David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Keith Alexander:

The Internet is fragile.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea:

Don't let your design make promises you can't keep.

Vannevar Bush:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Newspaper advertisement:

Did you work at Sellafield in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s?

Were you by chance in the job of disposing of radioactive material?

If so, the owners of Britain's nuclear waste dump would very much like to hear from you: they want you to tell them what you dumped -- and where you put it.

James Bridle:

Everything should have a history button.

Rebecca Brock:

You can't even remember what I'm trying to forget.

Julian Sanchez:

They're calling it a tweak.

Yet those four little words would make a huge difference.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Sanchez:

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued, such broad authority would not only raise enormous privacy concerns but have profound implications for First Amendment speech and association interests.

Decius:

Man, what a great time to be alive!

Obama's Power Grab

danah boyd and Eszter Hargittai:

We examine the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18- and 19-year-olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook's privacy settings.

Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy.

We find that, while not universal, modifications to privacy settings have increased during a year in which Facebook's approach to privacy was hotly contested.

We also find that both frequency and type of Facebook use as well as Internet skill are correlated with making modifications to privacy settings.

In contrast, we observe few gender differences in how young adults approach their Facebook privacy settings, which is notable given that gender differences exist in so many other domains online.

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort. This is just another brick in the wall.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?

Noah Shachtman:

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come.

CEO Christopher Ahlberg:

We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring

Ellen Nakashima:

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters.

Stewart Baker:

It'll be faster and easier to get the data.

Nakashima:

Senior administration officials said the proposal was prompted by a desire to overcome concerns and resistance from Internet and other companies that the existing statute did not allow them to provide such data without a court-approved order.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

Julia Angwin and Tom McGinty:

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive.

Some of the tracking files were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only.

An exchange:

Charlie Rose: Don't you think we've milked this for about as much as we can, Richard?

Richard Florida: I hope not, Charlie. I hope not.

Mike Zaneis, of the Interactive Advertising Bureau:

We are delivering free content to consumers. Sometimes it means that we get involved in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.

Josh Harris:

Everything is free, except the video that we capture of you. That we own.

Denton Gentry:

We might recoil from this, but I suspect it is not something which can be stopped. The technology has reached the point where these things are feasible, and there is a huge economic incentive to do so. A concerted effort to stop it results in the technology being less visible, not absent.

Marc Lacey:

There has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest US Websites

Acidus:

Think of cookie storage like having to remember an errand to do after work by shouting it at the end of every sentence you say.

Matt Knox:

It's hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

Julia Angwin:

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.

Beacons can track what a user is doing on the page, including what is being typed or where the mouse is moving.

Eric Porres:

We can segment it all the way down to one person.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

David Moore:

When an ad is targeted properly, it ceases to be an ad.

Sean Cheyney:

We're driving people down different lanes of the highway.

The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

Paul Graham:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Noteworthy:

They say delayed gratification isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"We'll see", I tell them. "We'll see."

Carolyn Johnson:

As cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy.

Judith Warner:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

How to Lose Time and Money

Milt Bearden, in March 2009:

The only certainty about Afghanistan is that it will be Obama's War.

Garry Wills:

Most presidents start wondering -- or, more often, worrying -- about their "legacy" well into their first term. Or, if they have a second term, they worry even more feverishly about what posterity will think of them. Obama need not wonder about his legacy, even this early. It is already fixed, and in one word: Afghanistan.

The President might have been saved from the folly that will be his lasting legacy. But now we are ten years into a war that could drag on for another ten, and could catch in its trammels the next president, the way Vietnam tied up president after president.

David Petraeus:

Hard is not hopeless.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Obama's Legacy: Afghanistan

Jeffrey Rosen:

How best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing?

It's often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances -- no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you've done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

Facebook's nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site.

Erica Naone:

It's stunning to contemplate how large a responsibility the company has for information belonging to a growing number of people around the world.

Rosen:

We are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent -- and public -- digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

Vannevar Bush:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Neil Howe:

If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.

Paul Volcker:

Today's concerns may soon become tomorrow's existential crises.

The Web Means the End of Forgetting