The Death of Privacy

There's been a couple of recent stories. Both of these I meant to blog about independantly but just never really seemed to get around to it, but in retrospect, there's probably a lot of context that I share.

The more that I get immersed in this technology, the more that I'm concerned that we're on a runaway freight train. I'm very worried that things will not get any better and as a matter of fact, things will just get exponentially worse.

The first article was that I read from the CEO from Google who recently half joked that as a matter of practice, people should change their names once they reach adulthood based on the premise that all of this online history would otherwise follow them around.

That in itself (in jest or in not) is just exceptionally chilling. As I've written in the past, these digital footprints that we leave cannot be erased.

Let's say that it just become practice that once one enters the working world, you create a new persona. What does that REALLY fix? Isn't that just fixing the symptom rather than the disease? If I have a new identify as I become 21, am I not going to have the same problem with privacy in another 10 years when I'm 31? There's something very fundamental here that needs to be looked at, and I know that I'm not the first person to have this concern.

The other article that really made me question privacy was where I read that there are government agencies that are openly using satellite photos (aka Google Earth and the likes) to "spy" on individuals. This is matter of fact. I don't recall where (but I will find the original article) but it goes on to state that in one instance individuals in the muncipal govenment scan photos to see if houses have undeclared pools or structures that have been built without building permits. There was one country - Greece I think - that openly admitted doing this, and the only reason why they were was because it was a cash grab - it was a way to increase the city coffers.

Can someone please stop this ride, I think that I want to get off now.