Issues in privacy
My March Computerworld column is an exhortation to IT workers to get involved in IT-related public policy issues. Probably the most complex and serious ones are in the area of privacy. Options I posed include:
• Do nothing.
• Maintain sharp limits on government acquisition and retention of information.
• Mandate that the government keep its information in separate silos.
• Create strong rules about how governments can use information once acquired.
• Hamstring corporate acquisition, retention, or use of information. (Much of the government’s potential data comes through private channels.)
• Various mixes and matches of the above.
My own view, which I plan to lay out and defend in a series of posts, is a complex one. Historically, protections such as the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution have focused on limiting the government’s access to information. And this has been wise. As was shown for example by the misuse of FBI information under J. Edgar Hoover and the misuse of IRS information in the Nixon Administration (which Nixon claimed he didn’t innovate), once information gets into government hands its use is hard to control.
I see no good alternative to preserving these safeguards as long as possible. Maybe the Bush Adminstration should have gotten legislative permission for its data mining adventures and maybe the permission should have been denied, but the fact that they pursued them while circumventing the legal safeguards is utterly deplorable. That few people have suffered from the violationof these safeguards, or the worrisome provisions of the Patriot Act, merely proves that our multiple layers of safeguards are strong. It does not justify chipping away at them illegally, and I’m not real thrilled about legally undermining them either.
On the other hand — many of those safeguards are eroding fast. The amount of information the government can or potentially could obtain legally from credit card records, electronic auto toll tracking, etc. is staggering. National ID cards and passports are going electronic. The US Constitution apparently doesn’t prevent sensitive devices snooping into your house from the outside. Web surfing behavior is being submitted as criminal evidence. The government WILL have access to a very complete dossier on your activities, rather soon. Legislation to mandate this data be maintained in independent silos, while worthy, is just a stopgap.
And so in the US (and other developed countries, I would think), it is not just enough to fight government information acquisition. That’s a losing battle, especially since the most absolute safeguards can not be maintained in the face of the terrorist threat. Thus, I think we also need some reaffirmation — in principle, at least, if not in actual law — that “thou shalt not be hassled.”
I’m not yet sure what form(s) I think that needs to take.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mining, Privacy, censorship, and freedom, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Oracle’s perennial confusion about analytic technology
Oracle is badly confused about analytic technology, and indeed long has been. It would be tough for me to coherently explain why without being, well, confusing. So I’ll just list a series of data points, which hopefully should suffice to illustrate the point.
- Classic BI tools have at various times fallen under the purview of the app dev tools group and the app server group.
- Data mining, stemming from a Thinking Machines, Inc. acquisition, is under a whole other group on the East Coast.
- That group is now collocated and somewhat integrated with the group that oversees the MOLAP database capability, which came in via a different Boston-area acquisition (IRI/Express).
- While Oracle brags of its integrated BI stack, enterprise reporting is an exception.
- Discoverer 1.0 (Oracle’s original BI tool), was one of the most impressive new products I ever saw. But then BI technology at Oracle almost stagnated. The reason seems to have been largely a series of platform ports – client/server, Java client, thin client, etc. Other BI vendors faced the same problems, however, and they now have products generally agreed to be ahead of Oracle’s.
- Oracle didn’t seem to have a coherent analytic apps strategy even before the Peoplesoft acquisition, which obviously just confused things further. (Of course, neither does SAP, really, Dennis Moore’s passionate insistence to the contrary notwithstanding.)
- ETL/data integration is of course a historical Oracle sore spot.
That’s even before getting to Oracle’s problems in data warehousing itself, where it can’t beat Teradata and DB2/mainframe at the very high end, and low-cost options like Netezza are a looming threat as well.
What’s particularly ironic is that some of Oracle’s core marketing pitches have a lot to do with analytics. The whole integrated stack story? Doesn’t make much sense when you’re only talking OLTP; only with analytics in the picture is it coherent. The whole scalability story? A few huge websites and the like aside, that’s mainly about data warehousing now.
Obviously, Oracle has the potential to be a titan in analytics. But it doesn’t have its act at all together yet.