The news is full of stories on online privacy. The highest profile is the story on the released AOL searches, but that story provides a nice counterpoint to Tim O’Reilly’s post on surveillance from below . Like O’Reilly’s commenters point out, while Tim’s optimism is understandable we do have some important historical cases of intense surveillance from below with adverse effects.
Sense of privacy is important for Imity as well. I recently had a good conversation with Eric and Alex of Trustmojo about this. I’ll be blogging more about the specifics when they blog about our conversation, but in the meantime I can point out some of the guiding principles we’re founding our platform on.

• Default Open - sharing beats not sharing. There are proper exceptions to the rule but the default should be “open”.
• Reciprocity - When your neighbour knows something about you, you should know what she knows
• Proximity (obviously) - there’s a huge difference between just sharing your life with anybody and staying open to your immediate surroundings. In the non-digital, analog, physical world you are already placing a lot of trust in your surroundings: You go out expecting to meet people in all kinds of exchanges (commercial, friendly, professional, the list goes on). And in general this trust works out for us. This is a good thing.

Imity is very much about extending this kind of natural trust to the digital realm without breaking it.

Related topic: Steve Mann’s sousveillance project.

tagged privacy