Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 56

The device layer completes the model. This is perhaps the most visible component of cyberspace, since devices connect users to the services available within and from cyberspace. They include personal computing devices, smartphones, desktops, tablets, and navigation units—an ever increasing and diverse mix of hardware, software, and ubiquitous apps. Their role is to capture, present, and manipulate information according to the user's preferences and the designer's specifications. Importantly, the latter of these two influences is not always evident, as these devices capture and transmit information far beyond the communications themselves in order to better enable the routing, storage, and recovery of the data entrusted to them by their owners (for instance, the so-called metadata, which includes routing information and other attributes such as geolocation, the specifications of operating and system software being employed, and so forth).

And as these devices become increasingly mobile (keeping the people who employ them connected to cyberspace and its panoply of services, regardless of the location of either the device or the user), the once straightforward task of associating a device with a person or a location has become a much more complicated affair. Attendant changes in the underlying economic model of how service providers charge for their wares have enabled even greater user and device agility by replacing per-call and location-based charges with flat-rate plans that simply charge users for access to global communications services anywhere in the world. Legal regimes that determine privacy rules or the status of property rights based on the physical location of a device now have to sort out the complex reconciliation of the data, device, and person, which may be actively and richly associated with one another, despite their being physically located in three (or more) disparate locations. Coupled with the reality of one person employing multiple devices, often concurrently, the actions associated with a single individual may be manifested in cyberspace as a collection of personas operating simultaneously in multiple locations across the planet. The consequence is a legal regime dependent on tenuous mapping of the physical to the virtual world, and there is ambiguity about which nation-state's rules should be employed in determining what constitutes reasonable behaviors and acceptable consequences for exceeding them.