The nature of Trust

A synopsys from the Ethics Smethics Point of Vue and other reasons why I'll never work with Michael Schrage 

http://www.cio.com.au/article/185611/ethics_shmethics/

Do the right thing or implement the system correctly. Well this statement is clearly flawed. If your IT department cannot implement a system correctly than you as the CIO have failed at developing a team with the right skills, Wilcox et al have cited that team composition and dynamic are of prime importance on ERP and CRM development. (Willcocks, Sykes, 2000)ⁱ If such difficulties arise you might be better off seeking employment as a used car salesmen or tax collector or some other business where a lack of ethics is a good fit. 

If you believe that withholding layoff information will help get your projects completed, it’s probably going to be your last project as CIO since the company will have serious issues gaining customer confidence once employee confidence and trust is lost. ; Issues of customer confidence include those experienced by Enron, MCI World Com, Nortel, Arthur Anderson and others. (Patasuris, 2002)ⁱⁱ

The truth is simple, the bright ones will see the writing on the wall and leave before the layoffs occur, those deer in the  headlights will expect a golden handshake for their woes but beyond that is the prime consideration involving the why; Why bother hiring developers if you only need a software tool? Simply buy the tool and it's rights. Microsoft bought the rights to it's first software platform; this still happens every day.

Senario:

CRM Development – Outsourced Support and Administration there after.

Utilitarian –

If you have a development department that is capable of developing a good valuable CRM solution that will function as desired and you plan to outsource support and administration, then you may consider engaging in business with this software house as a means to generate real revenue for your company. If you cannot create a new and profitable business venture than your company should have also outsourced the development as you had no intention of maintaining these employees after the project was completed, if you plain to fail then you fail to plan. The moral good of the collective of the employees would be best suited by ensuring their long term employment over considerations of profit; one such consideration would be that the organization owes these people work, just as this human capital owes the organization productive efforts. As Economics (Samuelson, Nordhaus, 2004)ⁱⁱⁱ states all production requires Factors that include Human Capitol and Land.

Nomative –

The moral facts of the situation as sited by Schrage are both simplistic and narrow minded. Yes IT is a business, but it’s up to the sales people and directors to ensure that it functions in a sustainable manner. In 2008 the software industry added $280 billion in value to the U.S. Economy alone (BSA, 2008)^iv, If the sales department of this organization cannot capitolize on such a large market than they should be the first to be replaced; The above scenario would not exist if they outsourced all development of the platform, or if they hired developers in a cautious manner. Full time gainful employment as a developer in an economy means that you as an individual have already made the choice to devote 100% of their time and effort to your company, to assume that these people are expendable just because the company cannot find a means to sell their talents is wrong in both the utilitarian and nominative philosophical sense. The prima-face (W.D. Ross, 1930)^v duties in the nominative sense would be that the benefice, fidelity and justice of the organization are co-dependent upon those received by their respective employees and those experienced by their customers. Henry ford once stated, Take aw

Short Term Losses

The short term losses of this organization would include a lack in skills and ability for the organization to product any software product, not to mention a loss in production and morale. Losses to corporate morale can kill a company; if your entire workforce is apathetic then your companies production may grind to a standstill.

Long Term Gains

The long term gains of this company or organization may be that instead of going bankrupt they exist in some form their than they used to. Current examples that include ones like this include “Research in Motion” where they have recently gutted their workforce in an effort to combat a downturn in sales.(Yin, 2011)^vi By reducing 11 percent of their programmers; one such strategic move would have been to refocus efforts on Android development of a blackberry compatible mailer client to further expand on a client base on an exponentially growing client base, thus no longer depending on their own hardware business and leveraging the strength of the mobile marketplace from Samsung, Motorola, Nokia and any other Android based phone manufacturer: however weather or not Rim will survive into the new year remains to be seen.

Good Ethics or Financial Benefits

The example above is just one example, however if all organizations were to invest as heavily into their employees as their employees invest in their organizations than the returns would include competitive advantages as well as financial ones, the best examples include sponsorship of an executive MBa as a means to capitalize on leadership within the ranks of an organization as opposed to purchasing or poaching an executive. Good Ethics lead to a good reputation, a good reputation directly increases sales and revenues regardless of the product or service being sold. 

iWillcooks Leslie P., Sykes, Richard (ACM, 2000) Enterprise resource planning: the role of the CIO and it function in ERP [Online] PDF Document Available from: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332051.332065 (Accessed on October 23^rd 2011)

iiPatasuris, Penelopie (Forbes, August 26^th 2002) The croproate Scandal Sheet [Online] World Wide Web, Available From: http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/25/accountingtracker.html (Accessed on October 24^th 2011)

iiiSamuelson, Paul A; Nordhaus, Paul D (McGraw Hill, 2010) Economoic 19^th ed P.295. ISBN: 978-0-07-070071-0

ivn.a. (Business Software Alliance, 2008) Software Industry Facts and Figures [Online] PDF Document, Available from: http://www.bsa.org/country/Public%20Policy/~/media/Files/Policy/Security/General/sw_factsfigures.ashx (Accessed on October 24^th 2011)

vW. D. Ross (Oxford University Press, 1930, Reprinted 2002) The Right and Good ISBN 0-1-992-526-53

viYin, Sarah (PCMag, 2011) Rim Cuts 2000 Jobs, Reshuffles Management [Online] World Wide Web, Available From: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389071,00.asp (Accessed on October 24^th 2011)

The Long Con

“If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.” ~ Matt Damon, The Rounders

When Vint Cerf was designing TCP/IP he did not think twice about the ramifications of it's use and abuse by the commercial enterprise, ethics were not in consideration at that time, just a protocol for communicating between computers in a resilient fashion.(n.a. 2000)ⁱ, When Tim Bern s Lee was engaging in the development of HTTP and the “Hyper Media Experiment” in 1989 at CERN his desire was to develop a system that would enable global commutation with the use of Text, Video, Audio and any digital artifacts that might be created with a computer, in 1990 he created the firs web server and client.(w3, 2001)ⁱⁱ

We may argue that these ethical people created an ecosystem whose behavior is no longer deterministic or positive but profit driven and potentially dangerous. The world wide web as it exists today according to the LANDER project as implemented by CAIDA contains 4,294,967,296 unique hosts as of 2007. (CAIDA, 2007)ⁱⁱⁱ as of 2011 we have exhausted all available IPv4 addresses.

Moore's Law dictates that the cost of computing is divided in half every 18 months(Gordon Moore, 1965)^iv; This also applies to storage in addition to computing, in that the cost of storing data is halved every 18 months as well. In fact most physical storage devices have beaten Moore's Law with respect to cost per gigabyte per watt in terms of performance over the last two decades. It has become cheaper to store information gained from use.

Business intelligence is the act of mining transaction data within an organization to derive value and intelligence from the dataset and it's behavior. Recently the advent of Web 2.0 standards means that computers that host information can now exchange semantic data as objects in XML from one another using XMLRPC thus no longer requiring user intervention or the “Duplication” of input. These include standard such as SOAP and any other Web 2.0 standard where you fill out information on one website such as Facebook, Linked In or Twitter and then 3^rd party sites may query those servers using your tracking cookie as an identifier of you as a person; then poll your data and use it to auto fill it's own forms.

This notion of logical “Glue” was heralded as the greatest human achievement of all time by all of the on-line marketing firms, social networking web sites and companies with vested interests in tracking your behavior as an Internet user for profit.

One such abuse of an individual's right to privacy is called the “Ever cookie”, this cookie uses multiple methods and vectors to place it self in commonly used buffers that are not erased by most browsers such as using the Flash object store to create an “LSO” object to be tracked and quired.(Kamkar, 2010)^v

Recently in Canada it was argued that “A hypertext link does not constitute defamation of character”, this has massive ramifications with regards to another case before the courts against the well known site “ISO Hunt”.(Supreme Court, 2011)^vi In that a Linking site which profits from posting links to copyrighted content may not be liable for enabling said copyright infringement.

Other example includes a recent suit filed for class action by a woman in Mississippi accusing face book of violating federal wiretap laws by tracking people's use of the world wide web when they modify a cookie as stored on a web-page that may contain the “Like” button.(Goodin, 2011)^vii

The ethical argument presented by companies such as “Google”, “Facebook” and “Linked In” is as follows:

“People are willing to give up their rights to privacy for communication with other people that would otherwise not be possible”.

The ethical flaws of this argument are that your privacy is a right granted to you if; you live in Europe or North America by either a Charter of Rights and freedoms or a Constitution.

These companies do not sell products; they do not sell ad-space; they sell people! The user base of the web site is the product, your information is theirs and their stock valuation is proportional to the amount of users they have; this perception is reality.

Google, the world largest data store tracks over 2 billion people daily, they have over 1,000,000 servers holding e-mail, web-searches, impressions of text ads, peoples digital pictures, and databases of use; to assume that they do not violate your right to privacy in mining this data for profit is utter and sheer stupidity that should be side by side with notions of the world being flat or the sun rotating around us.

All modern Internet companies have one common product, a group of captive users with data on what they do and how they do it and Web 2.0 simply increased the volume of data available for mining and exploitation or sales. This is accepted as the norm and perceived as perfectly normal so long as they do not attempt to commit fraud or blatantly sell to you via a traditional methods such as cold calls, or telemarketing.

The Association for Computing machinery, the oldest known association of computing professionals and perhaps one of the largest has an entire chapter devoted to Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. (ACM, n.d.)^viii The KDD is a group of very talented programmers whom are usually hired by organizations to engage in knowledge management and mining from their internal datasets, however this now includes peoples personal information, a programmer may even be at ethical odds with respect to the KDD as they would have singed the Ethical Code upon their membership.

The trend of profiting from peoples privacy is actually growing as more sites become intertwined with one another the “Sticky” nature of on-line data and exchange has created an ecosystem where advertisers may profile you before you ever see any of their ads. This industry is valued in the billions, and it's being used to drive marketing and product development as I write this; This prime issue is that this trend on the Internet is wholly unethical in nature and clearly violates everyones respective rights; as time continues to pass more court cases will be heard by other violators of privacy; however I fear that due to the sheer value of the market the courts themselves may get bought as well, justice may be blind but she is also expensive.

In the 21^st century most of humanity has been conned into believing that these companies are providing services and goods to make their lives better when really they are just more venues for advertising; we the early adopters and Internet users have been conned into disclosing too much information without demanding compensation that is equivalent to it's value. Every new generation from now on will simply accept this fact of life, and continue to blindly use each of these services as if they were entitled to them.

in.a. (Living Internet, January 7^th 2000) Vinton Cerf TCP/IP Co-desiner [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_cerf.htm (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

iiTim Berns-Lee (W3C, 20011/09/01) Tim Bearns-Lee Biography [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ (Acdessed on October 19^th 2011)

iiiCai, Xue; Fan, Xun; Dougherty, Maureen; Govindian, Ramesh; Hiderman, John; Hu, Zi; Papadopulus, Christos; Pradkin, Yuri; Quan, Lin (CAIDA, 2007) The Lander Project Summary [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/census-map/ (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

ivMoore, Gordon E (Electronics, April 19^th 1965) Cramming More components onto integrated circuits [Online] PDF Document, Available from: ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

vKamkar, Samy (Samy.pl, 09/20/2010) The evercookie [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://samy.pl/evercookie/ (Acceseed on October 19^th 2011)

vin.a. (Superme Court of Canada, 2011) Crookes v. Newton, 2011 SCC 47 [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://scc.lexum.org/en/2011/2011scc47/2011scc47.html (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

viiGoodin, Dan (The Register, 14^th October 2011) Facebook Accused of Violating U.S. Wiretap Laws [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/14/facebook_tracking_lawsuit/( Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

viiin.a. (ACM, 2011) SIG KDD Information portal [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.sigkdd.org/ (Accessed on October 19^th 2011)

The Nature of Chaos

"The world must actually be such as to generate ignorance and inquiry; doubt and hypothesis, trial and temporal conclusions... The ultimate evidence of genuine hazard, contingency, irregularity and indeterminateness in nature is thus found in the occurrence of thinking."

- John Dewy (1958)ⁱ

The software enterprise consists of a vast forest of applications with each serving it's own genus and function, each program and system maintaining it's relevant business function. This “Ecosystem” has many dependent factors however it's usually a homogeneous environment, where most systems within an organization are similar in nature or utilize a similar base computing system to ensure that function and form are not chaotic.

To take an organization that has a “Chaotic” environment and standardize it is to undergo the process of maturity or the cyclical process of software and hardware audits according to existing standards and determine which gaps if any exist and what is required to remedy them.

The key aspects to consider in organizing the software enterprise are to determine which standards and guidelines may add value to said organization and to develop a plan to implement them by using or devising road maps to apply said standards by using formal methodologies such as CoBIT from the ISACA.(ISACA,2010)ⁱⁱ

CoBIT is a methodology used to manage methodologies; an example would be to formally apply the CMMI from SEI to an organization to determine the maturity levels and gaps. The CMMI is available free of charge from the SEI at Carnegie Mellon and it incorporates a lot of the standards and process from Six-Sigma. The CMMI is a collection of best practices (SEI, n.d.)ⁱⁱⁱ, so given that it is a collection of what can be done; determining what must be done is a matter of business practice in Gap Assessment and Impact Assessment as well as Risk Assessments and value assessments for the organization's core business practices; the CMMI-DEV would apply if the organization is a development house, the CMMI-SVC may apply if the organization offers services.

In addition to utilizing methodologies to adopt standards we would also need to consider which standards we must adopt to reduce chaos; The ISO standard for software development quality assurance is 9000-3 the current iteration of this standard is entitled ISO 90003:2004 and is available from the ISO/IEC.(ISO, 2004)^iv Other relevant standards include the IEEE 12407, ISO/IEC 15504 for quality assurance plans, ISO 27001 and ISO 27002 to improve the organizations security stance.

Standardization is one method to ensure that a software enterprise is producing quality secure software of great value but it cannot do this without having an enterprise project management office in place to ensure that the desired standards are being met with the current versions or methods thus we must also ensure that project management methods are being observed as well such as the broad adoption of SDLC.

In addition to the above formal methods there is also the question of good “Due Care” as defined by the (ISC)2.(Tipton, 2010)^v Is the corporation or organization engaged in planning for business continuity? Disaster Recovery and Availability requirements? Are all of these formally defined and understood by both the Executive and Employees of all departments; thus not limited to just IT.

Thus the key considerations for any software enterprise are weather or not the office environment is standarized and mature? Is every desktop in said software Enterprise managed by a formal methodology including ITSM standards from the ITIL as defined by the U.K. Office of Government Commerce(ITIL, OGC, 2010)^vi; such as Release and Problem Management along with formal Configuration and Change management? The other common sense consideration is; Does the people, process and technology function as they should to achieve the business goals of the organization?

Now the reasons behind the adoption of standards, methods, and methodologies to be used to apply said standards to said software enterprise are very simple; they are industry proven methods used to improve the value, availability and quality of the software enterprise. The people and process may be simple, the technology is complex and the goal is to reduce the amount of chaos within the software enterprise to a manageable level that can be quantified and measured and reported upon. Not only will this increase the organizations competitiveness it will also make it a far more secure and resilient entity; however we are assuming that these standards methodologies and processes are adopted and implemented with care and wisdom as endorsed by the Executive and understood by the employees.

The ecosystem in a rain-forest is wonderfully diverse and very deadly. The ecosystem in a managed forest is less complex and far more habitable as well as productive. The goal of the exercises in adoption of methods and standards by the nature of assessment and feedback; is to change the nature of the software enterprise from a risky and chaotic stance to a risk averse and standardized one that is measurable and quantifiable in human terms.

If we are unaware of the dangers lurking in the trees how can we ever hope to produce any paper?

Conversely if we have diverse separate groups of individuals formulating software projects with no oversight or consideration for goals in quality or management how may we ever hope to maintain our level of quality or client base? 

 

iKellert, Steven H. (University of Chicago Press, 1993) In the Wake of Chaos P.1 ISBN: 0-226-42976-8

iin.a. (ISACA, 2010) CoBIT 4.1 [Online] PDF Document, Available from: http://www.isaca.org/Knowledge-Center/cobit/Pages/Downloads.aspx (Accessed on October 16^th 2011)

iiin.a. (Software Engineering Institutie, Carnegie Meallon Unviersity, 2010) CMMI Solutions: Process Areas [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/solutions/index.cfm (Accessed on October 16^th 2011)

ivn.a. (ISO/IEC, 2005) Software engineering -- Guidelines for the application of ISO 9001:2000 to computer software [Online] PDF Document, Available from:http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=35867 (Accessed on October 16^th 2011)

vTipton, Harold F. (Taylor & Francis, 2010) Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK, Second Edition P. 266 ISBN: 978-1-4398-0959-4

vin.a. (APM Group LTD. 2007) Official ITIL Website [Online] World Wide Web, Available from: http://www.itil-officialsite.com/ (Accessed on October 16^th 2011)

Privacy in the Information Age

Computing has many capabilities and information technology is now a driver for most business ventures including multi-billon dollar companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Facebook and Amazon.

The following five basic capabilities are available to any organization via investments in computing

infrastructure.

Long term record storage

The advent of inexpensive desktop and pocket computing has had as much of an influence on business and the Gutenberg press did on the dissemination of information over two hundred years ago. Computing  facilities now house all the records for most organizations in a digital format on a file system usually residing either on a series hard drives or a highly available and redundant Storage Array Network; Having these commuting resources allows an organization or business the ability to store records of all practices and procedures; these include records of communications and meetings in the form of E-mail and minutes letters. We no longer measure libraries in terms of psychical storage space but we measure our available storage for information in the number of “libraries of congress” or Gigabytes of data that may be stored upon them. This facilitates the development of a long term corporate memory; where once an agent in an organization would have to peer over archives and file folders for hours on end to locate information they may now simply submit a query to an internal database of records to locate relevant data in the form of Documents, Communications, Actuarial Records (Books of business) or any other relevant information. The availability of vast amounts of information regarding various fields of science are turning once traditional fields of research involving psychical tests and trials into exercises in data management and mining. Cervek et al (1999)istate that the availability of a universal design of a data grid to access these now enormous data sets (peta-bytes of information) must follow a standardized format to ensure interoperability and that any research conducted upon it is sound. Long term storage equates to a perfect memory provided the integrity of the data that is stored is sound.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is defined by Junpil Han and Mani Subrami (1999)ii as the ability to manage the intangible assets within an organization; that is to distribute and manage the intangible information within the individuals that work for said organization. Knowledge Management Systems are IT services and infrastructure that become business enablers and competitive advantages by ensuring that all the Value derived from the knowledge of an organization and it's business are maintained and transferable. This would not be possible without an investment in a Knowledge Management System which resides on computing infrastructure.

Business Process Automation

Business process automation can be loosely defined as the integration of automation engines within an organizations infrastructure; where each independent cost centre may be viewed as having it's own automation engines: ie; Finance and Accounting may use packages such as Accpack, Simply accounting ; Oracle Financial or people-soft to accomplish common tasks like payroll, renumeration and the calculation of balance sheets including current operations. Business process automation would involve the integration of these systems with business intelligence and marketing platforms to further automate various business processes such as “manufactering” or “software production”. Again business process automation requires that multiple IT sytsems be integrated and become aware of one another; this usually involves the adoption of WASDL or XMLRPC and web 2.0 based standards and data interchange. Examples of BPA include automation of the reconciliation of electronic books; say the payroll database with the transactions as input to the accounting platform from the bank directly; basically BPA allows an organization to streamline it's operations and realize effectiveness in staffing and human time by automation as much as can be automated.

General Purpose Computing

When Alan Turing conceived of his machine; the Turing Machine in 1936, Barker-Plummer (1995)iii as a means to conduct thought experiments with computing systems he did not realize at the time that it might be capable of simulating every algorithm ever created. Thus we may define general computing as the application of any system or algorithm by a computer to any data to obtain any information desired. General computing within the day to day activities of an organization would consists of the desktop operations of it's agents and their tool sets however complex or simple they may be. These include the mundane manipulation of information in spreadsheets all the way up ot the most advanced reasarch in statistical applications such as SaaS or similar scenarios. General computing is any computing inolving math and a computer.General computing is using records as maintained by long term storage to facilitate the creation of value or gleaning insight into the available data.

Interconnectivity of Working groups

The information superhighway in it's current form as defined by the companies that run these networks are a series of high bandwidth optical interconnections between geographically disperse municipalities, provinces, states and countries. Realistically the Internet is mapped by CAIDA project n.a. (2011)iv and is governed by international standards bodies in each country with access to it. What the INTERNET facilitates is rapid exchange of information among groups of geographically disperse agents. The nature of these exchanges is usually beneficial when business and commerce are concerned; the risks of interconnection arise when organizations expose themselves via unsound software or business practices in relation to the types and nature in which they engage in communicators on the INTERNET. The risks of Fraud and Exploit by agents in countries where little or no oversight exists has had academics move to the “INTERNET 2” which is a seperate ultra high speed network for the sole purpose of academia.

The current networks that are used by business to manage it's organization and employees are semiprivate or private by using security technologies such as application virtualization or the use of encrypted networks on top of the INTERNET such as Virtual Private Networks or SSL access gateways to ensure that employees have access to the information resources from where ever they may INTERNET access; as INTERNET access is fairly ubiquitous in the industrialized world then your organization may no longer be bound by psychical constraints of available office space. This of course gives rise to the notion of what methods and metrics are to be used to determine if an employee is productive or not; since in effect the punch clock is no longer a physical device. The benefits of utilizing the INTERNET vs physical presence are many, inexpensive video communications over instant messaging is the once dreamed of “Video Phone” and it was developed by software companies not phone companies; this inexpensive access allows organizations to compete at a multi-national level with few key resources conducing far more specialized work in local or remote locations. Many organizations of today including some of the top preforming public ally traded companies reduce travel and operations costs by having virtual meetings.

The Death of Privacy

Privacy still exists as a legal fiction; the police and state may not commit transgressions against an individuals privacy such as searching or monitoring their communications without due cause which is defined by Canadian common law as the procedure and process of hearing before a judge to obtain a warrant to engage in surveillance. This due process is a major component in Habeas Corpus (the write to equality before the law) and forms the basis upon which civilized society functions. The truth about privacy is that it is long dead; it was killed by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and Microsoft. The standards of Web 2.0 had a minor role but the agents are these companies and their core business of managing and presenting our information to us. Google is the worst offender when it comes to privacy, it is estimated that Google has over 1,000,000 systems operating in a custom designed cluster as an amalgamation of data-centers across the globe; mostly in north america; hwoever to ensure speedy searched they co-locate as close to major populations as possible. When Eric Schmidt, Richmond (2010)v the previous CEO of Google once stated:

“Our company’s policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”

The Privacy commissioner in Canada filed a Law suit following the comment and the ensuring enquiry was designed to determine what information Google maintained on the infamous and useful “Street” view trucks; as it turned out, Google would also sample any WiFi networks that were available when driving; they kept this information internally, although they did not publish the WiFi information the use of this information without consent of the owners of these networks in Canada was a clear violation of The Privacy Act.

Recently the CEO and Founder Reid Hoffman of Linked In in the Davos Annual Meeting vistated that:

“Privacy Issues are for Old People since the value of connection is greater than privacy issues”

George Cummings the CEO of Forserter stated that (2010): 

"The 15 most trafficked sites of the world seven of them social sites; which constitutes 5 to 6 hours of a day on the consumption of media, twitter has over 25 million unique visitors per day, Facebook 130 million users per day, my space 50 to 60 unique visitors per day, and linked in about 15 million and ming about 6 million these are from Com-score."

Only 17% of the on-line community uses social networking sites; the age ranges are aimed at younger INTERNET users. Thus the current trend is adoption among young adults. In addition to the social networking sites, on-line search and Geo-lcation services; the other major offenders are our own Institutions, our provincial and federal governments in efforts to ease access to our own services these include the databases of our hard information such as property ownership, licensing and registration information as well as birth and death records via sites like “Ancetry.com” where we may review and pay for our genealogy. In addition to these our banks and creditors routinely track our purchases to better serve us and to glean information into our spending habits.

Thus the organizations that have served us for so many decades now with the advent of inexpensive

computing by utilizing the above five capabilities of computing on various large scales; may now

maintain a permanent memory of every action we may have ever been involved with, including any

pictures that others have taken of us or any records we may maintain in any municipal or federal

government. Thus we may see that large businesses have made huge profits by simply asking us to

disclose information we see as valueless to facilitate connection and communications in a transparent

manner but by doing so we have sacrificed our privacy for temporary and transient communication and

connections. I believe that the value of a shared identity is and having a smaller global village is very

real but I also believe that the value of my privacy is incalculable it's a right in my country and I'd like

for my children to enjoy this right as well.

i Ann Chervenak , Ian Foster , Carl Kesselman , Charles Salisbury , Steven Tuecke (1999) The Data Grid: Towards an Architecture for the Distributed Management and Analysis of Large Scientific Datasets [Online] PDF Document, Available from: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.32.6963 (Accessed on October 10th 2011)

ii Hahn, Junpil; Subramani, Mani R. (1999) A framework for Knoledge Management Systems Issues and Challenges for Therory and Pratices [Online] PDF Document, Available from: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.114.7693&rep=rep1&type=pdf (Accessed on October 10th 2011)

iii Barker-Plummer, David (2011) The stanford encylopedia of philosophy [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/ (Accessed on October 10th 2011)

iv n.a. (2011) CAIDA Visualizations [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble From: http://www.caida.org/publications/visualizations/ (Accessed on October 10th 2011)

v Richmond, Shane (October 25th ,2010) How Google crossed the creepy line [Online] World Wide Web, Avaialble from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8086191/How-Google-crossed-the-creepy-line.html (Accessed on October 10th 2011)

vi World Economic Forum, (2011) Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - The Growing Influence of Social Networks [Online] Video,http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pexGCUPlUeA#! (Accessed on October 10th 2011)