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It is kind of crazy how many people can’t - or won’t - connect the dots about this. If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. Some of our parents,

It is kind of crazy how many people can’t - or won’t - connect the dots about this. If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. Some of our parents, whether they know it or not, were actually pretty wise to tell millennials “everything you post online is forever.” The corollary being it will be linked back to you eventually.

bsder 6y ago
> If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. So "The Dead Past" (by Isaac Asimov) is our only option? I reject that. The problem is that our laws have not caught up to the fact that the Internet makes some things too accessible. We have too many things which link our personal identities exposed online because of the government which assumed that it was too much work to go to the county courthouse and look up a deed without good reason. Now, that's not to say that someone determined cannot link things together. They obviously can. However, right now it's simply far too easy.
- BolexNOLA 6y ago
  I guess I should have been more clear. I’m not saying that literally anyone can easily grab anything about you, though that isn’t entirely untrue in the current moment. What I am saying is that once you put it out there, once you link accounts or make a comment or really do anything online, someone determined can find you.
op03 6y ago
Things will change. It's not a static world. The wild west period is over where companies or people could do whatever they felt like with personal data. Forget about privacy advocates, mgmt in many data hoarding companies have suddenly realized it effects them too, their kids, their parents, their employees, clients etc etc. We just fired someone at work recently for moving customer data off site. Few years back no one would have batted an eyelid. Not only was data moving all over the place, few people had any idea who all had access or in what ways the data could be used. Today after one debacle after another, 200 alerts go off if people touch the wrong data. But there is so much inertia behind what has happened over the last 10 years that it will take some time for people to see the trajectory change.

bsder 6y ago

> If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. So "The Dead Past" (by Isaac Asimov) is our only option? I reject that. The problem is that our laws have not caught up to the fact that the Internet makes some things too accessible. We have too many things which link our personal identities exposed online because of the government which assumed that it was too much work to go to the county courthouse and look up a deed without good reason. Now, that's not to say that someone determined cannot link things together. They obviously can. However, right now it's simply far too easy.

BolexNOLA 6y ago
I guess I should have been more clear. I’m not saying that literally anyone can easily grab anything about you, though that isn’t entirely untrue in the current moment. What I am saying is that once you put it out there, once you link accounts or make a comment or really do anything online, someone determined can find you.

op03 6y ago

Things will change. It's not a static world. The wild west period is over where companies or people could do whatever they felt like with personal data. Forget about privacy advocates, mgmt in many data hoarding companies have suddenly realized it effects them too, their kids, their parents, their employees, clients etc etc. We just fired someone at work recently for moving customer data off site. Few years back no one would have batted an eyelid. Not only was data moving all over the place, few people had any idea who all had access or in what ways the data could be used. Today after one debacle after another, 200 alerts go off if people touch the wrong data. But there is so much inertia behind what has happened over the last 10 years that it will take some time for people to see the trajectory change.