emerge life

I really like my table. If I feel like it, I can get my jigsaw, cut a big round hole in the middle of it and repaint it in all the colors of the rainbow. If I am lucky, people will come up to me and pay me handsomely for this because of my astonishing work of art. More likely, people will come up to me to tell me that I'm kind of stupid. No one, how ever, would ever come to me to tell me what I did with my table was illegal in any way. I bought that table, I payed for it, I own it. It's mine. I can do with it whatever I want because it's my property and I doubt anyone would object to that.
Now if I look at my digital "property", it makes me rather sad...

The German consumer advice center vbvz successfully sued the six biggest social networks in Germany, Xing, Myspace, Facebook, Lokalisten, Wer-kennt-Wen and the VZ-Group, to change their general terms of use and privacy conditions into a more user friendly form, granting the users more rights and control over their own content and data.

Have you ever googled yourself? Or your friends or family? I bet you have. Everyone wants to know everything about everybody nowadays, and of course, everyone wants to know what the web knows about oneself.
Now have you ever wondered how THAT piece of information, something you never ever wanted to reveal to the public or something you would never have expected another person to reveal has landed on the web? I bet you did that too.
Of course, when you ask such a person (or yourself), the reaction is usually the same. How could that happen?

An interesting ePetition has been opened for signing by Lars Fischer to be submitted to the German Bundestag. He concerns himself that the results from government funded research, though financed by tax money, is not easily and openly available to the people who pay for it. The goal of this petition is for the Bundestag to enact a law to make publicly funded research results freely and openly available for everyone without charging large amounts of money on books or magazines.