"As every man goes through life
he fills in a number of forms for the record,
each containing a number of questions .
There are thus hundreds of little threads
radiating from every man,
millions of threads in all.
If these threads were suddenly to become visible,
the whole sky would look like a spider’s web,
and if they materialized as rubber bands;
buses, trams and even people would all lose the ability to move,
and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers
or autumn leaves along the streets of the city.
They are not visible, they are not material, but
every man is constantly aware of their existence.
Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads
naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Today, everyman is not "constantly aware" of pervasive data collection, or how the "threads of self revelation are connected." Solzhenitsyn implies that in Stalinist Russia, the threads were obvious to everybody. In the course of his daily commerce, his bits of ordinary data were filled into forms. He later noticed the data threads from those forms became "chains" that kept him under the control of the communist party. Today, the act of data collection is often intentionally hidden. No forms are needed.
You will find a link to material explaining how this problem can be solved.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Why do the citizens of the EU have privacy protections against such chains... But not the freedom loving Americans? Could attention to the matters of privacy result from the fact that that most EU citizens live closer to tragedy than Americans? Germany, and Russia, were center stage the authoritarianism that played out in the West. Do Europeans have better memories? Could they have a better educational system? Whatever the explanation, they seem to understand that Privacy is the essential issue in the Information Age. Politics and finding solutions for urgent issues of survival (like fixing politics) can't move forward if we are tangled up in threads. What can Americans learn from Europeans, if anything? One potential examination would be the privacy protections introduced by the European Union in 2018. The GDPR. This law addresses risks to personal freedom and may well prove just as foundational for freedom as the US Constitution. Both bodies of law will serve as a guide through the topics examined on these pages and its associated websites.
We are the only Western nation that does not have a similar type law...
Julia Angwin