Lauro,

Thanks for the thoughtful comment and the kind words.

With Blockchain, my main gripe is the need people have it sticking it everywhere, just to be able to say crypto or blockchain. From my reading and the little I know about it, the reason to use it is when you have trust issues, but there, it requires a marketplace of sorts with people willing to use it. The thing is, that in almost all cases today, trust already exist between the user and the service provider itself (to some extent), and using blockchain isn’t going to increase that trust or solve a problem – simply because services and service providers work in their own islands in the cloud and not in some federated manner like carriers do (where trust between carriers is mostly enforced through standards and legal contracts).

I believe that security in the digital context is the key to privacy in the digital context, but these are two conflicting expectations in a digital business model.

Big digital companies are only big due to data collection, they can even sell products, but their main product is their users who actually “give the raw material” (their data).

With respect to public (government or tied) and private companies, transparency and auditing of their employees’ activities in the context of their activities is at least expected. Whether “outside” monitoring is required or practiced when an employee is no longer on duty is another matter, perhaps legal.

I don’t think it’s absurd to use client-side algorithms that filter out potential spammers or misuse … I particularly hate receiving spam and abusive messages that most often come from senders I don’t even know about. But I have caveats about an automatic filter on the sender side … such a filter is only possible with ML which means that at some point some of the so-called “private” user data will be sent somewhere. Who guarantees that one person won’t read “that most private message” you send to another? And who guarantees that the user will be aware of this?

Blockchain, what does it refer to? The implementation of crypto-currency, Ethereum and cotratos or the concept? I think the “concept” is valid but there is no implementation today that fits the topic of this post. Would give a dissertation 🤔

We do not always see what we think is best for us with the eyes of others. Everything that comes to us through digital media influences us in our lives, you are right to worry about what comes to your children. They may not care about your thoughts today, but they did in a few years.

Regulations, well they exist. What remains is to adapt.

Congratulations, peace and health … ps: I love your publications!