Imagine if Stasi had unrestricted access to the databases of Facebook or Google.. What state could they have built ! Oh no, those days are over - people have l

Imagine if Stasi had unrestricted access to the databases of Facebook or Google.. What state could they have built ! Oh no, those days are over - people have learned their lessons and it can't happen again! If you didn't smell the sarcasm in the previous sentence, then you've got to do some living in other countries. Because not only history can repeat itself, it already is repeating itself in many parts of the world, but now with these powerful data storage and data mining tools that we, the idealists, have so passionately crafted (and open sourced) in order to create a "better" world. Cross-reference Facebook friends, search engine queries, music, movies and porn habits of individuals and you've got nice buckets were you can place people. What you do with the buckets of people ( who succeeds and who fails in society, who gets promoted, hired or published, who gets to travel abroad and even who lives and who dies) depends on the current ideological or political requirements. The point I'm trying to make is that in the future you won't need informants -- most information about us is out there somewhere - and theoretically it can outlive us or survive enough to feed the decision tools of some crazy future regimes or social experiments run by "rogue" AI. If this happens, then the future will be a very strange and dark place.