Our passage into this world leaves many traces. We influence other people through social interactions, the economy through financial interactions and nowadays the online data repositories through our online activity. From these data troves are mainly extracted patterns of behavior from which algorithms can study us and understand how we think and act.
Currently this is mostly applied to the domain of advertisement, but other avenues are being explored. This is usually labeled as Big Data. For a while I have endeavored to anonymize myself online by changing the services I use away from the big players like Google and Facebook. If the world of the future is to be shaped by these Big Data technologies, then my efforts to anonymize myself are actually reducing my impact on the world, erasing me from the future data sets.
No matter how sacred one might think the right to privacy is, it is not eternal. For people long dead, privacy concerns don’t stop us in the least. We eagerly ancient letters without thinking that it might be an invasion of privacy. The data I produced would be the same after I died. We’re all anonymous when we’re dead anyway. So what’s left to protect? So I think I will reduce my anonymizing efforts to anything that can directly be used against me, such as geolocating systems and securing personal files through encryption.