Ramifications

February 27, 2009 / Computers and the internet have made old fashioned privacy extremely expensive.

Bruce Schneier on data as pollution:

Your future has no privacy, not because of some police-state governmental tendencies or corporate malfeasance, but because computers naturally produce data. […]

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.

I’d add: and because the data they produce is good for making profits. He gives a lot of examples that illustrate just how impossible privacy has become. To have any, I suppose you have to be either extremely poor, extremely wealthy, or extremely isolated.