I've got a longer post on NSA surveillance, but let me start by observing that America has not had a serious discussion about what data should be
public, semi-public, or private since ... I don't know, since some 19th
century Congressmen discovered the executive branch was reading their
telegrams. Every once in a while, a Supreme Court case forces the legal system
to think about ones expectation of privacy, or a video rental place
will leak the porn habits of a Federal judge, but we haven't really
thought about consumer privacy very comprehensively. That goes for both protection from government intrusion and from private sector intrustion. As Wired's Bruce Schneier
points out, advances in social media, GPS in everyone's phone and car,
and the like mean that the "expectation of privacy" test will rapidly
leave is with no privacy. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act,
which protects the privacy of email hasn't been updated since the year Top Gun was released.
We are overdue for an overhaul.
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