From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 10:56:03 MST
Spike Jones wrote:
> Nextly, transparent world fans and info nudists: I can easily imagine,
> in my own natural lifetime, being able to sit down at a computer, type
> in any name and have some future version of the web go out and
> collect every stupid thing that person ever posted, ever, by searching
> thru achives, etc. Does this change the way we post? spike
I came to that realization a couple of years ago, and it sure changed what I
post. I'm not too worried about the long run, but in the next 5-20 years
the possibility of getting raked over the coals by some government for
violating a law that hasn't even been passed yet is an issue of some
concern. Its already too late to avoid being identified as a subversive
element, of course...
But its worse than that. Unless really draconian privacy measures get
enacted before the market for online personal information gets going, I'd
expect just about anything that isn't actually secret to be easily found.
That means credit history, purchasing history, most of the paperwork you've
ever given the government, and probably a lot of other info I'm not thinking
of. Won't that be fun?
Of course, it could be a lot worse. What if some kind soul (or repressive
government) were to dig up a landfill and read off all the data on the
floppy disks, hard drives and tapes that they find there? That would be
dirt cheap to do with modestly capable AI and robotics, after all - and
what percentage of 'securely erased' files would actually be unrecoverable
to 2010-2015 era technology?
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:15 MST