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On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 12:24 AM, Alessandro Carelli <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I recently came by the new edition of “The Design of Everyday Things” in > which Donald Norman addressed his experience with the Google NEST > thermostat. > (long article snipped: I do recommend you read the original.) (A personal plea: please always add TWO returns between paragraphs. Alessandro's article was very difficult to read because there was minimal visual separation between paragraphs. On the web in general, really short paragraphs with clear separations make for easier reading.) To add to Alessandro's concerns, I point out that Nest makes most of its income by selling energy use data of Nest users to energy utilities. In some cities, the utilities use this information to throttle back home temperatures when the utility is reaching its energy limits. Today, utilities only do this if the home owner has given permission and they often accompany this ability with a rate discount. But who knows about the future. You might also note that Nest now couples their services with a large number of others, including garage door opener, washing machine (Whirlpool, for example has a pct with Nest) and so on. Garage door? Yes, in theory Nest cut back the home temperature when you are away and turns it on again when you return. The garage door would seem to me to be a weak indicator of home occupancy. see https://nest.com/works-with-nest/ Today, it works with Whirlpool, Jawbone, Mercedes, and DropCam, plus others. Can a thief learn that my home is unoccupied by hacking into the wi-fi thermostat connection and discovering that it is set to "Away"? I can remotely do this using their app, and recent events indicate that we should assume that everything can be hacked. Is all this good -- a convenience and also good for the environment -- or is it a dangerous invasion of privacy? Your call. My friend David Brin has written a very interesting book, *The Transparent Society,* in which he argues that privacy is the wrong issue. The correct issue is control, says David. Who owns your data? Who watches the watchers? Etc. He argues that we should own and control our own data. That we should be allowed to watch those who watch us (we should see the surveillance videos the police watch), and we should have more control. As for privacy, he argues that it is a recent invention and although in some cases, it is essential, in most cases, we are being fearful over nothing. Full disclosure is often the antidote to privacy. I think he makes a convincing case. http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html in his words: I'd been writing about the issues of transparency, security and privacy for several years before the publication of The Transparent Society. In this book (and in all my writings) I emphasize openness and transparency as a good general policy for the era ahead, when a myriad pitfalls and unexpected dangers may loom suddenly out of the future. Above all, openness is freedom's best defense. ... Our society has one great knack above all others -- one that no other ever managed -- that of holding the mighty accountable. Although elites of all kinds enacted laws and customs to hold commonfolk accountable, never before have citizens been so empowered. And history shows that this didn't happen by blinding the mighty -- a futile endeavor that has never worked. It happened by insisting that everybody get to see. By citizens demanding the power to know. ... The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? was published in May '98 by Perseus Press (formerly Addison Wesley). This large nonfiction work concerns threats to privacy and openness in the information age. It won the Obeler Freedom of Speech Award from the American Library Association and was a finalist for the McGannon Public Policy Prize. I have recently spoken on this subject for meetings of the World Bank and other major institutions. - See more at: http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html#sthash.sVeXVIWj.dpuf Don ------------- Don Norman Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego: Think Observe Make Prof. Emeritus Cognitive Science & Psychology, UCSD [log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/ www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org/> DesignX: http://tinyurl.com/designx-statement ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------