Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape

by Philip E. Agre (Editor), Marc Rotenberg (Editor)

Privacy is the capacity to negotiate social relationships by controlling access to personal information. As laws, policies, and technological design increasingly structure people's 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 book's 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.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published September 5, 1997

Reviews

[James G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderfully dated. A sweet timepiece. Picked up up "for sale" at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art when they were displaying exhibition entitled Analogital. Most of the work feels so quickly out-of-date; but sorta timeless, too, like Lyotard. Confession: My first reference to David Gelernter and Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean...more from this will follow. (More confessions: I see Gelernter also wrote a book four years ago called Judaism...more from this will follow.)