*********** Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 22:11:33 -0600 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Randy Sparkman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Privacy Article Declan, Here's a pointer to an article I've just completed about digital privacy. It will appear this summer in American Outlook, a Hudson Institute quarterly. It is intended as a general interest piece, but proceeds to make some fairly aggressive predictions in terms of the relationship of technology to the erosion of our privacy. The article begins: "Recently, in the grocery checkout, the lady in front of me prepared to swipe a store-provided discount card through the reader. Suddenly, her grammar school-aged daughter grabbed her arm saying, ^�Don^�t do it Mom, they^�ll know all about you!^� Just as this vignette of daughterly concern for a mother^�s privacy played out in a market, so, too, does the broader challenge to the right to privacy by our increasing dependence on computers and networks. But, no simple Mom and Pop operation, the marketplace of privacy is a global bazaar of passive consumers, mixed agendas, patchwork legislation, and aggressive corporate behavior. And it turns out, as a prototype for technology-related policy-making in the new century, the politics of privacy will be textured less by the ability of governments to regulate than by the innate ability of digital technology to ultimately return a degree of power and choice back to those who use it." It is available at: http://home.worldnet.att.net/~rsparkman/html/privacy.html Feel free to forward it to anyone you think may be interested. best, Randy Sparkman http://home.att.net/~rsparkman -------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe: send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this text: subscribe politech More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------
