Really? I didn't invent it for browsers, I invented it for distributed file systems before the "World Wide Web" had even been invented. You might as well have a talk with William Shockley or Vint Cerf.
- Why didn’t you have the foresight to predict that it could be used for what it is used for now?
- Whoah there. Kind of out of left field. I had nothing to do with WWW cookies.
?
Seems like you can just tell those friends that you invented the great-grandfather or the fifth cousin once removed on the uncle’s side to the modern cookie and be done with the conversation a lot quicker.
You did good and there's no problems with what you did.
I mean, it depends. If you build a atomic bomb during a war (with unrestrained city bombing from all sides going on), don't act surprised if cities indeed will be nuked with it and people point the finger also towards you.
But a general purpose lightweight distributed storage technology? Seriously no, then you can also blame hard drive producers for enabling tracking.
We all want some websites to store temporary information on out computers. Otherwise we could not log in to anything for example. And that the default of the browsers is to allow any random website to store literally GBs of data on your computer without asking (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...) - then this is really the choice of ad financed browser developers - and the choice of the users to just accept that behavior (ignorance can also be a choice).
> I mean, it depends. If you build a atomic bomb during a war , don't act surprised if cities indeed will be nuked with it and people point the finger also towards you.
You forgot the first part of the sentence you quoted.
>> We should, of course, think long (and sometimes evil)
My intention is to say that you can't do an exhaustive search and it shouldn't be expected. What's obvious to some isn't to others. This doesn't mean we can just go along without concern for morals. As scientists/researchers/inventors/developers we must think ahead (and evil). But it is like viewing history from a modern lens. We have knowledge we didn't back then and judgement about intent should come from the view of the time. (This also doesn't mean we can't look back at history and see "normal" things that people did as horrific. These are different things)
That's the entire point of coming from the future to the past with information unavailable. It's pretty much Time Travel 101 sci-fi trope. Rather than going back in time with sports scores and stock picks, I was putting it towards nerdy tech dev. Sheesh