At CES: Privacy, openness & broadband’s future

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski

Beyond the techno eye candy, digging out the substance at CES

An army of tech and gadget writers descended on the just-ended Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Rather than duplicate their coverage, I’ll offer some snapshots from my three days at the conference:

FCC chairman on the need for ‘digital literacy’

The Tech Policy Summit (for whom I’ve twice moderated panels in past years) held three days of sessions at CES, highlighed by Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro’s on-stage chat with Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski, whose appointment last year won rave reviews from reform groups.

In March the FCC is due to release its plan for making Internet broadband connectivity available to all Americans. Some nuggets from Genachowski’s talk:

• “Computers are in 75 percent of people’s homes, TVs are in 98 percent. … Can TV be part of the broadband solution?”

• “The concept of literacy and teaching kids to read needs to be expanded to include digital literacy so all of our kids, as they grow up, are prepared for the new economy.” Absolutely.

• “If you don’t have access to the Internet, more and more you can’t find a job.” Many job listings can only be found online.

• New website launched on Thursday: reboot.fcc.gov, with an aim of fostering discussion of how the FCC can be reinvented to serve the public.

• “The idea that open platforms are good business is becoming conventional wisdom, and I think that’s a healthy thing.”

• He said he wants to create a “baseball culture,” where batting .300 for a lifetime gets you into the Hall of Fame — it also means you failed seven out of 10 times, and innovation flourishes only when your employees aren’t afraid to fail.

• “The fairness doctrine is dead.”

• The FCC will defend the precept of net neutrality “rigorously.”

Privacy in the age of openness

On Thursday afternoon, at the Intel Upload Lounge for bloggers, Cathy Brooks moderated a fascinating hourlong discussion about privacy, identity and the culture of openness. Chris Kelly (at right), who’s on leave as Chief Privacy Office of Facebook to run for California Attorney General, was the center of attention in a conversation that also included Brian Solis, Frank Gruber and Genevieve Bell of Intel.

The panelists agreed that there’s a growing culture of prizing the authentic and the transparent — up to a point. Some highlights:

• Solis: “I think we’re becoming extroverted as a result of social media, and it’s leading many of us to be more confident in our online activities.”

• Kelly told us not to equate privacy with secrecy, and that we shouldn’t expect a higher degree of privacy online than we do in the offline world. (“You take a risk every time you tell somebody something private.) Instead, a new concept of privacy is emerging in which “control over and access to” your online identity is what’s fundamentally important. Kelly was a key player in Facebook’s newest round of privacy controls.

• Bell chastized the Washington Post for a story that labeled as “refuseniks” those who decline to take part in social networking.

• Kelly made the point that although he supports the open data movement, personally identifiable data should not be released and made publicly available. Agreed.

• Bell made the amusing observation that recent studies show that people are quite gleeful about the lies they tell online.

Random tidbits from CES

• Here is my Flickr photo set of the show.

• I got to play with the Canon HD camcorder, the Vixia HFM31, at the Canon booth and found it absolutely drool-worthy: amazing high-definition fidelity even when zooming in on objects and people 20 feet away. It’s coming out soon at a price of $800. I’ve found my next video camera.

• Some of the tech press wrote credulously about the wave of 3D TV and video offerings — all of which require viewers to wear 3D glasses. Let me say this plainly: It will never happen. In the movie theater, yes. As a staple of the living room? Not a chance. Color me unimpressed with the 3D hype.

• As my friend Steve Rubel observed, wireless and social are getting embedded into nearly every device. Now those are trends with some substance.

• Mind-blowing stat: Fellow at Intel booth holds up a single microprocessor chip and announces the number of transistors on it: 45 million.

• I’ll likely not be back to CES. It’s not just the madness of dealing with the crush of 110,000 people or the 90-minute waits for a taxi, but the way the conference organizers structure CES: with nearly zero participation by the audience. We’re spectators, not participants in any meaningful way. For his talk with Genachowski, Shapiro hand-picked the questions from the audience. Afterward, Genachowski was whisked away without being allowed to talk with anyone in the audience.

CES remains very much a 1990-era conference.

Disclosure: Intel flew me out for the show. I’m a member of the Intel Insiders social media advisory group.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.