Having just attended the Privacy Law Scholars’ Conference a couple of weeks ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to protect our private personal information from those who might use it to harm us. However, I’ve just read an interesting take on the “personal information” issue, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s recent book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.
Written by computer scientists, this book is about using available and new technologies to document our lives and improve our memories. It advocates individuals controlling their own information through various means of encryption etc. While I’m skeptical that the average person will learn how to control her own personal information anytime soon and avoid the pitfalls of having others take control of significant amounts of often-damaging information, I was intrigued by looking at the equation from the other side. It’s certainly an interesting take to think about proactively using the technology to maintain important private facts that we want to remember despite flaws and shortcomings in our “biological” memories.