They will find a way to sell it eventually. The data is worth so much money that the temptation is just too high.

The only way out is see is to make the data availability to marketers a *service*, rather than a product. Do marketers really want your *personal* information or is what they really want the ability to target advertising to you based on your demographics, interests and behaviors? Doing the latter does not necessarily mean you have to possess the former.

What if Google or Facebook only provided their customers (i.e. the marketers, not us) with a query interface? Such as, "tell me how many people with such and such demographic attributes who bought item x also bought item y". And then provide another interface to tell Google/Facebook to "show this ad to people with these demographic attributes who bought item x and ...." etc. This way Google/Facebook holds the private data and the marketers get most of what they want. Perhaps that's still evil, but it is a lesser evil.

Or is that what they're doing already?

More like:

Water purification:
is da process of removing bad stuff frm contaminated water.

Yes! They knew exactly how to take out a zombie. Massive cranial trauma.

My thought exactly. It would have been a lot cooler to have an actual planet named Vulcan.

And Shatner orbits Uranus.

It's not that bad, really.

The court will just sentence you to take three weeks of "copyright re-education classes".

Exactly. Securing the data is not much use if the programs accessing that data are compromised. If the encryption program is conning you into thinking that your data has been securely encrypted, you're screwed. I'm not an expert in this area, but I don't know why this approach is not more widespread.

No problem. I used to do the exact same thing!

quoi button?

This may still come to pass. I have a massive monitor at office but I've found that using hard copies of specs improves my productivity -- I think it's because it gives me a feel of "where" the piece of information I want to access is. I have to turn my head or move my hand to a separate, physical location in space rather than doing a virtual switch on screen.

If e-readers were to become cheaper and thinner, I'd have a bunch of them on my desk too.

Yes. No real world crook would take the time to write a virus with a sexy female voice that says "Releasing deadly virus in... FIVE seconds...". Hollywood had it wrong all the way back from the time they decided that there is some Terrorist Bombers' Guild that has standardized the color coding of bomb wiring. If I were a bomber, I'd use purple wires for everything. Try disarming *that*.

You mean Adleman.

I think gamma titanium aluminide is managing my project.

one might even say he threw a tantalum

Is there such a thing as an emergency PIN/password? I.e. a secondary password that lets you in just the same, but quietly alerts authorities that you are being coerced? There is an urban legend that says ATM PINs entered backwards do this, but they're just that -- legends.