We are all naked.

So while I read Little Brother, I wondered about this fear that the book promoted that we are losing our privacy. And it made me realize that we are on the road to a future where nobody will have any privacy at all.

All this reminds me of that movie, Sneakers, where the final solution to all governments spying on each other is to have "no more secrets." I wonder if in the future, we will agree to be completely naked, to put all our secret thoughts and behaviors out into the open for everyone to see. Much like the origin of the handshake (that I made up):

In an ancient land, there was a king who enjoyed surprises. Acrobats, sorcerers, magicians and transvestites all visited the royal palace to amaze the king with their secret talents.

One day a master of performing illusions with playing cards appeared before the king. He raised the sleeves of his robe to reveal bare arms and seemingly empty hands, but out of thin air, he produced a playing card. Wide-eyed, the king applauded for more. The illusionist produced another card and another and another from right in front of the king's nose, and all by what could only be magic.

The king wished to possess this magic, so he had the illusionists hands cut off. He shook the hands vigorously, but the king could not make the cards appear, so he threw the hands into the pile with the other hands and various body parts .

Soon word got out that the king was mad and that he sat upon his throne of severed hands muttering about how someone keeps grabbing his butt.

So to protect themselves from the king's madness and to keep their hands, from then on, all people, upon meeting a stranger, would thrust out their hands and allow the stranger to shake them and examine them for cards.

Last week Google opened their Health site "vhere ve keep zhe seekrets." Google is always trying new things, collecting usage data, evaluating the variety of data, sending it back down to The Master, The Dark Lord, then abandoning those things or continuing to use them depending on the results. Remember Froogle? Which became Product Search? Which seems to now be Mobile Product Search? I'm not sure if they've given up on that or not because it's still functioning (if you go to froogle.com) in beta, but they don't use that name to describe it. Google has a bunch of stuff in the lab, but I don't see Froogle as an active tool. It's not a big deal, but it shows that companies can abandon a product whenever they want.

So what happens to all the medical records if they abandon this project, or if any website that provides a similar service decides to quit or sell their assets to another company?

"Just the fear that records could be unsafe could lead patients to withhold important information from their physicians, worried that sensitive information, such as news of a sexually transmitted disease or cancer, might become known, says Tim Sparapani, senior legislative council for the ACLU.

"Whenever you digitize information and then make it, of course, searchable because that's how databases work, you facilitate snooping," Sparapani says." USAToday.

Eventually there will be a day when we have no secrets, when we're essentially naked before each other, but in my belief system, that ain't happening till after I'm dead.

I don't know how these databases can function. I believe that the one truth we all share is that we lie. That's the most basic rule of privacy. Your mom might warn you that some day that lie will come back to bite you in the ass, but everyone knows that much more often, it's the truth that leaves the deepest teeth marks.