Whether it's hacking or the NSA, some of us don't accept that privacy is dead

The common threat here is a massive, digitally enabled erosion of the individual citizen's private life

What a week this was. It has seen David Cameron's former communications director, Andy Coulson, going on trial in connection with phone hacking by journalists during his time as editor of the News of the World, German officials storming off to Washington to read the riot act about the bugging of Angela Merkel's phone, the medieval mumbo-jumbo of the Queen accepting a royal charter underpinning a system of press self-regulation that much of the press doesn't accept, and the EU threatening internet giants like Google and Facebook with a data protection directive that could end up splitting the internet into separate US and European clouds. One thing unites these apparently disparate stories: the revolutionary development of technologies that massively increase our power to communicate with each other, and as massively erode our privacy.

"Privacy is dead. Get over it," a Silicon Valley boss once reportedly remarked. Some of us don't accept that. We still want to keep a few clothes on. We believe that preserving individual privacy is essential, not just to basic human dignity but also to freedom and security.