Ian Brown at FIPR has pointed me at a piece by Toby Young in the Times where he considers the downside of recording the minutiae of life, which is now (naturally) facilitated by technology.

THE first law of technology is: anything personal
invariably becomes public. So it will be with the
SenseCam, a miniature camera that can record a
person’s entire day and store it in a computerised
diary. Developed by Microsoft’s British engineers,
the SenseCam will allow us to keep our entire lives
on disk. What a treasure trove of memories!
Alternatively, what a catalogue of indiscretions for
others to peruse! "

"It is only a matter of time, probably after some
horrible and shocking event, before Parliament
sets up a Department of Personal Records
requiring citizens to download their weekly
behaviour on to a national database. Strictly in the
interests of national security, of course."

"There is a second law of technology: it goes wrong"

He should have added that the third law of technology is that we use it unthinkingly and carelessly leading to adverse emergent properties...

I had a bad day in the office yesterday, when I was supposed to be on study leave, sorting out some difficulties with the new electronic computer marked assignment for my Internet law course. (Difficulties created by a completely avoidable accumulation of minor errors which the system then made difficult to correct and leading to the perception of a right-and-left-hands communications breakdown).