Tuesday 18 March 2014

A Particle Physics Approach to Privacy

A while ago I read on the LtU programming language blog a discussion about the future of programming language research - is the going to be any? Haven't we metaphorically illuminated all there is to see about programming languages?  Surely the future discoveries and developments in this area are going to be very small and very deep?

One reply caught my eye:
"When you've searched around the lamp, trying looking underneath it."
And so I feel the same about privacy...we're spending huge amounts of time looking at its effects and very little and looking at what it is.

What are the fundamental structures of privacy and how to these manifest themselves upon the World at large?

Should we take a highly deconstructive approach to privacy? Break it apart into its constituent blocks, its fundamental atomic and sub-atomic structure?

In the same way as the LHC breaks apart subatomic particles to reveal the inner structure of the Universe, should we take a similar approach to privacy?

What are the subatomic particles, the quarks, the bosons, the fermions of privacy? Does it have a metaphorical Higgs-boson and related field which gives privacy its "mass"?

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