The Digital Economy ANNIVERSARY EDITION: Rethinking Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence, 2nd Edition

20th Anniversary Edition Commentary on Chapter 11: Privacy in the Digital Economy

THIS CHAPTER’S MAJOR discussion of privacy in 1995 was ill-timed. Back then, the Web was a platform for the presentation of content; the browser cookie had barely been invented; there was no “Big Data,” Facebook, Google, and government eavesdropping was restricted to primitive wiretapping. When I said that privacy would be a defining issue of the digital age, the main reaction was a shrug.

Today, privacy has become that issue. New risks and threats such as identity fraud and identity theft are growing in a networked world, along with new forms of discrimination, social engineering, and even oppression made possible by the explosion of data capture and analysis. ...