How much will we leave marks on the world from ourselves? To the nature we'll leave a bunch of constant human-trademarks in the form of plastic bags, nuclear waste etc. In the web, then, we can easily leave even more traces of ourselves. It seems that, in case you are not careful, you can really loose (or gain) your reputation out there. Or here, by the way :D.
Has anybody been tracking down the environmental cost of our everyday internet-usage? How much do the invisible servers consume energy? I bet that the amount of consumed energy in these machines of lousy software is increasing second by second.
And the other thing in web is the visual traces we leave from ourselves. How can we be sure that the data left behind is not misused? By who, you might ask. By anybody who gets the profit out of it I say.
The marketing profiler companies, the merchandise marketers, at least. For example; this Blog is written on a platform owned by Google, which is by far the best internet -based company ever. It also has, as a company, really powerful ways of exploring the user statistics and (as I suspect) the user data inside all the millions/billions user accounts across the world. It's not saying this too loud, but it has tailored the search engine for China, in a way to restrict non-chinese-way of searching the web. The other word for this is definitely a censorship. which is never a good thing. So my question is, will Google serve other countries in other ways as well. It could, quite easily, provide use statistics and search cpabilities for U.S.A, which is not (and has not been) the number one in human rights following what comes to national security guarding. I'm not saying that Google does it, not that government of U.S.A (or whatever the country is) would do it, but that there's a possibility for google to provide such service to it's customers. I don't think they do act that way, if I got it right, they have been declining on such actions. But what about Microsoft, AOL and yahoo, then? Or the not-so-friendly criminal organisations, or terrorists?
My point in here might be (not quite sure about it ;) that people should think of what they provide of themselves in the web and with who they share that info. But it is like in normal world, I'm not telling my personal history to a bunch of unkown co-travellers in the subway. Like they say: Just because you're paranoid, don't mean nobodys watching.
And for a relief (is it?) to me and anybody who happens to be reading this. Who cares about me in the web anyway? Some people tend to think that they and their thoughts or actions are so important that their personal data can be used, as it is, against them by some big governmental player. From my point of view, the most of the data in the web can and will be, in the future - if not now, used as a merchandise targeting material for companies who want to make profit. Because that is the way for companies to keep on growing. At any cost, if you check the global players in any market sector.
Wouldn't it be great to beat the allfamous 'there's no free lunch' -tradition? Meaning that it would be neat to have a foundation that could actually give free lunches, to people who really are in need, perhaps. Anyhow the main point for getting the lunch would then be also that you could not earn it. In any matter. And that's what could make the whole thing tricky enough to accomplish and as a nice way, a challenge to set up.
