Legal

Back in 2001, Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, roused the media with a zinger delivered at a new product introduction. “You have zero privacy anyway,” McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts, “Get over it.”

That may not have been exactly true then, but now an Iowa University professor, Mark Andrejevic, says that “the data trail left by technology users allows public and private monitoring agencies to track users’ locations, preferences and life events for purposes including consumer marketing, targeting groups of voters for campaigns, background checks and government surveillance.”

Andrejevic’s recently released book is titled iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. He’s concerned about two things.

His big worry is that technology is advancing much faster than privacy laws. There’s probably not much any of us can do about that. The history of technology is that it runs far out in front of the laws and regulations that ultimately develop to deal with it.

His other worry is that the technologies allow people to become “do-it-yourself private investigators.” He’s right and wrong about that.

On one hand, people everywhere are using new technologies to check each other out. Dating couples Google each other to see what can […]