People have been talking about the Internet and online privacy for quite some time, ever since I’ve used it. I can remember some people discussing it as far back as 1993, and in 1996 some people were alarmed, and rightly so. Back then, it was clear that this would become a big problem, especially as public records came online. So the whole concept of privacy, well, went out the window from there.

Today, we complain about social media and privacy, as well as companies that release information, but it’s not that people don’t freely give up their privacy rights often enough of their own volition, yes, in return. of some online service or freebie To better understand all of this, you may need some background on the subject, how we got here today, and the reality that we never had complete privacy guaranteed online, the illusion of such.

Now, I’d certainly like to recommend a very good book on this subject if you’d like to get a little background. In this way, when you are discussing this topic, you will understand how we got here today. The name of the book I would like to recommend is:

“Privacy at stake: the politics of wiretapping and encryption” by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1999), pp. 364, ISBN: 0-262-04167-7.

You’ll learn the arguments on both sides, the real issues of national security, and what goes on behind the scenes. And from there you can easily imagine what happens today. It hardly takes much thinking to see, or much reading to see where it all goes from here. Please consider all of this.

++ I also recommend reading To bring you up to date are these two recently published articles in the Wall Street Journal, namely;

1. Wall Street Journal Article – “At the forefront of the web, anonymity in name only”, which was written by Emily Steel and Julia Angwin.
2. “Google agonizes over privacy as ad world advances,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2010 – by Jessica E. Vascellaro.
3. “The Great Privacy Debate”, which was debated by Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, versus Nicholas Carr, author of “The Swallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” which appeared in the Saturday and Sunday editions of the WSJ on August 7-8, 2010.