After two separate meetings today, I walked away from the last one with the certainty that we are entering a new stage of the age of information. It seems that the gathering of information has become more and more sophisticated as well as intrusive. All over the United States we hear about the Freedom of Information Act and our rights to that information. After today’s meetings, I have this gnawing feeling that the depth of this information that is available to the public is wrong.
Yes, for at least a 100 years a person could go to the courthouse and with the help of a clerk, find the book and page of where a particular mortgage on a property is filed and see the amount of the mortgage that was given. Now, thanks to the sharing of information that’s going on with computers, you can find out what that mortgage amount is from the comfort of your home or office. This is just the tip of the iceberg. One can see what a person paid, the improvements made, a recent drive-by with video cameras, the amount you pay for taxes and when the taxes were paid, as well as mailing addresses of correspondence from the government agencies.
Believe me, I can continue on with the type of information that can be extracted on just one homeowner. Insurance companies are tapping into this information as well as any and all companies that are out there trying to either sell you something or create a “ghost” profile of the occupant. What I’ve discovered these past several years, is that super computers are now cross-referencing information to find similarities within families and communities.
Do you think this information being gathered is just for the sake of gathering? I think not. Take a moment and just enter your address in any search engine you are using on your computer and see what information is given.
The human factors are being removed and leaving the computers to create what is “supposed to be” true and accurate. In both of those meetings today, I found faulty information given in several of the demonstrations. Now think forward. What if all the information gathered from every possible source is entered into super computers regarding the general population, and by just several strokes on a keyboard, we find that each and everyone of us have been pigeon-holed as this or that type of person? This is what I believe to be the end product of cloud computing. I think we all need to take a few steps back and think hard before entering the cloud.
