While I was waiting in the Salt Lake airport to get on the plane to San Jose I picked up a Seattle Post-Intelligencer and found an intriguing article. It was about how people’s privacy is being compromised because of the internet. As an aside, it was written by Jennifer 8. Lee. What kind of middle initial is 8? What does it stand for? At first I thought it was a mistake, but google found plenty of references so if it is an error, it’s very widespread.
I found a wonderful bit of irony when I read the title of the original article in the New York Times. The archive wants me to pay $2.95 to read it but the first result on a google for “trying to elude google grasp” is the complete article, free of charge.
I sure haven’t heard that before.You sure can say it’s one of a kind !
I don’t know that these people really had a reasonable expectation of privacy considering the fact that they posted things on the public internet. I think that privacy and anonymity are mostly pleasant illusions for most people today, and as technology advances and information becomes more widely available, those illusions will start to fade.
I agree it will be a bit of a shock for some people, but I think it’s better to be aware of the fact that there’s a tremendous amount of publically available information about us than to remain in ignorance about it. The existence of the information is the price we pay for a lot of the modern conveniences we have.
One area of development I think will be essential in the future is digital identity, so that we can have some element of trustworthy identification on documents available on public networks. That would significantly reduce identity theft, masquerading as someone with intent to defraud them, and perhaps allow for some sort of distributed trust mechanism to reduce other kinds of fraud.
And speaking of weird initials, I knew a guy whose middle name was a single letter. It wasn’t an initial, the letter was the whole name. This caused a great deal of confusion to people. Perhaps funnier than that was the fact that he was a Jr., his father had the same first and middle names. Some parents are just weird that way. I suspect Jennifer Lee’s middle name is the same sort of deal.
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