The perks and perils of our newly indexed society

Paper documents have become unnecessary relics. But when everything is digital and searchable, it comes at a steep cost to your privacy

D.B. Grady

For a couple of years now, I've used a digital-recorder-equipped Livescribe pen during interviews as a way to ensure the accuracy of my notes. It's an ungainly device — the definition of inelegance and easily the worst pen I've ever used — but it records sound quite well, creates a digital copy of my physical notebooks, and allows me to "jump" to the audio captured at the moment when it was written. These are very useful features for someone with terrible handwriting and the organizational skills of a rabid monkey.

Then, a few months ago, I backed up my handwritten notes to Evernote, if for no other reason than a perpetual and irrational fear of some natural disaster destroying my computer and filing cabinet. (Evernote stores all of my files in the cloud.) I really didn't think much about it until recently, when I was researching an article and recalled pasting a webpage into Evernote for future reference. I typed my query into the search box, and a few results came up, including the handwritten notes I'd imported from my Livescribe pen. Somehow, Evernote had figured out how to recognize those scribbles in my notebook as approximations of the Latin-derived alphabet, and that together they made up words and sentences. The computer made my handwriting not only legible, but searchable. My handwriting was even highlighted where it matched the search term.

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David W. Brown

David W. Brown is coauthor of Deep State (John Wiley & Sons, 2013) and The Command (Wiley, 2012). He is a regular contributor to TheWeek.com, Vox, The Atlantic, and mental_floss. He can be found online here.