Oddly, the day after Robert and I recoded the podcast, “Is privacy an illusion*?” I saw this headline on NY Times, “How to Fix (or Kill) Web Data About You.” It’s not woo-woo odd, mind you, just timely odd since it discusses the various ways that you can follow your online data trail and scrub it free of past transgressions (or at least try).

In the podcast we discuss the fact that we’re all so eager to streamline our lives through the convenience of technology that most of us think nothing of sharing our most personal data. Think about all of the pieces of information you’ve floated into a data stream — from the crappy album review you left on Amazon and your Peru vacation pics on Flickr to online results of your IQ — and then think about stitching together every iota of information to form a composite of yourself. What sort of picture would it paint? What could go wrong with a seemingly endless stream of data about ourselves that we’ve given of our own volition?