Just How Much Privacy Do We Have?

stuffman64 writes: "Popular Science is running an excellent article on just how private our daily lives are. The article chronicles a typical day of a make-believe Graphics Designer from Chicago. Throughout his day, he unwittingly supplies companies with information that can potentially be used against him. And with GPS-enabled cell phones just starting to hit the market, our privacy can only continue to deteriorate from here. A must read."

Comments

What killed Privacy.

[os2fan]

Copying. Under computers, it is easy to create copies of data, and fork them down different paths. So your every action can be legitimately recorded, and then illegitimately passed onto unknowing third parties.

Analysis. grep is a faster tool than vgrep. I can pull out data from millions of line of data from with script.

Cost. With the digital age, and the connection of computers, I do not even have to pay for crunching time to do this. Most spam is duplicated at someone else's expense.

Overzealousness. Now we get to the stage that /any/ comment can be overheard. People simply do not do act this controlled.

What can be done.

Until we get some sort of protection from this sort of digital snooping, nothing really. Like, who obeys the good manners and law associated with spamming.

We can hide for a while, but why should we?

Sometimes being different or incognito is perfectly legitimate. But you neigh must be a technical wizard to make this happen...