When we interact with individual sites on the Web, are we aware of what information we’re sharing? To an algorithm, the information we share on the Web might be reduced to any number of individual data points. To ourselves, this data may have a sense of meaning, in a number of different contexts of personal privacy.
Christopher Allen presents four fundamental concepts or privacy, with a discussion in an article at Medium. Perhaps the most challenging to define, if not the least often recognized, the concept of Contextual Privacy may bear consideration as to how the information we share on the Web may be interpreted in a social scale – beyond the reduction of personal data to any construction of data points.
No less relevant, the concept of Human Rights Privacy might find a highlight in recent news about spyware distributed on mobile phone platforms. The concepts of Personal Privacy and general Defensive Privacy may be the most familiar to us Netziens.
Each concept is introduced by Christopher Allen, in the article. Certainly, the concepts might find further discussion in individual academic journals. For this blog post, I mainly wanted to mention the article, before my day’s media journal for this Wednesday, 7 September, 2022.
Summary
This day in September, my media usage was focused mainly towards a form of technical research, in studying up about some features of the Java(r) programming language. It was one day of the week when I happily avoided social media altogether. There was a lot of Web search, in searching for information about a series of perhaps socially uninteresting and commercially uninformative topics, mainly in addressing technical questions about this programming language. I’m by no means a seasoned expert in Java programming. I’ve begun to look at the language, again, as a possible basis for putting some software tools together, after some efforts in research for media studies.
Since this Wednesday, I was able to find a complete reference about some fundamental features of the Java programming language, perhaps it could bear a mention here: Java: The Complete Reference (12th ed) by Herbert Schildt.
Before the details of this day’s media journal and as an artsy comment about senses of time, here’s an international advert that I found recently, from Samsung (Brands of the World)
9:45 AM: Checking Email; Starting my media journal for the day.
I began the media journal with Evernote. Theirs is a company that I personally trust for not making my personal writing anyone else’s business. Privacy would probably be a core part of their business model (or so I hope)
I believe I can trust Google for their email services, in a general sense, though of course they inject advertisements into some places in the service, e.g under the “Promotions” email tab.
10:30 AM: A first Web search for the day. This was for locating some more information about the Jena project (ASF).
As the day progressed, I decided to start using Google again, for these searches about technical documentation. It’s seemed to me that I’m more likely to find a meaningful result higher in the search list with Google than with Duck Duck Go – which is still the default search engine, in the Firefox browser on my FreeBSD desktop.
Between general Web searches and some testing at my PC, for some ideas in the Java programming language, this period from 10:30 AM literally extended to approximately 4:30 PM.
4:30 PM: Checking the weather forecast. Still extremely/seasonally hot, in the Valley. Some rain predicted by the weekend.
5:00 PM: eBooks at Safari Books Online, specifically OSGi and Equinox by McAffer, VanderLei, and Archer. The book’s web site is available in archive (no source code samples there, still…)
5:40 PM: More Java. Looking at the Jonas OSGi platform from OW2, along with the archived source code for Jonas (build instructions available via OW2).
This began a duration in some local hacking, with a short effort in trying to update the archived source code for OW2 Jonas, to build this software with a current release of the Java language platform. The effort was not completed by the end of the day, albeit. Did I mention that I’ve not written a Java program for years, up to this week?
7:30 PM: Checking email
8 PM: More reading: Maven Tycho for building Eclipse plug-ins, OSGi bundles and Eclipse applications with the command line, a tutorial at Vogella.
After some reading, later this week I’ll probably be focusing on the Spring Framework instead, for anything outside of the Eclipse platform. Happily, someone at GitHub has provided an example of how to use Spring for a desktop application.
With the Spring Framework providing a sort of architectural framework for the Java programming language, I’m glad I was able to find a good reference about it, up to this Thursday.
Conclusion
This Wednesday, I don’t believe I’d increased my Internet data footprint to any substantial degree. My Web searches for the day were literally all technical.
If Safari Books Online itself may ever make any data extraction efforts about my reading habits there, but I don’t believe their collection contains any books that could be said to be problematic to any political state in the world.
In Web Search and in Email at least: Google is Google, and what’s to say? as someone outside of Google.
Contrasted to my earlier media journal, my music listening practices for the day were fairly more limited – mostly electronica, with a really short loop of playlists on this day in early September. Mostly Loscil (Bandcamp)