Slashdot Mirror
In 10 Years, Every Human Connected To the Internet Will Have a Timeline
Presto Vivace writes: O'Reilly Radar has an article about how ubiquitous tracking and collection of data will fundamentally change how we live. Quoting: "This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quickly be taken for granted. Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage. Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers, unthinkably higher Dunbar numbers — now, every interaction has a history. This isn’t just about lifelogging health data, like your Fitbit or Jawbone. It isn’t about financial data, like Mint. It isn’t just your social graph or photo feed. It isn’t about commuting data like Waze or Maps. It’s about all of these, together, along with the tools and user interfaces and agents to make sense of it."
This is already the case - we don't have to wait ten years. Except to actually have access to our own timelines - right now they are under tight government/corporate security.
Great, so now the breakup of my ex-girlfriend from years is going to be used by others when judging my worth in relationships, or maybe health data. Or finance. Data is beautiful, but it can be really evil. Deeds will no longer be forgotten at some point; we'll be the sum of all of our decisions on the inside *and now* the outside for everyone to see.
This makes me very sad. Here's hoping that a nice fat CME takes down everyone's "timeline".
In 10 years, half of humanity will have had enough of this bullshit and will have hacked their way to privacy, or have decided that the internet just isn't worth it, or will have adapted multiple identities so as to confuse others.
And I should know, as I am traditionally an early-adopter, and have taken all three paths myself. I am also currently at the point of thinking it's better to destroy the current internet and rebuild it -- but without all the bullshit.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Those without a timeline will be at a huge advantage
There, fixed that for you. If influencing strangers is named as an advantage, I strongly disagree. Strangers more likely influence anyone with a publicly available profile. Remaining anonymous gets more important every day.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
What's the guy from M*A*S*H got to do with this?
Does this mean that the follies of your youth become held against you for your entire life? Even if we were somehow shielded until we're 18, youthful mistakes don't stop then. There has been quite a bit of study now that important developments in the brain continue into the mid 20's. Heck, since we often accept anecdotal fiction as evidence around /., think of Scrooge. He had a life-changing event relatively late in life.
At one extreme, we freeze everyone into the patterns of their youth. At the other, "I've changed, I've learned since then," becomes a mantra that absolves all responsibility. The difference here is that in the real world, people know you, your speech and actions, and how they all change with time, so they're at least equipped to make a decent judgement, even if that doesn't always happen. In non-meat-space those things aren't necessarily true, especially as so much incoming information is filtered to confirm one's current world-view.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What then? As little as it seems now? Or by then will no one care a shred about privacy?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
You might call it "Timeline" I call it "Big Brother". Same difference.
Edit the time line and you have edited history.
And the advantage is doubleplusgood.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage.
you told me the same thing about google plus, facebook, myspace, twitter, instagram, youtube, vine, secondlife, and tumblr. I seem to have suffered no loss in "advantage" though. Let me put it in your terms, maybe that will help. #GETOFFMYLAWN.
Good people go to bed earlier.
All of this assumes that forgetting things is bad. What if forgetting is useful and valuable?
If I can google for where I left my keys last night, they can have all my privacy and keep it. For fucks sake where are my keys!!?!?!
"Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall". Oh dear. A society (and its member) which cannot forget, are society, due to our inherent nature and bias, which do not forgive. Frankly forgetting is as much a good aprt of life as remembering. I think on the contrary to the summary that those without timeline will have a better time : as they forget and so are not as much affected by the inherent negative bias of bad memory, they will be nicer and better to live with. the one eyed emotional man among the society of emotionally unable to forget blind.
We have enough ways for small groups to try and keep a stranglehold on the lives of others already. The very last thing we need is some manipulable artificial construct to dehumanize us in our real world relationships like we already are online. Will we have to live under rocks to get some kind of peace of mind in the future?
Screw it, let's go make a new Amish colony. We'll have conversations in person where we can actually see that we're not talking to robots, and mirror neurons will actually mean something. We'll be human again. Who's with me?
It was all MySpace this, MySpace that. Everyone will have a space.
For now the big 3 credit reporting agencies can't even make a decent snapshot of what I *am* now, never mind any past history.
I am constantly surprised by incorrect addresses, wrong phones, misspelled names and other such junk (mostly because data entry clerks elsewhere can't be bothered to enter data right, or poorly designed "business systems" don't handle it properly).
My driver license from one state was not properly canceled, when I moved and obtained license in another - so for a while, unknowingly, I had two parallel driver licenses and separate records (even though presumably states share that information).
The only place where information about me seems to resemble anything like reality is my own linkedin profile, and that's because I care to keep it correct.
That's not to say there isn't a ton of information on each and every one of us, and the amount keeps growing. However, most of that information is of poor quality, and not organized - something I wouldn't expect to change anytime soon. The only danger I see is that new generation is conditioned to maintain their own timeline and do the information-cleaning job for the big corporations and government for free. So, let's wait and see, shall we.
This is a contradicting concept. Few weeks ago on Craigslist there was an article stating that Privacy will be a luxury. Today's article states that those who will be private will be somewhat disadvantaged.
To the best of my knowledge, many of the people that I know have multiple internet identities and email accounts.
Even if cash is banned and internet access is only provided with valid government issued biometric ID, marketers can continue dreaming into their fantasies about unlimited marketing potential and 100% view of people's life.
Many people, especially successful ones, have the right instinct on how to balance privacy and publicity. Just to come and state that future generations of people will be all dumb and clueless is not wise.
This will occur just after we all have flying cars and robot buttlers.
My "timeline" on the internet started in 1982 on the departmental PDP11. I tried to make it stop in around 1990, and started trying a lot harder to make it stop after the Eternal September made it clear what was going to happen to the original internet culture after inundation by the endless ranks of the clueless.
The internet held endless promise. Promise of connecting people all across the world even if their government didn't want them socializing with people from other societies. Promise of equal access to information. Promises we carelessly discarded as we gleefully abandoned open protocols and standards in favor of Facebook and other proprietary, closed, and censored technologies. As we let major corporations monetize it and "region-lock" it. As we allowed it to become an Orwellian nightmare.
It's now the product of thousands of bad decisions by billions of people. At this point, there's no fixing it, and those of us with any sense are trying NOT to have a fucking "timeline" with every tracking company on the planet.
Capcha: contempt.
So, in our post-manufacturing, robot-serviced future economy based on selling ad views, I want to be paid for access to my timeline. Why should the data warehouse get all the revenue? They are just another IT shop, no value added there, their costs should be ruthlessly minimized. (Same goes for other utility services: ISPs, cell phone operators. They never took any financial risks, the users guaranteed the entire investment.)
If the only recognized way to "create value" is to display possible interest in buying something, that value needs to be owned by the person who created it.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
A couple of generations ago this was also true for most people. In a small town everyone knew you, your family, and everything about you. It some places that's still true. You did (and do) have the option of moving away; but that meant you were starting out in a new place with no timeline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4rBDUJTnNU
Knowing a slightly abridged version of the life story of everyone who walks past you in the supermarket instantaneously.
I have spent the last 20 years growing. I am not the very hostile and shy person I was years ago.
To have people bring up things from 20 years ago and use it to judge me now would be a nightmare. At least with people who have known me all these years, they have seen the changes and have mostly forgotten or let go my past behavior. But to have people who see my past without context and the long and hard work I have put into being a better person would ruin me.
Technology is increasingly removing our ability to make mistakes and move on with our lives. That is a hellish future.
Did your first birthday cake have a zero on it? If it did maybe your parents were trying to tell you what they thought of you.
Anyone who believes this garbage deserves what they get. Time to go outside for a bit, people. Your virtual existence is not real, and if you think it defines who you are, you're as sick as the junkie who thinks the most important thing in their life is their next fix.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
When you say agents...
I agree. About half of my /. posts these days are anonymous for various reasons. (Yes, I know there's probably stuff kept in the database that could potentially identify me but regular people and web spiders can't see it, which is enough.)
I just don't feel the need to have my identity associated with the post, accepting the cost of not being able to check replies later via my profile (a "timeline" we already have!), etc. I have to credit 4chan with learning how to put aside my ego (aka "namefag"-ness) and just release my words into the ether.
His concept of a timeline is simply the opposite of privacy.
All the gains he thinks are present are gains for other people.
He refuses to realize that those gains for other people come at a cost - and the cost is paid for by you.
Timelines are great - for advertisers.
They are not great fore you. They do nothing good for you, except make it easier for other people to judge you.
Guess what, we already have something like that - it's called a credit history.
Yeah, a few - less than 10% - people benefit from having a credit history. But far more people suffer from having it. There are identity thieves, there are bad (and damaging) decisions made based on false ideas about credit history every single day - like hiring/promoting people based on it.
This guy is wrong about everything he believes in.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The movie, In Time, touches on the subject of a timeline for a person. As Wikipedia relates, Harlan Ellison had already written a similar story as well as a few others.
Despite this, I can see people not appreciating or caring about a timeline. I know it's hard to believe but there are millions (billions?) of people who use the Net strictly for general communication and research rather than the be all and end all to life.
As we've seen with smart phones, more technology does not necessarily make our lives easier. People are becoming so addictive to being connected, of needing to see if their lives are validated through tweets and pictures, that this timeline may send some over the edge as they desperately search for something to make themselves seem like someone.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
And you WILL bow as kiss the ass of the Zuck! just like you are doing, believe it or not, now!
Private social media sites exists for the rich and famous. How long before we have two social media sites. One that is public and one just for our close friends and family?
In a way, we are already doing this through the privacy settings (public, vs friends, etc.). It's just not as finely tuned or as effective as it should be.
My point is that even though people will have full timelines on the Internet, people will be taught from an early age what should be public and what should be kept private. The biggest problem today is that we are still figuring this out and people aren't trained to think this way, so almost everything is public
I considered that, and have cut/am cutting off other forms of voluntarily information/thought exposure. But with /. there's no point. This has been my homepage for 15 years. I can't imagine how many reams of e-paper I've written on here in that time. I am absolutely easily doxxable, and anybody who's mining this site already knows everything I think. And you can't delete your accounts and posts. I'm already naked here, so there's no point being modest now.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If you have been paying attention over the past five years, you know that anyone writing about what technology will be like in ten years is an idiot.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
Nope. I'll still be alive in 10 years, and I won't have a timeline. Well, other than the ones that were made for me by people who don't necessarily have my best interests in mind or are willing to let me have access to my own information.
Every human connected to the Internet? No. Maybe every human connected to Facebook/Google+ and similar services, but there is an anonymous side to the Internet filled with plenty of people like me who don't subscribe to the marketing/amateur spying (because that's all that these people ever see when they talk about social networking) fever dream. Try again after a few more generations.
... all 754 of them.
Articles like this are click bait.
Today is the day Slashdot leaves my RSS feed.
Sure, it always starts out innocent enough, but soon enough...
"I'm sorry, sir. We can't offer you a mortgage, your TimeLine(R) score is far too low to qualify."
"We only hire people with a TimeLine(R) score of 1500 or higher on the socio-econometric section."
"Citizens with a TimeLine(R) score of 1200 or less must report to the re-education coordinator of their region. Noncompliance is antisocial behaviour and will be dealt with severely."
"Mommy, what happens to people that get put on the trains for re-education?" "Shhh! Don't ask those questions!"
Wishful thinking.
When enough people will have a timeline, not having one will become suspicious.
i use google and facebook, but sparingly
i don't have a fitbit and don't keep track of my biometrics because it's fucking stupid to count the number of steps i take daily or record my pulse all day long
i don't use waze or Maps that often because i have a brain and can figure things out on my own if there is traffic or some train is running slow. or it's fucking useless to use Maps if you have one route to work and taking shortcuts takes just as long. i only use it as a quick traffic check or if i'm driving somewhere i have never been to before. NYC is fairly easy to figure out to navigate without staring into your phone all day
leapfrogs are a waste of money
People, being shallow and small minded, will automatically assume that you are doing something nefarious if you don't have a timeline or an incomplete one.
Or look at what happens if you have a hole in your resume. If I want to go off and join a Buddhist colony or whatever for a couple of years, I don't think it's any employer's business. But no. If you don't have a good story for that hole, it is assumed you were in rehab or worse.
Or look at the prejudice here on Slashdot against us ACs because we don't have a history.
These timelines will become yet another way that we have to conform to society; otherwise, one becomes a social outcast living on the fringes of society.
Honestly, this really sounds like a person who is addicted to life on the net, and can't imagine how people can be content with just some moderate interaction with e-mail, a website like slashdot, or some form of social media of their choosing... but could probably live without it as well. Having grown up without it, some of us understand that a fulfilling live is possible without the internet, just... not quite as convenient. He talks about being at a "huge disadvantage" without it, but seemed fairly vague about exactly what the actual advantages will be, other than some vague handwaving about how we'll possess some sort of creepy social advantages.
And we’ll look back at the time before our feed started — before Year Zero — as a huge, unknowable black hole.
Seriously? Read a book. Watch the History Channel. Talk to some people older than you. Damn. This is just inane rambling. It makes no sense to me as to why this "timeline" is going to occur, or how it's going to benefit us, as he implies. And this phenomenon is not unique to the digital age. The world before your own life began is *always* something of a "black hole" to you, as you can only learn about it second-hand. But honestly, this will be less so in the future, simply because of the pervasiveness of the information age and how much of the world is recorded and preserved for posterity. History has never been so accessible as it is now.
I also think he overestimates the extent to which things will be integrated into one, all-powerful, all-convenient system. Each company is still going to have their own little walled garden they're offering, and people will either choose one of these to play in, or even *gasp* none of them.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
that this timeline won't be (just) theirs. It will be de-facto public.
This "timeline" is the ultimate privacy nightmare and will be a blight on all those that suffer it.
"Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him"
If you thought your employer seeing your Facebook was bad, that was a little taste compared to what they'd do with this.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
and anybody who's mining this site already knows everything I think
No. Everybody can access some pseudo-anonymous content that may be from one or more actual humans who have access to an account called "meta-monkey". Similarly, one, some or all of those humans could contribute to other pseudonyms and might post completely different views, opinions and personal information. We'd never know if there was a 1-to-1 relationship from a person to a "handle", a 1-to-many to other handles or a many-to-1 for a group contribution.
Even using a "real name" is meaningless. Last time I googled, there were over 35,000 people with my name just in my country. You need a helluva lot more information (and it must be true information) before you can create a high-quality link between a single individual and an online presence.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I wish to keep my private life private and stay off it but have been forced in by our business culture which at one pointed threatened my career with insubordination for refusing to use linkedin.
"Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage." FU, really. I have had enough of companies and the media making it a life requirement to use social media. To stop this crap those pushing it need to be ridiculed and ostracized now. Simply saying no is not working. Where are the radicals when you need them?
Why are people letting some fascist a-hole with a hoodie and his facist sister that have campaigned to eliminate online anonymity have so much power over our personal information and private life. It is mind boggling.
What is all this babble about?
- a modern mentalist
- how to curry favor
- Dunbar numbers
- Fitbit
- Jawbone
- Mint
- Waze
- It’s about all of these, together
What kind of parallel universe do you come from?
I usually don't mind looking up a new term or name on Google or Wikipedia, but this author just keeps throwing up, and it doesn't look appetizing.
Why, so I can learn about "Ancient Aliens"? Or learn about how items are priced when pawned? Or keep track of the doings of "Swamp People"? I support your idea (learn history!) but watching the History Channel is one of the worst ways to do that.
Enigma
being that some of these services are used by a tiny minority of people and even facebook's user base a small minority do the regular posting, i wouldn't worry about it
this is for the phone zombies who need google maps to walk the same route every day because they are too stupid to remember. in fact i bet a higher timeline score will be bad because it means all you do is stare into the phone
You know all these kids, teens and young adults who are virtual shut-ins in Japan? Now imagine that 95% of the world population is like that.
The only way to beat this "timeline" problem is to have as little direct interaction with people as possible.
The good news is, a huge percentage of Slashdot readers have nothing to fear.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Have gnu, will travel.
Ah, but, Facebook and smartphones are just two inputs into the beast that is being created. Everything you do in life that involves a phone call (smartphone or not) is cataloged, new cars are starting to pop up with phone-home (and no opt-out) features, your television is recording your voice, your game machine is (not currently) watching and listening, your every action on the internet is collected, every non-cash & non-rewards card purchase is collected, your operating system (is probably) also phoning home with personal information about your activities, and on, and on...
Now, imagine gathering all of that information together in a massive data warehouse with analytics to paint a picture of your entire life. That is what's being talked about here. All of that data already exists in silos, but if you put it all under one roof? Total Information Awareness! Hmmmm.
A few random thoughts on this:
Influencing people by having instant recall is a classic sales trick. Old school sales people wrote notes in their Rolodex to remember spouse's names, birthdays etc,. Today, Salesforce, Zoho, and the like (hell, even linkedin) handle this role. However, as soon as you realize that the sales person remembered something using a CRM rather than actually remembering it, that interaction quickly becomes awkward. In the past, sales techniques like these weren't well known outside of sales circles. Nowadays, everyone knows about them and they're less effective. The value in the technique is that people weren't aware it was being used and mistook the sales person remember personal details as actual friendship, rather than just a sales trick. Same will happen with timelines - we'll quickly sort those who use it as a gimmick and those who are sincere.
Another angle is the fitbit/life tracking. You know who obsessively tracks everything they do in hopes of improving themselves? People who obsessively track everything in hopes of improving themselves. The rest of us don't. Those people will always be around and will use these tools, the rest of us won't.
More importantly on the personal side of things: anyone who's accumulated a lifetime's worth of photos knows you never really go back an look at them in an detail. Sure, once in a while you'll reminisce, but you never do the detailed analysis of your past that these data hoarding stories predict. Instead, you live your life in the present, learning from the past with an eye toward the future. A few million years of evolution has made our brains very good at that. Every attempt to document and catalog our lives externally has failed to really live up to what our brain already does (hint: we likely don't have perfect recall for evolutionarily important reasons).
From the corporate side, data will be tracked as long as it can be traced back to profits. Right now, most of the profits are going to companies selling big data analysis services. It's only a matter of time before their customers move on to the next marketing trend.
trl;dr: live in the present and stop trying to cheat nature. :)
-Chris
ps: yes, the government collecting all this data is scary as hell. Voting can help fix that (at least in America - it'll take a few elections, but it's possible).
And yet, for all the people here talking about how awful this will be, or that 'eventually people will get sick of it, and everything will work out', people wishing to be anonymous are literally already labeled as cowards.
Those trying to influence somebody with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers
Information is power, think before handing too much of it over to the marketing dudebros.
0 1 - just my two bits
Speaking of your nakedness... would you please cover up, there are children here! :)
In 10 year All of humanity will have ascended a higher plane of existence in which link-baiting, trolling and attempts at viral propagation of marketing propaganda will become so ineffective people will no longer bother to try.
Speaking of your nakedness... would you please cover up, there are children here! :)
If not for the sake of modesty, then for the sake of courtesy.
Comparing "timelines" could make body image issues look like child's play.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Not everyone is going to give a damn, to be honest - we don't all live and breathe for things like Twitbook or whatever they are called.
I mean, I'm hardly a luddite, being a UNIX sysadmin, developing web applications in J2EE and so on, but I have only just got my first smartphone - and I have spent most of the time getting rid of crap I don't need or want. It's possible that sales guys actually believe in the hype when they go 'This Change Everything!!!!' from time to time, but it doesn't really. Think about it realistically; the internet has changed many of the ways we interact with information, but in many ways it is still the same sort of shape: Wikipedia has replaced the Encyclopedia and made it a lot easier to find out about things, but it is still, basically, an encyclopedia. On-line shopping is still shopping; we look at things, we pay for them etc. The internet, for at it's usefulness, has not "changed everything", it has just made the same old thing more convenient.
There is a sort of Darwinian-like selection that goes on in all this: a lot of new technology is developed all the time, but most of it does not survive; in many cases because it isn't acutally that useful. Will it be compellingly useful to have complete timelines for every person on the planet? I doubt it; a lot of the data that can be collected will come from involuntary sources - such as the cheap, disposable computing devices that are one the way in. Never heard of them? Not surprising, perhaps, but there are in fact companies already now that make business from producing ultra-thin, printable computers, which can collect their electric power from ambient sources, and which will be fully networked. So, much of the data from people's "timeline" will come from such devices embedded in wrapping paper, cardboard boxes and clothes. There will GB of data from your underwear, just for starters. How useful is that going to be? People's video logs will be a very minor part of it, I can guarantee you. It's a fad, nothing more.
Ah, no, that's not our future. In ten years global conflict, greed, and social pushback will cause civilization to collapse, reducing the world to an agrarian economy similar to the mid-nineteenth century. Technology of all sorts will be condemned as the cause of our problems, to which the solution will be ignorance, intolerance, and cultural isolation. Anyone who disagrees with the opinion of the majority will be purged from society. As a result, all digital Timelines will simply ... end.
On a more positive note, at least the Net Neutrality debate will end as well.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
The only disadvantage will be that those people without a timeline will have something known as "privacy"
Imagine a boot stamping on a human face... forever.
Barrel + Fish / GE M134 Minigun + 5 mins. worth of ammo = Too fscking easy.
1984 is not a manual, FFS. Your glorious ideas lead directly to fascism, you morons. We did not build the internet so that you can turn it into Facebook!
Last time I heard, people are leaving facebook in droves...
They will exist on the margins of society, performing tasks for which a fully-vetted identity is unnecessary or even undesirable.
Some blanks may be interesting and colorful characters, compensating for their lack of connection with organized society.
Blank reg in the Max Headroom series
I'm apparently a little dated, as I haven't had cable for the last six or seven years. It used to have really good documentaries, but I guess they've traded that in for lowest-common-denominator programming. Too bad.
Well, I'm sure you can still find good historical documentaries out there somewhere.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Take this random thought into consideration: arrest records. We've got a huge archive of them, and it is mostly meaningless data. We treat this data like it's the latest gossip, and yet it isn't fact checked against trials, convictions, dropped charges.
Nothing against police officers, but they make mistakes and ultimately the prosecutor and judge/jury decide if a crime actually occurred.
I know folks that were arrested and immediately had the charges dropped because it wasn't them. Yet that record still exists. What do these folks put on job applications that ask "Have you ever been arrested?" Even if the original was purged Google will find it.
And folks are thinking having EVEN MORE of this data out there is an advantage? If we weren't worried when Twitter became a "reputable" news source then i don't know what it takes to scare someone these days.
The author seemed delusional, especially on the point you make.
At an interview you are better off telling your story from scratch or by personal reputation than having to deal with someone who has already googled up some tidbits and let their mind fill in the blanks. Plenty of private details that will never affect your work performance (church affiliation, political party, age) can dramatically affect someones perception of you and are hard unseat (especially if you are unaware of how you have been judged).
I see a rich future for the already budding industry that massages your search results, and the concept that we will all have valuable timelines ignores that many will be skewed by manipulation.
When enough people will have a timeline, not having one will become suspicious.
Will become? It already is, at least in some circles. How many stories have we had on /. about people not getting a job or at least having a harder interview process because they don't have a Facebook profile for HR to troll through? Granted I don't, but I think I'm just old enough that it won't matter, at least so long as I continue to put some minimum into a LinkedIn profile so I have some semblance of an online persona.
Where do I opt out?
What a total fricking nightmare
How many stories have we had on /. about people not getting a job or at least having a harder interview process because they don't have a Facebook profile for HR to troll through?
While I have heard about this on the Internet, I don't know a single person in real life to whom it's applied.
...the overclass to which laws don't apply. Like Hillary Clinton's private email system.
Know your place, peasant. It's not up to you to judge your betters...
The prediction here is made by extending the present, but the future is never that predictable. Look at snapchat and google allowing deletion of entries. The demand for ephemeral data is growing, and this directly contradicts the premises. What this doesn't take into account is the people NOT wanting this who will invent ways to serve those who don't want it either... and when that market surpasses the Timeline reseller market, this prophecy will not be fulfilled.
Timeline is a technology that is already here and it already has a market. In the future, we will be able to own our timeline, and we would not want others to own our timeline. The government will try, but we will fight them, like always. And once there are better alternatives, we will get off facebook and google and all the timeline reselling monopolies....
Timelines aren't just for people though... Phones, toasters, forks... anything could have a timeline, and this is where non-right-violating timeline technology has a huge upside. But I'd be wary of any company banking on the timelines of people, especially those that disregard basic user rights and user voices, such as facebook and google.
We all have a timeline already. Acxiom has been tracking electronic spending and any other records they can get a hold of since 1969. Every adult in a first world country who isn't living off grid is tracked. Your profile is meticulously maintained and sold off to whoever wants it. They can infer women's menstrual cycles and let marketers know the best time to send targeted ads when they are most likely to have success. That is just the tip of the iceberg of the way these big data companies can influence your life.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
What is far more likely is what is already increasingly the case today: You can't find out much of anything about the elites. But they know who you are, where you live, what you think, where you shop, what your phone number is, where you went to school, what your weaknesses are, who your friends are, their phone numbers and where they live, your sexual preferences, who you date, what crimes you've committed, how you vote, what you weigh, what your grades were from first grade through today, and that and everything else is cross correlated, logged and analyzed to control you. They can buy and sell you or take you out any time they want.
And you did it to yourself. Welcome to the future, sucker.
People here say: just opt out of social media. So I did. But the reality is I am heavily penalized for doing so. No Facebook means I miss out on all sorts of social events, lose track of old friends, and am held in suspicion by some. No LinkedIn will hit me hard in looking for new contracts. Employers cannot google me, I'm not on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, in short: I don't exist. What do I do?