Lately I’m a little more careful about what I say on the phone with customer service. You would be, too, if you thought about it. Reality TV. America’s Funniest Home Videos. Podcasting. The Long Tail of content. Someday, your customer service conversations will be mined for entertainment content and your discussion with Darleen over your international roaming charges will be on YouTube. Or your down-home local ISP will close its doors, and truckloads of backup tapes will be ’securely disposed’ of in a Walmart parking lot dumpster at 3am. Months or years later, your old email and message board content is indexed online; searchable. Or somebody will hack Google to find out the exact date you turned off ‘SafeSearch’, and email your next search query to everybody in your address book…
A short story by Jorge Luis Borges describes a machine of the future. Once the machine is given all the data about the present state of the universe, it can reproduce any past state of the universe. You get the idea. What would you confess as the last pieces of data were being fed to the machine?