As a futurist I often feel as though I live in a déjà- vu world. I write about something and then months or years later it occurs or becomes something that is on the minds of a lot of people.

This is the first of what may be occasional columns from years past written here that, for one reason or another, are relevant to what is currently going on in the world.  As a futurist I try to write “ahead of the curve” or to take a “future look at today”. Sometimes old columns resonate today.  This is one of them.

The recent – and ongoing – flap about privacy settings on Facebook is just the latest incident that makes us think about our privacy in this age of connectivity and social media.  When we are confronted with this issue, predictably we seem to recoil and speak about invasion of privacy.  We get upset that our personal data is or could be shared with people we don’t know.

Facebook, with  almost too numerous to count privacy settings, is clearly a conflicted company when it comes to privacy.  It has a culture, purpose and business model that is completely about sharing, or sharing completely.  A complete surrender of privacy is the ideal.

To focus on Facebook and other social media as a place of concern for privacy is myopic.  We all long ago gave up privacy for the sake of convenience.  In the larger scheme of things we have willingly, if not fully consciously, …

Last week I wrote about being pleasantly surprised by a short speaking tour of Saskatchewan.  In every other place I have visited in the past three months there has been extreme pessimism and concern about this Great Recession of 2008-2010/11.  In last week’s column I described how three different groups of CEOs, business owners and senior company executives were upbeat about the economic prospects in Saskatchewan.  In fact their only concern was that maybe what was negatively affecting the rest of Canada, North America and the world might descend upon them.

I made reference to two companies that had or would soon have patents on very unique products.  One was a supplement company that was close to having the patent on a supplement that, in preliminary tests, seems to lower inflammation at the cellular level in humans, thus slowing the aging process to some degree.  The other company is just in the process of rolling out a patented product that looks like a mouse but is actually a credit …

One of the trade offs we seem to have accepted during the past 20 years is a loss of privacy.  None of us say we approve of that, but we have embraced technology in such a way that a diminished sense of privacy has occurred.  The portability of storage and computing, as discussed on this blog in earlier posts, is a major reason.  The easier small storage devices and laptops are to carry, the higher probability of theft.

It was revealed the other day that a laptop, with personnel records for 382,000 Boeing employees was stolen.  This was the third time in 13 months that this has occurred with Boeing.  Of course Boeing is not the only company where this has happened.  Laptops are portable and easy to put into a briefcase or bag.  Someone goes up for another cup of coffee at Starbucks or leaves their desk to go to the bathroom and in a few seconds the laptop and all the data on it is stolen.  We all enjoy the fact that we can have a computer with us wherever we are.  The freedom to work wherever and whenever we want is a very empowering thing, something that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

In the 1960s and 1970s, computing equaled mainframe computing.  Companies and universities all had these large machines that were in air conditioned, controlled access environments.  Access was highly monitored, records were kept for all activities and people even dressed in white …