With the aggressive pace of technological change and the onslaught of news regarding data breaches, cyber-attacks, and technological threats to privacy and security, it is easy to assume these are fundamentally new threats. The pace of technological change is slower than it feels, and many seemingly new categories of threats have been with us longer than we remember. Nervous System is a monthly series that approaches issues of data privacy and cyber security from the context of history—to look to the past for clues about how to interpret the present and prepare for the future.

Google’s April 1, 2004, announcement of a new webmail service was widely construed at the time as a facetious joke. The news release seemed unusually casually written and coincided with ridiculous job postings for a research and development site Google allegedly planned to open on the Moon. The announcement promised an unprecedented set of features, including a then-staggering gigabyte of storage coupled with full-text searchability.