Now's the time for a Web 3.0 right to privacy

As social-media sites become more prevalent and individuals share more and more details of their personal lives online, I think we need to rethink the bounds of our right to privacy. Not to regulate innovation or industries - I as a matter of fact think government should tread cautiously on that front - or to limit how authorities can access our information, however to protect us from each other.

Word of art

"Publication[]" is a word of art, which includes any communication by the defendant to a third person. "Publicity," conversely, means that the matter is made public, by communicating it to the public at large, or to so many persons that the matter must be regarded as substantially certain to become one of public knowledge.

But it doesn't stop there. As I discuss in more detail in my GigaOM Pro piece, the confluence of facial-recognition innovation, cloud computing and big-data processing could before long make it possible to determine a person's name and any openly accessible information about them via a mobile app. Nefarious types with some data-science skills could predict your Social Security number knowing just your name, age and hometown. And it all starts with a single photo on Facebook.

For someone who has on purpose kept a low profile online to avoid sharing personal information, the advent of such technologies completely undermines that personal decision. Far from being just a face in the crowd or a guy at the end of the bar, anyone with a mobile phone and $4.99 app could know more personal information than that person would ever share gladly. All because his friends are sharing the details of their own lives online.