Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape

About this book

Privacy is the capacity to negotiate social relationships by controlling access to personal information. As laws policies and technological design increasingly structure peoples relationships with social institutions individual privacy faces new threats and new opportunities. Over the last several years the realm of technology and privacy has been transformed creating a landscape that is both dangerous and encouraging. Significant changes include large increases in communications bandwidths; the widespread adoption of computer networking and public-key cryptography; mathematical innovations that promise a vast family of protocols for protecting identity in complex transactions; new digital media that support a wide range of social relationships; a new generation of technologically sophisticated privacy activists; a massive body of practical experience in the development and application of data-protection laws; and the rapid globalization of manufacturing culture and policy making. The essays in this book provide a new conceptual framework for the analysis and debate of privacy policy and for the design and development of information systems. The authors are international experts in the technical economic and political aspects of privacy; the books strength is its synthesis of the three. The book provides equally strong analyses of privacy issues in the United States Canada and Europe. Contributors: Philip E. Agre Victoria Bellotti Colin J. Bennett Herbert Burkert Simon G. Davies David H. Flaherty Robert Gellman Viktor Mayer-Schonberger David J. Phillips Rohan Samarajiva.