Personal Information Logos: Headed in the Wrong Direction

Things are seriously headed in the wrong direction in terms of Personal Information Logos.  I use the term “logos” to denote data information, retreival, archival, interchange, communication, formats, indexing, and more.  These are all common personal information activities/interactions/comportments which people now engage in as regular matters of course.

Big tech companies are bribing our government and the situation is getting grim.  We are now losing substantial ground in terms of freedom and power.  Losing.  Yes, even with all the gazillions of dollars being invested and spent, and all the resources and thousands of companies and developments and products…

Look at this simple fact:  You maintain a list of contacts.  That list is your personal information.  There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that anyone should need to nor be forced to use any proprietary system controlled by any one company or other entity in order to store and retreive their personal contacts.

Yet today doing so outside of having a Gmail or Apple account is very rare.  The scary thing is the extent to which its all being integrated into the devices.  They are being built so that one has to have these non-free, proprietary, privately-controlled accounts to manage their personal information.  This is a huge no-no and should be glaringly conspicuous.  The way these gadget manufacturers – and I mean phones, tablets, computers, everything have it fixed is that you need to use either Apple or Gmail.  Sorry to Google in this argument.  It seems that one of Google’s founders in fact is very concerned about similar things (how they reconcile with their company’s operations I seriously wonder sometimes).

Just to be able to view a calendar or contacts on my desktop, phone, and tablet device I am forced to use one of these accounts.  This is fundamentally wrong.  A new, open standard must be developed and manufacturers must be forced to support it in all their devices.  Calendaring and contact management should be as open as e-mail currently is.  People who claim that e-mail will die out are extremely misguided and probably do not even comprehend how the basic protocols which support e-mail work.

We are seriously headed on the wrong track and things need to change immediately.  It should be the case – it should be built into standard protocols – that not only are systems like e-mail capable of being operated completely independently of any one provider, but so should contact management and calendaring technology.  What this means is that every device that is manufactured should be required to support the open standard which accesses open systems which are non-proprietary.  In the past companies would not have thought of not offering compatibility, the ability to interface with some standard for the sake of personal information activities, yet this is changing drastically as they learn to corner markets and captivate audiences.  Open access has to be forced onto vendors, gadget manufacturers, everything, because of how entrenched things have become now.

Perhaps the specifications which define e-mail standards need to now be expanded to incorporate calendaring and contacts.  It needs to be integrated into the protocol and it should be possible for any server operated by any person to run standardized, free software capable of conducting essential personal information logos functions.

Right now companies are keen to provide all these glittery, whizzbang features on all these devices, yet there’s a grave problem at hand in terms of personal information.  The most basic functions that one can think of for personal technology devices – keeping a list of contact information or calendar events – are things that should clearly be openly supported and should be the foundation level at the base of all this technology.  Yet while there exist 3D whizbang graphics associated with games and entertainment, the core is essentially rotten.

Many of the features related to basic personal information are cludgy or don’t work.  Calendars are difficult to synchronize.  Sometimes synchronization does not work and data is lost – something that is completely inexcusable given the state of current technology and amount of resources invested in other things.  Clearly the priorities are upon keeping people hooked on different gadgets and types of entertainment while our basic freedoms of technology and the basic functions of personal information management laungish.

As a final comment, if anyone wants to see the effects in the real world of the same kind of narrow-minded, gold-digging mentality which is driving the tech industry today, one need go no further than along the Yuba river to see the scars left from the hydraulic mining of the gold-rush days.

Now the scars being created are not so apparent, but I fear they are even more drastic and severe.


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