Julian Sanchez: If you assume that essentially
every imaginable piece of data about what
you're doing online is being recorded somewhere,
you will—more often than not—be right,
at least for some segment of the sites you're
looking at, and it's probably being tracked
by more entities than you would guess.
The default, in a sense, has changed: for
most of human history, tracking and recording
details about any event was an extra step
that had to be taken.
It was abnormal.
Almost everything you did left no permanent,
structured, centralized record of what you
were doing, your conversations,
what you were reading.
Data storage costs have plummeted; we've sort
of hit the point where 'storing' is, in a sense,
as cheap as 'throwing away.'
