Our brains can't forecast what the technologies of tomorrow will do with the information we are uploading today.
Face.com
Here's a problem with uploading your life into the cloud: you're sending it Internetward with an understanding of today's technologies -- and tomorrow always comes.
So, you upload photos to Facebook thinking about how easy it is for your friends and family to see them. You are not thinking about people a year or two years down the line being able to search through every photo you've ever uploaded by face, not name.
Yet that's the future that we're steadily marching towards. Last week, Facebook acquired the facial-recognition software company Face.com. Of course, Facebook had already been working with the company, and a Face.com app had long been available. But the acquisition signals a deeper integration between a facial-recognition technology company and social network with the largest repository of photos of people in the world.
This is just another step to a world in which digital content of all types -- not just text -- is searchable. Take a look at where Google has been moving YouTube, steadily increasing the ability to auto-caption videos uploaded to the site. How long will it be before we hear about Google or another large video repository acquiring a transcription service like dotSUB? How long after that will Google, Facebook, or Microsoft acquire Betaface, a "facial recognition-based media indexing platform for searching and monetizing multimedia content" or eyealike, which bills itself as at "the forefront of visual-based search"?