Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape

By Marc Rotenberg and Philip E. Agre

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 026201162X
• ISBN13: 9780262011624
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

More balanced view than many treatments.

From Virginia Postrel's pollyannish embrace of technology to Reg Whitakers musings of government devolving power (the state withering away-an old notion yet to be validated by experience) to Jerry Furland's utterly terrifying vision, this latest entry, "Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape" at least allows that the jury is still out on this issue. Except for Furland, ("Transfer-the end of the beginning")each falls short of addressing what one can "DO" with this new technology and actually provides a credible blueprint in novel form. I recommend each of these authors, but I put my money on Furland being right.