Sometimes they remember even things you have already forgotten

When I moved to Massachusetts briefly in 1979, I found that the only ID recognized by some businesses was a driver's license or a card issued by the Department of Transportation. I applied by giving my name and date of birth, and within ten minutes I had picture ID showing my current address. At the top of the card was my US social security number.

This was long before most people had any idea of how much personal information was being stored in sophisticated, interconnected data bases. I had not worked in the US for more than ten years at that time, and I had not had a permanent residence there for a number of years before that. Yet the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had no trouble retrieving my social security number. It was my introduction to the technological intrusiveness of the all-seeing Them.

When I threw my name into the grinding gears of Facebook two weeks ago, I was given the option to connect with a number of people. Some of them drew a blank in my memory -- they were graduates of the same university or high school, or lived in the same city -- and some were people whose names had come up in letters I had written.

That seemed scary enough, the thought that this program could delve into the bowels of my computer and come up with the names of people I knew. But more frightening was the name of a man I have never met and have never written. He is the nephew of a friend of mine, a woman who graduated from high school with me. Her nephew's name has never been mentioned explicitly in all the years she and I have corresponded, though she has referred to him obliquely on a few occasions.

I do not know what this means. I am not afraid to express opinions, or even to expose other aspects of myself, on line, though I am careful not to say more than I have to about myself in this blog. I know that anything I put on line becomes what used to be called public property. The concept of private property seems to have been lost in the gears of the great technological revolution so often praised.

On Google, my name is still associated with things I wrote thirty years ago, things I long ago left behind and would have forgotten except for the electronic detritus still available to anybody in the world. If I want privacy, I must keep my name to myself. No driver's license, no social security number, anonymous or pseudonymous blogs only. Like this one