>I'm much less worried about individuals seeing my history than giant adtech behemoths.
Point is, if you publish something at a publicly accessible URL, anyone, any organization, any individual, can crawl it, archive it, transform it, make it findable, make it accessible. That is the whole value proposition of the internet and it's the whole value proposition of public publishing. It's why hopefully, future archaeologists and anthropologists can read what kind of people we were the same way we dig up dead cultures and read their published works, their letters, and their creations.
There's a danger in the empherality and bit-rot of our current digital culture in that it can be erased from history.
I have pointed you at my pre-Google blogs before, so you know my position on this has nothing to do with my employer. I am for distributed, decentralized publishing, and permissionless reuse, and I'm a copyright minimalist.
Before G+, there was USENET, there was LISTSERV, there were BBSes, as an enormous treasure trove of conversations going back decades on the internet and online world. Being able to archive and find those conversations is of enormous historical importance.
Aggregation is already a fact of life, and there are numerous websites already that you can use to look up your criminal history, job history, social media history, financial history, household history, and education history combined in a centralized report, all in ways that are far scarier and less accountable than big tech.
I don't necessarily like it either, but it is a natural consequence of network bandwidth and computation becoming cheaper -- it's democratizing surveillance. It's like getting angry about cameras everywhere. When the cost of cameras falls to near zero, and the cost of bandwidth (5g) is cheap and plentiful, there's going to be a natural gradient, decentralized, of wide spread surveillance and live video sharing AND processing.
I might suggest widening your view a little bit beyond Google towards the fundamental economic changes taking place that will make it very hard to avoid surveillance, even if you don't use any big tech company products.
I'm not worried about what people 100 years from now will do with my data. I'm worried about what people 2 years from now will do with my data.
And there's a point in that what I may have felt was acceptable at the time may not be in years to come. And my online presence is significant enough I can't personally remember everything I've ever said, much less the context in which I said it. But I'm still responsible for it if someone digs it up. I can't make a guarantee it is purged from the Internet, but I should probably try to keep it somewhat in check.
Point is, if you publish something at a publicly accessible URL, anyone, any organization, any individual, can crawl it, archive it, transform it, make it findable, make it accessible. That is the whole value proposition of the internet and it's the whole value proposition of public publishing. It's why hopefully, future archaeologists and anthropologists can read what kind of people we were the same way we dig up dead cultures and read their published works, their letters, and their creations.
There's a danger in the empherality and bit-rot of our current digital culture in that it can be erased from history.
I have pointed you at my pre-Google blogs before, so you know my position on this has nothing to do with my employer. I am for distributed, decentralized publishing, and permissionless reuse, and I'm a copyright minimalist.
Before G+, there was USENET, there was LISTSERV, there were BBSes, as an enormous treasure trove of conversations going back decades on the internet and online world. Being able to archive and find those conversations is of enormous historical importance.
Aggregation is already a fact of life, and there are numerous websites already that you can use to look up your criminal history, job history, social media history, financial history, household history, and education history combined in a centralized report, all in ways that are far scarier and less accountable than big tech.
I don't necessarily like it either, but it is a natural consequence of network bandwidth and computation becoming cheaper -- it's democratizing surveillance. It's like getting angry about cameras everywhere. When the cost of cameras falls to near zero, and the cost of bandwidth (5g) is cheap and plentiful, there's going to be a natural gradient, decentralized, of wide spread surveillance and live video sharing AND processing.
I might suggest widening your view a little bit beyond Google towards the fundamental economic changes taking place that will make it very hard to avoid surveillance, even if you don't use any big tech company products.