The Cloudy Future of Consumer Computing

Professor Roger Clarke (ANU Research School of Computer Science and AMAAX Consultancy Pty Ltd)

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR information and Human-centred computing

DATE: 2011-08-16
TIME: 15:30:00 - 16:30:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
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ABSTRACT:
Consumers used to run software on their own devices and store their data at home. They are now increasingly dependent on service-providers for both functionality and data-storage. Risk assessment techniques need to be applied to consumer contexts. These are diverse, covering many kinds of consumer devices, many different consumer profiles, and various consumer needs.

A preliminary evaluation was undertaken of some key legal aspects of consumer protection. It concluded that consumers who place reliance on outsourced consumer services may be seriously exposed, because the Terms of Service of mainstream service-providers offer very low levels of assurance about features critical to consumers' interests.

Brief comments will also be made on the prospects of general-purpose computing devices ceasing to be available to consumers. The driver for this is the increasing dominance over consumer needs of the business interests of equipment suppliers and copyright-owning organisations, the demands of the moral minority to determine what everyone should be able to and not to access, and the national security extremist agenda, which mutually reinforce one another.
BIO:
Roger is a 40-year veteran of the I.T. industry. For the last 20 years, he has focussed on strategic and policy aspects of eBusiness, information infrastructure, and dataveillance and privacy. He has operated through his own consultancy company since 1982: http://www.xamax.com.au/.

He has also been active in public interest advocacy for decades, in the privacy and consumer rights areas. He is currently Chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation and a Board member of ISOC-AU.

He holds degrees in Information Systems from UNSW, and a doctorate from the ANU, and was Reader in Information Systems at the ANU 1984-95. He has been a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society since 1986. In addition to a Visiting Professorship in Computer Science at the ANU, he holds a similar position in the Law Faculty at UNSW, in cyberspace law and policy.

He has published over 100 refereed papers and a couple of hundred more unrefereed. Those since 1994 are on his personal web-site at http://www.rogerclarke.com/, which attracts 3-4 million hits p.a.