Overheard - Data mining collective intelligence

For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew. In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly. Dr. Thomas W. Malone, as quoted in You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

This New York Times article is about a bunch of kids at MIT who are trading their “privacy” for a free smartphone. The article ends with this quote by Dr. Thomas Malone, the director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence. He’s got a good point. I remember stories my grandmother told about kids listening in on her parent’s “party line” or how the small-town operator in our upstate New York town was such a gossip that if you had something confidential to share, you would NEVER use the telephone.