The issue of personal data on the in a networked, archived environment is one that arises time and time again. It's not too strange that this is the case, since most forms of interaction, entertainment, business, and publishing via the web involve the exchange of personal information more often than not. At the same time, the exchange of personal data is nothing new to western society, but most living generations are used to doing it with pen, paper, and stamps rather than browsers, servers, and fiber optic cables.

Leaving trails of data through our everyday business on the web - search history, social networking profiles, credit card transactions, blog posts, instant messages, e-mail, and so on - is the easiest way to see the ways a networked environment acts as a simultaneously individualizing and multiplying subjective force. We are at once going through a process of individuation in our ceaseless stream of archived data, yet wit every step forward we leave another footprint behind. This footprint does not cease to signify once your foot leaves it however, in fact, in the case of social network profiles especially they continue to signify as something of a subjective prosthesis. It is the tendrils of these multiple paths we wear that ultimately serve to individuate and deindividuate us.

So what are we to do about personal data archived in a networked environment? Should we legislate our problems away as Bruce Schneier suggests in his article on Wired.com? This seems to be a flaccid solution at best; one that has been debunked time and time again by hacktivists, pranksters, and criminals alike.

Perhaps we should make like China and some aspects of the loss of control and use our constant stream of data in our favor? A more friendly example of this is TrackMeNot, the Firefox extension that provides a degree of privacy through the creation of random meaningless data. How might such a thing affect the implicit indivuating processes involved in online interaction?

I suppose the answer might shake out over the next few years, but I'd say it's more likely that the issue of personal data on the web will be a perpetual battleground.