Because for the first time in history, every action you take in fundamental aspects of your life--your communications with others (email), what you read (everyt

Because for the first time in history, every action you take in fundamental aspects of your life--your communications with others (email), what you read (everything online), what you watch (Hulu, etc.), what you listen to (Pandora, etc.), and so on--can and will be traced and recorded, perhaps indefinitely. (See Room 641A, the NSA's Utah data center, etc.) People could go back and see exactly what you did online for years and possibly judge/punish you for it should laws or social mores change in a decade or two, which is not entirely out of the question--just look how things changed in a decade after 9/11. Things like Guantanamo Bay or open extra-judicial assassination of US citizens would have been unimaginable to us before that event, and yet here we are today. Worse, it could be done on a massive automated scale. Before if an agency wanted to find a potential criminal, they'd have to expend time and manpower looking things up. In the coming years a computer could data-mine your online activity going back a decade, including email, to decide if you were a threat or not. Perhaps it's not possible today, but someday, it will be--and this stuff is being recorded now. Laws and societies change. The hard information on your history kept in easily-processable racks in vast data centers doesn't. That's the big worry for me.