"To all my contacts: Do not share my pictures on Facebook." How many times did you have find in Facebook , or any other social,  messages where someone ask to tou  to "do" some things in order to protect your privacy or the privacy of your contacte? The increasing use of Internet as key tool for communication, turns the issue of privacy in an urgent topic. But Internet and Privacy are compatible? I don't believe... Privacy and Internet are incompatible, as meaning of computer "incompatibility". A software needs a specific operating system to work . An application designed for Windows system will not work on a PC running Linux (unless you don't modify it or if you haven't a Windows emulator for Linux). An iPhone app will not work in an Android smartphone. Similarly, the word privacy "does not run" (as we say for software) on the Internet platform, unless we don't use an adapted "version" of the term "privacy". Why? It's the proper meaning of the two terms makes them inherently incompatible. Intenet is Sharing, Collaboration, Transparency. Privacy is Property, Confidentiality, Secrecy. The two words cannot be defined antinomic terms, but Internet and Privacy are certainly in opposite sides in an ideal quadrant to represent the way the people relate themselves and with others.

This feature is inherent the creation and development of the NET, as it's proper to define Internet today. 

It is a well known fact that internet was born during the Cold War in the 60s in the United States as ARPANET. ARPANET was a military project to create a communications network capable to resist a nuclear attack .... NO, NO, NO! This is just urban legend. The (almost) true story is that the seed from which sprouted Internet was indeed planted in the ex Soviet Union. Exactly October 4, 1957 in Kazakhstan when it was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome the "Travel Companion", better known as Sputnik, the Russian original name, the first artificial satellite orbiting the Earth. The "reds" were conquering space and the free world beyond the Iron Curtain get left behind.

During the cold war were not only important nuclear arsenals and military power, but needed to prove that you had technological leadership in order to scare your opponents more. To keep world equilibrium, the U.S. government was caught by the desire to be able to cover the gap with the Soviet Union and began to distribute  windfall funds, also for not immediately productive research projects. In traditional American liberal mind was given great freedom to private enterprise, both to private companies and public institutions. Thanks to public capital were financed projects where a private company would never invested without an immediate or short-term economic return.  For this purpose it was created in 1958 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), renamed DARPA in 1972, where D stands for Defense, indicating military purposes of financed research. This fact has probably originated the legend of Internet / Arpanet built as a communications network to withstand a nuclear attack. In fact, until 1972, but even later with a lesser degree, the purpose of ARPA was to create a substrate of science and technology to recover and overcome the technological gap arisen in late '50s with the USSR.

Among the thousands of financed projects, one in 1969 led to the birth of the ARPANET. The main objective of the ARPANET was to share precious computing resources of the first computers (hardly transportable and greatly expensive). The first experiment of remote connection between electronic computers involved four Universities: UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara), The Stanford Univeristy (in the county of Santa Clara in California, near to Palo Alto where today is located the source of ideas Silicon Valley) and the 'University of Utah. The first form of internet is not military, but was born in academia. The characteristics of the ARPANET, which are inherited by the current Internet, were: polycephalous and decentralized architecture, packet switching and compatibility with different hardware and software platforms.

All principles based on transparency and democratization of communication. The aim is to enable the world to share resources, exchange informations, collaborate on joint projects to get in less time and more efficiently the desired objectives and results. Decentralized and polycephalous means that all nodes in the network can perform the same functions. Does not exist an established hierarchy. Packet switching allows splitting information into smaller elements. Each element can be sent over the network and achieves independently to its destination, where all the elements will be reconstituted to get the original information. What looks like a complicated way to send informations, helps to ensure the informations comes in any caseto the destination, faithful to original message, even in case of failure on one of the nodes of the communication network. Finally, compatibility with all hardware and software platforms enables systems designed by different organizations and companies to use the same communication system and to achieve a high degree of transparency and independent from the logic of market and from particular interests.

From the original core to connect only four universities, the ARPANET began to cover the entire territory of the United States and later by a U.S. government network becomes a public network, including data transmission networks result of other projects (such as BITnet, Compuserve, Usenet, fidonet, etc.). ARPANET became Internet and was wrapping around the globe. To get the Network as a communication tool for everyone, transforming Internet in the appliance of the twenty-first century, household object, but also a personal tool that follows us everywhere on our smartphones and tablets, we should recall  a last great revolution: the birth of the World Wide Web. In 1991, a researcher at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), a genius of intuition and usability, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web. Internet can be used by everyone. The realization of the dream of the hypertext that starts with a generation of scientist of information technology, communications, social sciences, such as Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart. Today internet has further evolved. From simple first portals www realized with simple graphics and textual content, we got hypermedia, hyper-everything, with the birth of Web 2.0 and 3.0, which have created a new remix and prosumers culture, where everyone can feel itself an active player of communication and creativity. A new model of society, the network society, where information is the main value and the NETWORK is the tool to connect  intelligences through Internet. 

Privacy. Privacy is something as old as time? Something inherent the essence of the human race, or one of his inventions like Internet? "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they [Adam and Eve] realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves." 

Chapter 3 of Genesis seems to indicate that the seed of the concept of privacy is very old. But is it quite right? The Adam and Eve privacy is the same we mean when we talk about the internet or is it something else? 

Well ... this is another story and another post.

November 5, 1915. _ The Institute of Physics director of Berlin University, 36 years old man, looking a bit 'scruffy, with long hair and mustache where the gray traces show an early approach to old age, goes to the Prussian Science Academy.

The academy is into a XVII century 3 floors austere building, in the heart of Berlin. The war raging across Europe. It's the Great War. The first year of battles already has its tragic charge of blood and tragedy. The war, however, is far from the German border. The Kaiser's soldiers fighting on several fronts, but the war seems to have turned in their favor. Both on the eastern front, in rapid and fierce pitched battles, and on the western front, in wearing trench warfare .

Everything appears not affect Albert Einstein, set for 10 years now in a desperate attempt to overcome unthinkable mathematical difficultie, at least for that time. In 1905 he developed the Theory of  Special Relativity which resolved the contradictions between electromagnetism Maxwell's equations and principles of Galilean Relativity. However, this theory contradicts, or rather, does not integrate with  Universal Gravitation Newton's theory. Until then all modern science  had been based about two paradigms: the principles of Galilean mechanic physic and the universal gravitation Newton's theory. After 10 long years, Einstein was able to solve the complicated equations to explain the contradictions with the Newtonian theory and just November 25, 1915, he begins a series of lectures to explain the results to the scientific academy.

The following year, these lectures are published with title "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity": Time and space are no more absolute references and absolutes constants. The variable "time" can not be considered independently from space. Space and time are inextricably linked. They lose their "ABSOLUTE" nature and become "RELATIVE".

The principles lose their absolute value and the methods too. The theory of relativity is not developed according to the rigorous scientific Galilean  methods of observation, experimentation and results repeatability. The model is totally mathematical: abstract and ideal. Experimental evidences of General Relativity will come several years after the publication of the theory.

Very interesting for us is the applicability of Relativity not just to the natural sciences, but and especially, to the social sciences too. Everything we observe in the  society development, contemporary or not, is about Relative Absolutes. About causes and effects. In the same time transcendent and immanent, in an apparent contradiction more evident today in a society ttally discretized into the digital representation of each possible content. Zero and One. On and Off. White and Black. Yes or No.

BIT is the basic unit of any type of information and communication in post-modern world. BIT tends to be the basic unit of any form of relationship too. The digitization simplifies the representation of information, makes easier portability and storage. But real informations and relationships are not their digital forms. Their digital shape is a pure representation, even though exact to reality is still a mirror image of truth. The reality is not virtual. In the virtual there are signs of reality, but it's  not reality. The reality is continuous and analog. The virtual is discrete and digital. The virtual is not evil and is not false, but it is not real. The reality is liable to distortion, but it remains "true" in its transcendent contradictions.