Thursday 15 April 2010

mining and data-dressing

There are two suspectly parallel news items--one that attempts to paint as a human-interest story the Library of Congress' plan to archive Twitter for posterity--I could only imagine how confusing and without context a stream of bursts and tweets would be to future generations, and a second article that warns of data-mining and how that valuable information defines any individual more circumspectly than any other trail of leavings.  I think it is naive to think that one is ever private or anonymous on the internet--though I disagree that one is unreasonable in hoping that were the case.  One is protected and made faceless by the herd and the sheer amount of traffic out there.  Maybe one realized that one had precious little privacy, but one also thought that the services, the wires would not so willingly offer it up to the spy agencies, foreign and domestic.