The Internet Is a Surveillance State
Schneier has a great article here on the many ways you are being tracked, but I think overlooks the fact that much of this record keeping happened prior to the internet. Almost all public activity generates a paper trail, and before the internet, your phone company, bank, grocery store, even your VHS rentals and public library, were keeping records on you.  The internet makes it far far more efficient, but it didn't invent the collection of such records.<p>I think the focus shouldn't be on the unavoidable "information radiation wake" you give off as you move through the world living your life, but on the ways people utilize this information. The government, and private entities, need to be constrained in how this information can be legally used, not in the collection of it, which I think is impossible.<p>Consider health records, which lots of people are paranoid about. There's a lot of diseases we might be able to treat if people's health records were available to researchers. One might be able to detect correlations in disease from these records of millions of individual cases.  But insurance companies and employers could potentially discriminate against you based on these records, so it is in your interest to keep your medical conditions secret. In cases, if you have a communicable disease, it is understandable you'd want privacy too.<p>Point being, the biggest danger of loss of privacy is abuse by the state or other private entities, and if we could build safeguards against that, the fact that your phone signals give away your location, or your subway card shows where you've been, might not be so threatening.