>>>Farewell to anonymous anything. Between the scanning of your credit card, gas discount card, grocery discount card, online cookies, passport … your autonomy has been gone for a long time.<<<
Sadly, I was thinking this myself. For instance, I always tell the students in my high school classroom that anything typed on the computer or on the Internet should never be considered private. (I include myself, too - I won’t post anything on any website that I think might get me in trouble at work or home, and that includes the guts of the hard drive. Real privacy? I’ll use pen and paper, or talk to someone in person.) As soon as I step outside my front door, I consider my privacy gone. I wish I could figure out a way to retrieve it, too.
Autonomy of information is a thing of the past. Hard rives have infinite memory unless you defrag often or reformat, then perhaps “most” of what you type will be gone.
Indeed. There are a lot of people--intelligent people--that think that email just disappears into the ether when they hit the delete key. At least paper can be shredded. Email is forever.