Have not located the actual quote yet, but here are a couple of indirect references.
The links refer PDF files.
(thanks for referring the quote)
Paper: A Middleware Architecture for Privacy Protection in Smart Environments by
Eleftherios Koutsoloukas, et al. concludes with,
Future technological reality is characterized by Ron Rivest’s “reversal of defaults”: what was once private is now public; what once was hard to copy is now trivial to duplicate; what was once easily forgotten is now stored forever. Thus, in this paper, a framework meeting the principles formulated by the privacy legislation and the consequent technical requirements is described.
Paper: Privacy by Design - Principles of Privacy-Aware Ubiquitous Systems by
Marc Langheinrich also summarizes,
What lies at the intersection of privacy protection and ubiquitous computing is easy to
imagine: the frightening vision of an Orwellian nightmare-come-true, where countless
“smart” devices with detailed sensing and far-reaching communication capabilities will
observe every single moment of our lives, so unobtrusive and invisible that we won’t
even notice!
Ron Rivest calls this the “reversal of defaults”: “What was once private
is now public”, “what was once hard to copy, is now trivial to duplicate” and “what
was once easily forgotten, is now stored forever.” Clearly, “something” needs to be
done, as nearly all work in ubiquitous computing points out, yet little has so far been
accomplished."
There appears to be a reference in the book RFID Security and Privacy, Dirk Henrici, p33.
This carries a bibliographical reference Riv01
which I could not reach. Maybe, it is a direct citation.