Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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I think about this often. I think that Millennials, and especially Gen Z, will be the best-documented lives in history. Almost everything you've ever done online is sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Once the encryption schemes are broken, posterity will have full access to all of it. They'll probably study us for hundreds of years—possibly thousands (if we even make it that far as a species).
I've also wondered if all of that data collected about a person could be used to recreate them—a digital copy. It probably wouldn't be perfect, but I bet it would be close enough to be useful.
I'm definitely not excited for people to have access to and study my college Facebook account :-P
Once the encryption schemes are broken, it's not just posterity, but every malicious actor with access to encryption-breaking tech will have a field day.
I don't mind a large collection of data about me being made available to historians, I just mind that happening with my contemporaries.
That's actually the lesser issue, because we have quantum-resistant encryption algorithms already. The problem is with old stuff that was stored encrypted with pre-quantum algorithms.