Back to nature, my friends. Going for a trek in the mountains may be one of the few ways to escape the Big Brother’s all-knowing eye. In the country where Privacy is or rather used to be one of the very top values not to mention human rights.

I just came from a lecture by the former CEO of one of the largest and most successful European-based multinationals who made several comments on how democracy in its pluralistic form is terribly inefficient and who claimed that the fact that nowadays the more people oppose the system the more highly regarded they are in terms of academic prizes is unnatural. As he put it, back in the days of tribes, people who opposed the way the society worked were killed. As humanity progressed, they were tolerated. Now, they are awarded. Right.

Just after that, I heard that the fact that I listened to Schnappi das kleine Krokodil (more than once, as well!) would now be known to Viacom due to a US court ruling. What the $#% does Viacom care if I like a certain crocodile??? He’s cute! I will follow developments with regard to this issue with great interest as the US court ordered Google to divulge the database that contains the unique login ID of the user who watched any YouTube video, the time when the user watched it, the IP address (unique online identifier) of the computer used to watch the video and the identifier for the video (source).

I wonder how many Americans still have that ‘over my dead body’ gut response to corporations collecting their information. Isn’t it Google that is launching an online medical record database system where you can keep all your medical records and your entire medical history with diagnoses?

Collectively, people’s hindsight is gradually degrading from 20-20 to 09-11.

Repeat after me. We are all individuals.

Mountains, here I come!