It's an intelligent piece and hits on many of the themes revealed since:
Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that at it's heart, this problem with protecting our data stems from, essentially, a conflict between the centralized and decentralized Internet, and that we've always been at one end or the other, swinging like a pendulum
...
Paul Ford: See, I read this book in 2002 called Translucent Databases by a guy named Peter Wayner. It's a short book and it just describes an approach to obscuring data inside of a data base so that it's still useful in some ways. You might know the zip code but not know the street address and so on. The user of the website, they might have full access to it. They can update their name, they can change their address, whatever. They can make decisions about how they want that information to be used as well, but what it really does is scramble the eggs. It's an approach to just hiding and obscuring as much by default as possible, adding lots of garbage and then hashing that all together into a big mess.
B: So this idea has been around for a while but these big centralized sites have not picked up on it, I assume because it runs counter to their desire to market the information they've assembled or to market to their customers.
...
PF: ...I'm starting to wonder (if) maybe the best thing to do is erase my own history, just get rid of it. Maybe that's the only way out for us right now, just to start to travel a little bit lighter, throw stuff away, have less digital footprint.
The key theme I'd like to add is this: Data is Liability.
Again and again, that's the message from data disclosures.
An exceptionally peculiar aspect of digital data is that, while it may remain in the boxes and cages provided for it, it's got a notable tendency to find itself liberated. Often without warning, and not detected for days, weeks, months, or longer, afterward (as in this case). In the real world we've got friction, especially associated with data processing and transfer. In digital form, far less so. Sometimes friction is good.
