Carl Hewitt
Carl Hewitt is Emeritus at MIT in the EECS department. He is known for his research on strongly paraconsistent logic, privacy-friendly client cloud computing, norms and commitments for organizational computing, and concurrent programming languages, models, and theories.
Is intimate personal information a toxic asset in client-cloud datacenters?
Aggregators (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) tend to believe that personal information is a valuable asset for several reasons. It is valuable to advertisers because it enables greater relevance for their ads. It is valuable to users because it can be used to enrich their lives. And it is valuable to aggregators because they can use personal information to make more money by selling (anonymous?) versions and by using it to bring together advertisers and customers. Recency and intimacy can add value to information. Current and recent information tends to be more relevant than older information. Intimate psychological, physiological, sociological, geographical, medical, etc. information can be used to personalize interactions.