Introduction
This article gives the best argument I can currently give for the concept of free information spread. This is a very emotional writing for me to make; I must confess that some of the conclusions I arrive at often times seem troublesome to even me, let alone the general public. However, I can currently prevent myself from going mad about the moral issues by remembering that we are undergoing a societal revolution, and many cherished beliefs will be challenged. If my conclusions are valid, and the general public eventually moves over to a new collection of beliefs I don’t know exactly how the world will necessarily work as a system, but one may find some answers in my essay on surviving.
The Nature of Information Spread
Unless there are direct, undesired consequences of sharing information one has knowledge of with another, and the effort needed to perform the sharing spreading is kept minimal, one generally does not hesitate to share one’s information with another person. One can think of this as a sort of “”Why not?“” situation; in general, people will help others if there is little or no expense on our part. One need only look at the enormous amount of information sharing that goes on in USENET newsgroups mailing lists, or web forums to see some validity in this statement. I will not try to detail why people act this way; rather I will simply use the fact that this phenomenon does occur, for whatever reason.
Given that people tend to share their information resources, information spread tends to have an entropic nature. That is, information kept highly structured and organized in databanks tends to spread out by some means to those wishing to have knowledge of this information, after which the information ends up in a medium where it is much less organized.
One should note that information spread cannot be directly described according to the laws entropy, because information is not physical, and obeys no laws of conservation; I am simply using entropy as a useful metaphor.
Our Situations
The loss of privacy
Perhaps the most shocking recent news to those who still feel that privacy is or should be guaranteed is the report that the Canadian government has a large detailed database on its citizenry.