Just as information wants to be free[1], I think information wants to be stored. Forever. I have disk images to old computers that themselves have tarballs from servers and disk images from yet older computers. And I've rarely been very good at backing stuff up…
Part of wisdom is knowing what you can't change, and I'm starting to believe that more and more, we're going to be living in a post-privacy world. I also suspect, however, that this very-mixed blessing is tempered by the reality that we're all going to be Waldos lost in a sea of people.
In my own life, there's more material that I've lost that I wish that had been saved than there is material that's been saved that I wish had disappeared.
Instead of trying to stop what seems inevitable—the collection and archiving of information about us—I think we should focus on regulating how all the material that's available about all of us can be used e.g. what's permissible to consider when credit scoring, making insurance coverage decisions, doing background checks, and during the job application process.
The reality is that we'll never be free of this. I've been asked if I was married and had kids during job interviews. (I answered—and then volunteered that I'm straight and an atheist, which made the point to the guy that he was way out of bounds asking those questions.) But in any event, the key is to get the issue of information usage (iPhone UDIDs, anyone?) out there so companies need to define policies which we can then, using the same panopticon they have access to, hold companies to those policies.
[1] FYI: Just before saying this to Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the originator of this phrase also said, "Information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable."
tl;dr: site seems to be mostly about <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">, its alternatives and background. (I guess it may not be obvious from submission's title.)
Part of wisdom is knowing what you can't change, and I'm starting to believe that more and more, we're going to be living in a post-privacy world. I also suspect, however, that this very-mixed blessing is tempered by the reality that we're all going to be Waldos lost in a sea of people.
In my own life, there's more material that I've lost that I wish that had been saved than there is material that's been saved that I wish had disappeared.
Instead of trying to stop what seems inevitable—the collection and archiving of information about us—I think we should focus on regulating how all the material that's available about all of us can be used e.g. what's permissible to consider when credit scoring, making insurance coverage decisions, doing background checks, and during the job application process.
The reality is that we'll never be free of this. I've been asked if I was married and had kids during job interviews. (I answered—and then volunteered that I'm straight and an atheist, which made the point to the guy that he was way out of bounds asking those questions.) But in any event, the key is to get the issue of information usage (iPhone UDIDs, anyone?) out there so companies need to define policies which we can then, using the same panopticon they have access to, hold companies to those policies.
[1] FYI: Just before saying this to Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the originator of this phrase also said, "Information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable."