I remember way back in the late 90’s when Intel was considering including a unique, accessible identifier in each of its CPUs. The Internet community was up in arms over the insanely huge breach of privacy this represented. It would became programmatically possible to tie executing code to a distinct physical core, and that core almost certainly had a purchase record associated with it that pointed back to, if not the individual, the organization which had purchased it.
Responding to the furor, then Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” He was blisteringly criticized for suggesting such a thing, and in no small part for having done so so dismissively and with such arrogance.
Given the all of the recent revelations related to governmental and corporate monitoring of the communications of specific individuals – regardless of the devices they’d been using – the Internet community’s concerns at the time seem almost quaint.
Maybe we owe Scott an apology.
A Pun Involving Travel 