"Jelly Roll" Morton's WWI draft registration card comes to the Web. →[More:] I'm not sure how I feel about this. Many of us are supplying more information about ourselves to our governments than previous generations ever did, without much assurance of how that information will ultimately be handled and disseminated. I doubt "Jelly Roll" Morton imagined the whole world would ever be able to examine his declarations to the Draft Board at the click of a mouse.

Personally, I'd be a lot happier if I could designate that all personally identifiable information I've supplied to the U.S. government be destroyed within 10 years of my death, with some degree of assurance that such destruction of records would actually occur. I think most private citizens would be better off with such a policy in place.

This says nothing about the megabytes of data about us, as individuals, that is growing daily in privately managed databases, either.