The ultimate storage technology.

Precisely how can two drives “back each other up”? Does each drive contain a sub-drive which is a copy of the other drive? If so, does each sub-drive contain a copy of the copy of itself which is contained on the other drive’s sub-drive? And so on, ad infinitum?

Do you really mean you back-up some third drive twice, once on each of these two drives?

God rest your soul.

That’s my point: when they do, they do in big ways that don’t fit the discrete private/public model. There’s a reason why the redtops in Britain employed the services of someone famous for searching through bins for scraps of personal information.

Consider the swarm effect when a group of people on the internets want to find out about someone based upon a few scraps of public data, which can then lead to online spoors.

Even without the bits to which you ascribe value—in essence, the stuff of financial life—my guess is that the contents of one’s hard drive can be used in very uncomfortable ways.

I suppose—but there’s really very little motive for somebody to nab your family snapshots. Unlike account numbers, credit histories, and medical records, personal photographs generally have zero value to anybody other than the owners.

(Consider the emotional impact of robberies: the violation of sentimental items hits much harder than the loss of cash and prizes.)

Yes—losing irreplaceable items has a special impact, but when we’re talking about digital images, there generally is no single copy that can be stolen. If thieves made off with copies of my vacation photos, I wouldn’t much care, because I’d still have copies myself.

It is correct, if Fujitsu are to be trusted.

“Fujitsu has developed a technique it claims will allow the company to produce hard drives with an areal data density of 1Tb per square inch – almost seven times the density of today’s latest perpendicular-recording hard drives.”

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/25/fujitsu_1tbpsi_hdd_breakthrough/

That’s a very selective definition. Discrete low-level personal information has fairly discrete privacy value, but it’s the stuff that doesn’t come with a keep-secret warning that’s much more troubling, particularly given the blurring of public and private online.

If someone gets hold of my credit card number, it’s a very real pain in the arse, but if someone nabs my photos, that’s a personal intrusion. (Consider the emotional impact of robberies: the violation of sentimental items hits much harder than the loss of cash and prizes.)

[On the one hand, digital photography makes it less likely that a mother will get a visit from the local plod because someone at Boots took offence at the bathtime-playtime photos of her children. That’s a gain of privacy. On the other hand… etc.]

Good point – I haven’t actually seen a 1-page memo in 10 years.

Cranky

Yes, exactly—the vast majority of that storage will be used for digital image, audio, and video data that used to be stored in analog form. And the amount of information stored in the old forms was not necessarily much lower (when you consider analog video tapes vs DV and 35mm film negatives vs digital camera images).

And I question that this explosion in capacity has many implications for privacy. The kind of data we worry about with respect to privacy (names, credit card numbers, financial transactions, medical histories, etc) are simple text and, therefore, very compact to store.

I remember specing out a minicomputer (remember them?) in 1978. Main memory cost $1/byte. That means my PC has $1 billion worth of memory on it in 1978 terms.