Privacy In the Age of Persistence

Bruce Schneier recently wrote another essay on privacy for the BBC concentrating on how data seems to be the "pollution of the information age" and where this seems to be leading. "We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive. Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us — living in the early decades of the information age — and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data."

Comments

Remember...

[stillnotelf]

Anything you post in this thread will be on the Internet forever, so be careful!

Re:Remember...

[aicrules]

Slashdot moderation provides the utopian method for making all information available while providing the facility for anyone to set their own threshold for what information they will actually see. Slashdot will be looked at by future generations and they will say "There is an information source that was ahead of its time!" Then they'll accidentally set their mod threshold to -1 and will immediately dig up Taco's corpse and beat it with a stick.

Re:Remember...

[commodore64_love]

No my evil twin's name is atari800_love.

We had various and vociferous debates about which computer was better. He'd say the Atari has better graphics, and I'd argue the Commodore has a sound chip that can make realistic music. It got even worse when he upgraded to an ST and I to an Amiga. We just never saw eye-to-eye.

Of course now that Microsoft controls everything, we both are unhappy.