336 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age One typical human fear is related to automation: what if automatic synchronizing, archiving, and backing up should fail? What if it loses something irreplaceable, unique, and personally signifi cant? This fear is well justifi ed, given the unreliable and often unfathomable nature of computing devices. Could I trust my invaluable content to such a fragile system, one might ask. The land of permanently lost bits is alarmingly close to us. Another human threat is the users who intentionally abuse meta- data. There are several potential misuses, such as spying individuals from anonymous metadata by, for instance, combining information from a number of sources. Another potential threat is metadata forgery and spam – the users will create and distribute bogus metadata, thus potentially ruining the work of others, rendering a lot of metadata useless, and also interfering with the use of clean metadata (this can be compared to the current spam problem in e-mail). A typical example, familiar from the past, is the misuse of adult web site metadata tags to include arbitrary keywords that bear no relation to the offered services. This has led the search engines, and subse- quently the web surfers, astray. Not surprisingly, the metadata tags are not used by current search engines. Such forgery will undoubtedly plague metadata related to personal content as well. As a side effect of metadata forgery, false metadata could lead to malfunctions through incorrect assumptions on people’s needs, wishes, and future actions. False metadata can also potentially affect content usage. Once more content is protected in one way or another (see section 3.5 for discussion on Digital Rights Management), false rights information may render content object useless, or even illegal in the worst case scenario. An interesting potential indirect threat is assuming that people’s ability to make associations decreases due to reliance on automatically generated associations. This is a familiar line of argument that inevitably comes up with every new technology. Initially it is feared that the technology will take over our humanity and reduce our brain capacity. Such discussions have been raised with TV watching and the ability to read, for instance. Too much automation and machine operations may indeed weaken some of our mental abilities. Alternatively, it could be argued that the human mind will be released for more interesting tasks, while machines do the low-level associating. Then there is always the issue of public acceptance. In case the use of metadata remains too complicated or is not regarded useful, people will (rightfully so) fi nd other solutions for their personal content needs. However, the reasons for such non-acceptance should be identifi ed and analyzed. For instance, it may also be due to fact that the reason-