This will assist you in deciding whether it's a good idea to post those hilarious drunken half-naked pictures of you groping that dude dressed up in a Grimace costume.

And therein lies the real problem, of which Facebook is merely the grand-daddy of monetized symptoms: I should have the right to post a compromising picture or story of myself (or an innocent picture or story that is only compromising out of context) to have a private chuckle at my own expense with a few friends and family and suffer no immediate or future consequences. We've all got embarrassing pictures of ourselves and others, and they of us, but it never used to cost us a future job except in the rarest of deliberate & vindictive betrayals by a friend/family member.

Now, the internet is forever and you never know when your privacy might be breached over something you no longer remember. As long as simple cut and paste exists, this risk doesn't go away even with opensource solutions where you control your information exactly the way you want. It's too easy & common for someone to innocently put their copy of that picture on their website or e-mail or whatever, and you can never put that embarrassing genie back in the bottle, just pray that no one stumbles along the wild internet and connects the "whatever" back to you.

Maybe Facebook et al. need to be reigned in, but they are merely taking advantage of (& are a symptom of) the real problem. Society will either have to learn to go back to sharing risque items via "sneakernet" or society & the corporate world will have to learn to disregard anything found on the 'tubes as heresay and unfounded rumour, even when it consists of actual proof.

whoever said I was ok with what corporations are doing with my data, nevermind the government?

of course, the government isn't in a hurry to set limits on what companies can do because then the government can ask companies to "volunteer" to hand over your personal information that the government couldn't collect on its own without a pesky warrant...

can't wean the wife and kids off the tube, but by the time we empty nest we'll be gone. Personally I watch only one show, never catch it live because the timeslot is inconvenient to my work schedule, so I have watched every episode online. I might miss live sports but I don't watch regular season games unless my teams are contenders. I'm betting that by the time I cut the cable, most pro sports will be available live with ads like tv episodes. Heads up to advertisers: I'm more likely to watch your ads when it's 30-60 seconds online than I do when it's 2-5 mins on TV and I can channel hop and get interested in something else or grab a snack in the kitchen, etc... In other words, if you think you're getting your money's worth on broadcast TV, then you'd definitely get more than twice the value from showing half the commercials online at twice the price.

Funny, I do something similar from Canada...make up an address, but postal code H0H0H0 (aitch-zero-aitch-zero-aitch-zero), not an actual place, but the postal code used for mailing letters to Santa...unless it requires american zip code, then it's 90210, of course...

Isn't a privacy policy a contract? If you buy a contract are you not legally obliged to the terms of that contract?

even assuming that it is a legal contract in the first place, the entity that purchases your info from the bankrupted website is probably not obligated to honour the policies.

In general terms, company A goes bankrupt and company B purchases the assets for pennies on the dollar and doesn't purchase (or assume responsibility for) any other facet of the failed company A. Obviously company A made mistakes that caused the business to fail, what's the value in obligating company B to assume any risks by being forced to emulate company A? The emphasis is on getting some money from the purchase of company A's assets back into the hands of secured lenders who will still lose money for having invested in company A.

My long winded point is that company B gets to decide what's an asset (the market value of your personal info that you trusted to company A) and what's a risk/burden they're unwilling to assume (your expectation of privacy from company A)

I mean, who'd believe linux, or bsd, or asterix, or postgresql, or apache, ... were all free

They aren't, they're just part of the most subtle pyramid scheme ever...they've even hooked you!

I'll take my chances, especially since the trade off isn't a few decades of old age, but rather a few decades (I suspect actually centuries, on average) of being in my prime

Generally speaking, you would have the health of a normal 25 year-old, i.e. peak physical condition. Most of what we call aging is our bodies decreasing ability to (correctly, if at all) repair itself at the cellular level. We are programmed to self-destruct after a suitable peak reproductive period.

Even if my eyesight, hearing, and hairline did not return, technology can compensate for those, and it's a small price to pay (and since I *am* aging, I'm paying regardless) for an otherwise Olympic-caliber (or as close as I could ever get, anyway) body

I have little desire to be centuries-old in a centuries-old body, but I think we're close to being able to live forever by being physically equivalent to a 25 year-old forever. Sign me up for that! If I change my mind in the distant future, I can still load up my Mr. Fusion on my flying car and aim it for the centre of the sun.

you and every other woman (all three of 'em) on /.

Now three Republican lawmakers are asking what's being done to prosecute those hosting the document

Why don't you ask what steps are being taken to make us trust our politicians and corporations so that sites like Wikileaks become moot?

Hint: Going after Wikileaks et al. ain't one of those steps and shows a shocking lack of understanding of the purpose of the first amendment or the ephemeral nature of the internet...

except in real life, generally speaking, once a moment is gone, it's gone. Did you see me rake my lawn this morning? Prove that it was me and not someone else that did it, prove that it happened this morning. Without technology, the only way that raking my lawn becomes a searchable fact is if someone is staking out my property and recording the details and publishing them in some way. And that's called stalking.

Life used to be full of public moments that were anonymous because you could essentially hide in plain sight. Ever spot someone in public that you were avoiding and duck into a store to not be seen? Lots of good and bad reasons to avoid certain other people, and it's no one's business as to your motivation for being evasive. Going out in public but taking care who sees you is an analogue version of protecting your privacy. More and more though, we are losing the digitally equivalent methods of controlling who knows what about us as these moments are all recorded and searchable and aggregated by anyone and everyone. Maybe facebook et al. aren't making your details anymore public than they used to be before the internet, but the very definition & implications of anything being public is worlds apart from what it used to be, the most significant of which is the fact that being public about something didn't used to be something you had to worry about because it was typically an ephemeral fact that didn't exist once the instant was gone.

I get mad at you, buy a gun, walk around with it loaded for a few days, never seriously intending to do anything to you or anyone else...and I'm guilty of attempted murder instead of just some degree of weapons charge?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Not at all. I merely imply that it is currently predicted that the population will retreat from it's 2050 maximum and state that extending lifespan may be desirable and/or necessary to stabilize that trend whenever we retreat back to whatever population level is desirable, whether it's 1 billion, 5 billion or merely a few 100 million.

The ridiculous extreme interpretation of the reports I've seen would be that 2050 marks the beginning of our march towards extinction from insufficient reproduction...but no one is claiming that will happen, nor have I seen predictions of any sort for life beyond 2050 when the population is presumed to start shrinking. /ramble

The point is that extended lifespans may be desirable by themselves and are not automatically incompatible with sustainability models.

I was reading somewhere (probably /. ) last week that the western world birth rate is below 2.1%, which is the needed replacement rate. Third World countries are gaining access to technology, birth control and nutrition such that they are expected to hit that rate around 2050. In other words the world population maxes out in 2050 and possibly begins declining.

The point is that it's very possible (in the long long term) that extending lifespans might eventually be necessary to maintain a certain global population level once the world declines back to whatever level we feel is most sustainable. Equilibrium itself poses challenges because our consumption cultures are geared towards expansion and growth.

The other key factor is that, eventually, long lives don't mean spending the last 100 years of your 150 year lifespan as a feeble withered husk; it means taking 25 years to grow into a 25 year old body and mind (prime mental and physical maturity) and staying that way indefinitely. Aging is a now-almost-redundant/obsolete evolutionary path to protect against overconsumption of local resources.