Privacy, the promises and perils.

The Web is now 30 years young, and in this time, we’ve seen countless web-based inventions and an exponential use growth, accounting for over 60% of the world’s population, thanks to a tiny yet supremely significant invention by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then working at CERN in Switzerland.

Putting it simply; connecting Hypertext language to transmission control protocols (TCP), thereby creating HTTP, the Universal resource Locator (URL) was born and the world’s first internet address at: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html,, unleashing what’s now been called the 4th industrial revolution. It’s still visible today, should you wish to check it out.

From that moment to this an explosion of innovation has occurred, commerce has changed, our expectations have grown and the dream of “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” has shaped our relationship with friends, family colleagues and society.

What a great time to be alive! The world at your fingertips, information everywhere, friends a plenty ‘on-tap’ and new ways to make a living, should you so choose.

It seems like an economic nirvana, a levelling of each playing field, where democratising the access to information, 'levels-up' societies the world over.

Thus, this was the original hope for the west coast dreamers, the legacy of the hippies from the ‘Summer of Love’, those the that "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out” and carried their ethos into the world of ‘geeks in garages’ from Bill Gates, to Wozniak and Jobs, Bill Hewlett and David Packard and so many, many more.

But what have we really unleashed, what is it that we have sacrificed on the alter of progress to achieve our dreams?

Kevin Kelley in his seminal work ‘New Rules for the new Economy’, penned in 1998 just as the Web was progressing beyond its childhood years, outlined 10 things that would drive the web forward. Each chapter extremely visionary, but it's chapter 9, all about relationships that this commentary lands upon. For those of you interested check out page 134 of his first edition, but even then even Kevin only scratches gently at the surface.

Since then, more than two decades have passed, the power of computing has indeed doubled every 18 months, and with the advent of even better, faster, and more reliable connectivity starting with dial up modems 56Kps, to superfast broadband of 1Gps (a million times quicker), and beyond, connecting things to things, and people at the speed of light, has made the immediacy of our world even more impactful. You can, in an instant connect with you friends half a world away and in barely a second you’re tuned in and connected. ‘What a wonderful world it could be?’

But… Is it really that wonderful, have we mistakenly and blindly walked ourselves into an unwitting nightmare that we cannot control? Has the machine overtaken, or are we at the cusp of something so transformative that we are where we are, like it or not?

Let’s break this down a little.

Fundamental to the ubiquity of information at our fingertips is the engine that drives all connections, determines our likes and dislikes, profiles our needs, and suggest things we might like. The Search engine.

‘Mosaic’ launched for free in 1993 and whilst there were a few predecessors, it really popularised the potential of the web, using graphics and not only text to enrich the users experience. Even back then this whole new way of viewing information was strangely intoxicating, More information available at your fingertips, and growing ever larger day after day.

Roll forward travelling past Navigator, Yahoo, Lycos and Ask Jeeves to name a few, we arrive at the big beasts, Internet Explorer (and subsequent MS products) and Google Search, the behemoths of their time. Each designed to make search easier and our experience better; results so much more attuned to our needs, and perhaps making all of us as better more rounded, knowledgeable people?

And herein lies the issue.

To achieve this, we have had to sacrifice something quite profound. Our own privacy, our own online identity. No longer are we anonymous, we are as transparent as a pane of glass, visible to all who have the intent, resources, technical cunning or time to have a look.

Finally (for now), and most importantly in this scene setting is the tectonic shift from embedded hard drives on devices, protected by layers of supposed security, we are now all in the cloud, reliant on super quick connections and tuned applications and services to enhance our browsing experience and our ever more thirst for knowledge, entertainment and connections.

So, what have we really given up, and at what cost? Can we turn back time, or is it a price we must be to be ‘keeping up with our neighbours?’ After all we each live In a ‘hyper connected - hyped competitive’ world; and if we don’t, then perhaps we are assigning ourselves to the dustbin of history, our genes no longer matter as our digital ‘friends’ move ever faster and farther than we do.

Do we care? I suspect we should.

I invite you to comment, so let's start the conversation, let's unpack the issues and collectively (in the spirit of the 'summer of love') we might just get a better set of answers.

Thanks for reading.