1994-07-27|Personal Information (Was: guidelines for our list)
To the World Future Society
Question: Do you keep an archive of this discussion? I have been "reading" the introductions with interest, but don't have enough storage space. Even if I kept them all, I wouldn't have enough energy to go through hundreds of accumulated messages.
This leads me to introduce one of my projects, as you requested.
The objective is to make individual's personal data publicly available through the information superhighway, together with a photo which presently takes up too much bandwidth. The personal data have confidentiality flags so that my banking information is available only to financial institutions, while my "introduction to wfs-talk" is available to anybody in the universe. The data would be voluntary, and the individual would have total control over its content.
A variation of this concept has already shown up in Bulletin Board System using FirstClass software on the Macintosh, and to a much lesser degree in National Capital Free-Net's user database. A message contains a button which displays one's resume when a reader wishes to see what kind of person wrote the message. An electronic commerce using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is finally catching on, thanks partly to Wal-Mart.
A full implementation of such a service must wait the information superhighway, public directory service based on the ITU X.500 standard, encryption, etc. The most difficult obstacle is sociological, such as the perception of security and privacy "problems" rather than technical ones. Who has cried out loud against the banking cards for security when they were first introduced, and now using it every week? I think it will take another 10 years, but firmly believe it will come, just as in Star Trek:The Next Generation. Anybody interested in such a project (and funding)?
