I think of the Internet today as being in the “gathering” stage. All our data is just being slurped up, hanging around on the servers of a few dozen companies.

I think of the Internet today as being in the “gathering” stage. All our data is just being slurped up, hanging around on the servers of a few dozen companies. It’s alarming, to be sure, but just you wait! A few years from now - when computers are faster and storage is cheaper - we’ll enter the “disseminating” stage. That’s the stage we’ll enter as soon as an entire internet’s worth of content becomes easily transferable. That’s when all your private information from 2019 (your medical history, gmail messages, bank details, your search and browsing and shopping history, your private photos, etc) will leak to the public. It’s just a question of time because any morsel of data only needs to leak once to be henceforth online forever. It will be a complete nightmare.