The idea of Semantic Web is to bring Artificial Intelligence to the World Wide Web.
Basing on the current achievements of Web 2.0, including social networks, B2C and C2C e-commerce, new Web robots will be able to crawl the web and collect information: profiles, photographs, calendars, retail information and process it into a coherent picture of a person, place or thing.
Paradise…
It will enable service providers to give you more precise recommendations. For example, e-commerce websites recommend a list of items that you probably will buy, travel agents offer tours that would match your preferences, social networks introduce people you may want to know.
Sounds superb cool right?
…Or is it?
You may want to think twice.
Imagine. The web robots will know, then analysts of that website will know, then very soon the whole world will know, your name, your house, occupation, habits, romance history. They will analyze your data even more carefully than do you, and treasure and publish the information for a longer time than you might expect it to. Worse, your sun-bathe photo or even video may be open for the whole world to view and comment.
To make it worse, cri.me never leaves any new advance untouched. Imagine what will be done on you when you are revealed all over?
I call it Nightmare.
It’s high time we re-thought Privacy and considered the information we publish on the internet, before the next decade when what I described come in place.
More articles will be written in the “re-thinking” process.
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Tags of this article: achievement,e-commerce,How Business Analysts work,information,information-management,internet,network,privacy,profile,recommendation,robot,semantic,service,social,travel,web,web-2.0.
Last update September 15, 2007
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September 15th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I think your fears of the Semantic Web are misplaced my friend. Cheers!
September 15th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Hi James,
Recent uprising concerns of employment security (like that of Dooce), cyber-bullying (like that of Kathy Sierra), cyber trolls etc. are solid reason for worry about the possible negative impacts of the evolution of more intelligent web systems.
I will continue to write about both sides of this development to prepare web users with enough information on how to best utilize the beneficial services and minimize malevolences.
Tai
September 16th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
The Semantic Web is not intelligent. Intelligence and thinking are not the same as reasoning over rules and logic. The Semantic Web rests firmly within the realm of computer science, whereas your fears of artificially intelligent user agents stealing your personal information rest within the realm of science fiction, for now. I’m not disagreeing that security is of absolute importance, especially when a new thing like the Semantic Web is being created. It’s just that of the things to be scared of, artificially intelligent harvesters are not yet the threat to look out for. Thanks for the response, keep blogging!
September 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Thanks James a lot for your clarification. An expert and insider’s words are always insightful
I will join Semantic Focus to continually get updated of this marvelous creation.
Cheers,
Tai
October 6th, 2008 at 12:25 am
[...] course, a service provider is a business. Many may have concern of privacy. Google has known MUCH about me, not Facebook does. There’s a chill in the air that there are [...]