Serendipity35

Privacy is a cornerstone of personal freedom, yet its meaning and importance have evolved over centuries.

Aristotle viewed the public sphere, or polis, as the space where true freedom and civic life were possible. For him, public life was about participating in politics and achieving lasting accomplishments, while private life was more concerned with household affairs and personal needs. This distinction meant that privacy was often seen as secondary to public engagement, but it also laid the groundwork for later debates about the value of personal space and autonomy. Even the Romans also drew a line between public and private spheres. Public life was where individuals could gain honor and recognition, while private life was associated with family, home, and personal matters.   Fast-forward a millennium or two, and thinkers like Rousseau saw privacy as a retreat from the pressures of society—a necessary space for self-reflection and authenticity. Hannah Arendt later argued that privacy is essential for forming personal identity and exercising political rights.In 1890 Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published in the Harvard Law Review an essay on the right to privacy By the early part of the 20th century, courts began interpreting the U.S. Constitution to protect an expansion of privacy to include personal freedom and dignity.

The history of privacy reveals that it has always been closely tied to personal liberty and the boundaries between the individual and society. From ancient debates about public and private life to modern legal protections, the concept of privacy has continually evolved in response to new challenges. Privacy remains a vital issue today, shaping debates about technology, freedom, and the rights of individuals in a rapidly changing world. As concerns escalated, privacy was recognized as a fundamental human right,  and laws and regulations were created to address the concerns caused by the spread of computers and data collection and storage.

Then came Edward Snowden.

The scale and scope of government surveillance was exposed. The global debate about privacy was joined with personal data security.  A full five years after surveillance and data collection concerns were exposed, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation claimed to set a new global standard for data protection and user rights.  Even California, with its trove of data-driven companies, took the GDPR seriously and enacted the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Personal data has become a valuable commodity in the digital economy. Companies collect, analyze, and sell user information to drive advertising, product development, and business strategies.

This shift has made privacy a key economic issue, as individuals must navigate the trade-offs between convenience and control over their data. 

As surveillance and data collection become more widespread, concerns about personal liberty and autonomy have grown. When every action can be tracked, individuals may feel less free to express themselves or make independent choices. These issues are at the heart of modern privacy debates, reminding us that protecting privacy is essential for maintaining freedom in a digital society. Privacy in the modern era is shaped by rapid technological change, new legal frameworks, and the growing power of data. As personal information becomes more valuable and vulnerable, understanding how privacy has evolved is crucial for protecting autonomy and freedom.

Privacy is not just a right of the past—it’s a challenge for the future. We all must stay vigilant and informed. Freedom depends on it.

I blog here about technology and education, and sometimes about how those two industries cross paths. I'm the blogger. Tim Kellers is on the IT side of this. Though he had done some posts in the past, he is more often updating something or fixing something broken on his server or fixing something in some code. That is not my area of expertise, and I don't really want to know much about it. I just want it to work

In October, it wasn't always working. Posts that I had spent time writing just disappeared. The blog went offline. People told me that they couldn't access it because of security warnings. I stopped posting.

Tim was texting me messages about our .net domain. He created an alternate version at a .icu domain. I had to look up .icu, a top level domain I had never seen before. It means so logically that it is illogical, "I See You."

Tim told me, "That instance runs on different CPU architectures, so I want to do that manual sync first before I move the domain name over." Then he said, "I just synced your post to s35.net," and "I went through an SQL dump of the database and found a whole lot of image files with our very old nji.edu address prefixes. I changed them for a local test, and it looks like a whole lot of broken images are back online.  That string was replaced 554 times according to the log file." 

All of which makes little sense to me. And that's okay with me as long as Tim hangs around.

When I was in Europe in September, I told Tim the site was not working and giving me odd errors. "Just added the Privacy/Cookies/GDPR thing to s35.icu.  Next time you are in Europe, see if the site connects," he texted.

Serendipty35 is back. Tonight is Mischief Night here in Serendipity35land, and I'm hoping no gremlins are out there that will prank Serendipity35.

Artificial Intelligence is so ubiquitous -  both in visible ways and hidden away in how we use technology - that MIT Review published a piece on six things you should tell kids about artificial intelligence. I taught in a middle school and I know AI has entered that curriculum level, but even younger kids need to be taught and prepared for using AI.

One thing they suggest is the idea that AI is not your friend, but that doesn't mean it's your enemy. Chatbots are likely one of the first AI forms a younger child might encounter. That may be via a device such as Alexa. Yes, they "chat" in a somewhat friendly, conversational tone but younger kids need to be reminded that they are machines. That means not giving the machine any sensitive personal information which will be stored and used in a very large database. We know of cases where bots and apps have become "friends" for people in a serious way - and I'm not talking only about kids.

They also suggest conversations for young kids about how AI models are not replacements for search engines or a way to write your schoolwork. Following that idea, let it be known that teachers might accuse you of using an AI - possibly even when you haven’t used it.

Chatbots and recommender systems are designed to get you hooked and keep yu using them and maybe paying for a premium version. They might show you incorrect information. AI makes mistakes.

Of course, this is coming from Massachusetts Institute of Technology so their final suggestion is not to miss out on what AI is actually good at doing. "Students who find themselves struggling to understand a tricky topic could ask ChatGPT to break it down for them step by step, or to rephrase it as a rap, or to take on the persona of an expert biology teacher to allow them to test their own knowledge. It’s also exceptionally good at quickly drawing up detailed tables to compare the relative pros and cons of certain colleges, for example, which would otherwise take hours to research and compile."

The main is that parents and teachers need to have conversations about AI with the young people in their lives, and probably educate themselves about it too.

120 years ago, divers discovered a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in Greece. What they found changed our understanding of human history, and the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism has captured the imagination of archaeologists, mathematicians, and scientists ever since.

The Antikythera Mechanism (c. 50 BCE) was found in a shipwreck off the coast of the island of Antikythera and is now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

It even inspired the plot for the 2023 film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The ancient Greek device was used to track celestial movements. In the fictionalized film version, it is called the Archimedes Dial and is said to locate fissures in time. The real Antikythera Mechanism was more of an early astronomical calculator. Not surprisingly, the movie takes creative liberties, turning the artifact into a tool for time travel rather than its historical function of predicting eclipses and tracking planetary positions

Using the latest 3D x-ray and modelling technology, experts are still unravelling the secrets of what else this machine may have been capable of calculating.

Could it be considered an early computer? Yes, it is sometimes regarded as the world’s first analog computer. Designed to predict astronomical positions, eclipses, and even track the cycle of athletic games similar to the Olympic Games. It uses a complex system of gears to model celestial movements, functioning much like a mechanical calculator.

Its sophistication was unmatched in its time, and nothing as advanced appeared again for over a thousand years.

Take a glimpse of the mechanism as it appears in this Hollywood version.

 

Originally posted at Kenneth Ronkowitz – poet, teacher, designer