff like firewalls and spam filters and malware disablers and intrusion detection systems. That is, we put up razor wire and robotic sentries to try to make that rest area a little safer, a little quieter, a little more manageable, all the while telling our colleagues and our children and their teachers that they need to be constantly vigilant for signs of the presence of bad guys.

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Where do you live? In a house?
Where else do you live?
And where do you work?

How much time do you spend looking at a computer screen? Don’t you also live part of your life, experience a significant part of your world through that little window?

If so, then is that window on your world as open as your access to the physical world is open? Or is it rather controlled?

Is this part of your life –  this window on the world that keeps growing in importance – is it controlled by someone you don’t really understand? Someone you don’t concern yourself with? Who’s the massah of that window, anyway?

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