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Comment by andrewfong | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is the flip side of "information wants to be free". Nearly all use of modern software generates sensitive information, and if that information is online, it will be made available to others, including the government, eventually.

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"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

-- Stewart Brand [1] - spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand#Aphorisms

Seems reasonable to believe. It's also just hard to contain entropy. Information about you tends to leak out any time you are observed. As observations become more durable, they support stronger inferences.

Personally I'm not that worried about it. Just because police societies have tended to be high on collecting data about citizens does not mean that collecting data about citizens causes a police society. In fact, the opposite is most likely true.

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