Sociologists have known for almost 100 years that we’re often more comfortable confiding in strangers than in people we know. Strangers remain strangers and there is no associated baggage of embarrassment in revealing information to them. The question raised by the Internet is whether the latest communications medium is a stranger or not. Most of us are justifiably disturbed when we learn that our online (and offline) activities are tied to our true identities through permanent databases, if only because we know that those databases can be bought and subpoenaed.
Technology has always threatened privacy. One hundred years ago, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren were concerned that instant photography and faster printing presses—the new media of that age—would diminish personal privacy. “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery,” they wrote in the Harvard Law Review. Each iteration of technology greatly expands the aspects of formerly-private life that can be monitored, indexed, and archived. The fear is that these recorded aspects of our selves will come to be perceived as the totality of who we are.
The Supreme Court has held that our Constitutional protection against unreasonable searches depends on reasonable expectations of privacy. As surveillance technologies become more pervasive and intrusive, our reasonable expectation of privacy is clearly diminished, resulting in similarly diminished Constitutional protections. In 1877, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that search warrants are required to open postal mail, regardless of whether the letter was sent from the office or from home. No such requirement exists for email, searches of which are arguably more invasive.
Law and technology are clearly out of step with the American citizenry. In a March Business Week poll, 57 percent of the respondents said the government should regulate how personal information can be collected and used on the Internet. Unfortunately, the American citizenry is notoriously diffuse while the corporate interests opposed to personal privacy are exceptionally well organized and funded. Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) has introduced a bill that would prohibit Web sites from collecting and selling personal information unless users specifically check a box giving their permission. Ecommerce lobbyists with deep pockets, who insist that the industry can adequately regulate itself, always resist opt-in proposals like Torricelli’s. There’s no time like the present to make your voice heard on this issue.
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