Community

Individuals deserve a clearer understanding of the data that companies are collecting from the new generation of digital, connected devices, said Vinton G. Cerf, Internet pioneer and Web evangelist for Google.

Mr. Cerf’s comments highlighted an ongoing debate that is gaining momentum as a growing number of connected devices, machines and objects, known as the Internet of Things, takes shape. As more devices connect to the Internet and collect data about users, who ultimately is in charge of it, and how are the data collection practices communicated to the public?

“It should be required that the users control this information that we accumulate,” he said Wednesday during a cybersecurity lecture at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. “They should have the ability to say no, I don’t want this device because I don’t want to be forced into providing that information.”

“That probably means the fine print needs to be a lot clearer than it is today,” he added.

A potential challenge is figuring out how to limit data access to certain parties, in certain circumstances. A person may want a doctor to have access to his or her medical records during an emergency, but may not want that doctor to have continuous access to electronic health information. “You need to have this ability to grant ephemeral access to information,” Mr. Cerf said.

In a panel discussion following Mr. Cerf’s keynote, a group of Internet of Things researchers touted the public and commercial benefits of being able to access reams of user-generated data. But some on the panel, which included Mr. Cerf, Cornell Tech computer science professor Deborah Estrin and Tandon School professor Beth Simone Noveck, cautioned against making data available solely to private interests, an outcome that could restrict consumer privacy and hamper public research efforts.

“Ultimately and finally this is an issue about control,” said Ms. Noveck, who directs The Governance Lab at NYU. “This is about getting our own data back about ourselves.” She also stressed the importance of finding ways to share societal information collected by private companies – such as weather and temperature data – with government and researchers to more effectively address policy issues.…

Tobias Jones is a co-founder of Windsor Hill Wood community in Somerset. His book about his community, Buy “A Place of Refuge” from Amazon UK, is published by Quercus.

In this extract he talks about why off-grid living is better in a community.

BY TOBIAS JONES

We set up our community, Windsor Hill Wood, six years ago in a ten-acre woodland in Somerset, UK. The sole purpose was to offer sanctuary to those in a period of crisis in their lives: those struggling with addiction, depression, bereavement, homelessness, eating disorders, PTSD, and so on. In that time we’ve had well over a hundred people living in our family home, and the benefits – both to ourselves and to our guests – have far outweighed the drawbacks. It’s just a natural, healthy, wholesome way to live.

Yet in all functioning communities, collective choices are made and have to be adhered to. One of the most fascinating communal experiments that emerged from the hippie movement in the US was The Farm, in Tennessee. Inspired by the late Stephen Gaskin, it began in 1971, as you might expect, as a mirror-image of that age’s free-for-all attitude, but slowly began to incorporate “agreements”, which, over the years, made it a very stable and yet very creative space. Communal choices were made to respect the sanctity of marriage and monogamy, to avoid the use of hard drugs, and so on.

But the greatest obstacle to sharing the lessons of communalism is our warped notion of freedom. The essayist Wendell Berry arrived at the heart of the problem in his 2002 book, The Art of the Commonplace:

. . . there are two kinds of freedom: the freedom of the community and the freedom of the individual. The freedom of the community is the more fundamental and the more complex. A community confers on its members the freedoms implicit in familiarity, mutual respect, mutual affection, and mutual help; it gives freedom its proper aims . . . The freedom of the individual, by contrast, has been construed customarily as a license to pursue any legal self-interest . . .”

It is here that, most clearly, a contemporary observer will glimpse the scary needle that administers the medicine we need: to create any sort of community, we need to pool individual freedoms to gain community freedoms. The latter emerge only through submission and obedience, not through exuberance and incessant self-expression. It is, obviously, a hard sell.

It is hard to find a word held so low in the public esteem as “communalism”. For most people it carries a toxic whiff of both “communism” and “commune”, implying dropouts, flakes, fanatics and cultish leaders. If you’re in any doubt about how frightening the word is to the average citizen, try telling your next-door neighbour you’re going to live communally: they will veer away from you (believe me, I’ve …