"Imagine a computer database which catalogued your entire social network: the email, home address, and sensitive details of all your friends, and consequently, all of their friends in a massive interlinked web. What if this service also archived all of your personal preferences on everything from books to movies to music? And if it also categorized your political views, club associations, previous jobs, educational background, and who you are dating?
How about if this information was available not only to government spooks but the general public free of charge?
Sounds like a hellish vision of the future, right? But this program is not the devilish spawn of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, nor the secret plans of “private” data miners like Choicepoint or Axciom.
The Beast system is here right now. And worst of all, people are voluntarily giving up this information, with some updating their profile every day with their latest personal details.