I have no idea how long I'm going to live.

Will I make it to 80 years of age? Maybe. My dad lasted until just a few short weeks before his 88th birthday.

My mom, on the other hand, passed away far too young. She was just 61. Will my demise fall somewhere in between the two, or will I outlive them both, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine?

But one thing I do know for sure. Ninety-two years from now I'll be long gone. I'll be lucky to be a vague memory for grandchildren who are yet to be born. Even the one grandson I have now would be 99 years old by then and, if he has inherited the family genes he'll be trying to remember what he had for lunch, not what Grandpa Geoff was like.

As for me, I'd be closing in on 150 in the year 2098 and I can say with absolute certainty that's not going to happen.

I got thinking about this the other day, while reading a wire service story saying that Statistics Canada is concerned because fewer than 6 in 10 Canadians have agreed that the information they provided to census-takers last year can be publicly released in 2098.

Good grief. Why would anyone possibly care? What secrets do nearly half of us harbour that we insist we take them not only to our graves but way into the afterlife as well?

I'm thinking back to the personal information I disclosed on my census form. Let's see. There was my age. My sex. My address. The fact that I live alone.

Nothing embarrassing in that.

The census people didn't ask me whether I'd ever been arrested (yes), if I'd ever robbed a bank (no), driven drunk (yes), had an affair with Angelina Jolie (no).

But if they had asked, I'd have answered. And I wouldn't care who knew about it next month, never mind in the spring of 2098.

Want to know the colour of my eyes?Brown. Hair? Mostly grey, although on a good day I'll swear there are still traces of brown. Weight?190 lbs. Height? 6-foot-1. I drive a Toyota and buy my groceries at Loeb. Have two kids and am twice divorced.

There. That's way more than the census people know and you don't have to wait 92 years to find out.

I won't give you my social insurance number or my secret banking password because that would just be dumb, but why do I care if you know a bit about the mundane side of my personal life? Especially if you find it out 60 years or so after I have drawn my last breath?

And yet nearly half of us apparently do. Only 56% of us said it was okay to release their "personal information" in 2098.

I know we're all a little jittery these days about protecting our privacy, with fraud artists trying to access our credit cards, bank accounts and even our mortgages.

But to me it seems a little obsessive to worry in early 2007 about the fact someone will know at the turn of the next century where we lived and the size of our families.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as University of Saskatchewan history professor Bill Waiser, who worries that Canada will have "lost an essential part of its history" because so many of us are publicity-shy.

Census date, warns Waiser, is "one of the primary building blocks of Canadian history ... census data is crucial."

I just think it's silly to worry now about the disclosure of innocuous information decades in the future.

The funny thing is, all the information gathered in previous census exercises will already be out there. It's just that, for the 2006 study, Canadians for the first time were given the option of saying yea or nay.

Who knew we'd turned into a nation of introverts?

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on ottawasun.com