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"Give me ten sentences spoken by the most innocent of men, and I will find something in them with which to hang him." -- Voltaire.

All sorts of companies (not just Google) manage to store rather more than ten sentences these days.

This is why data privacy should be considered so important. Sooner or later all sorts of people (including the government) discover this <treasure trove>, and some of them will use it to hang you.

If you think it's not possible for ordinary citizens to care about data-privacy, maybe visit Germany. The number of times even pretty regular people asked me to do or not do something in the name of "datenschutz" was pretty large!



"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" — https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu#Disputed


I double-checked and thought I had indeed made a mistake in attribution here.

However, while Richelieu is the most commonly cited as the source of the quote, the source is actually somewhat disputed, and has been attributed to various people (who may or may not have been (mis)quoting Richelieu themselves), including -apparently- Voltaire.

So I get off on a technicality :-/ . Going forward, I do promise to be more careful with attribution of quotes in future.


Richelieu was exactly the kind of man to have said something like this.




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