...after years of inaction, Congress is finally coming to see that privacy on the Internet won't take care of itself. The mystery isn't that self-regulation failed; the mystery is why anyone thought it would succeed. Data is money. It is a resource that the present architecture of the Net gives away for free. And just as the industrialists of the 19th century were not about to give up free air and water without legislative intervention (read: pollution laws), so too will Net commerce not relinquish free data in the name of something as obscure as privacy.

Priscilla Regan's Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values & Public Policy (Chapel Hill, Uni of North Carolina Press 95) provides a useful introduction to US legislative attempts to reconcile privacy and technology.  Her book is lucid and insightful, touching on questions ranging from caller ID through to genetic testing.  We regard it as one of the major studies in the past two decades.

Fred Cate's Privacy in the Information Age (Washington, Brookings Institution 97) is shorter and more narrowly-focussed.  His argument against EU-style regulation has gained the support of many US policy makers and business leaders.  

A Canadian perspective is provided by the essays in Visions of Privacy: Policy Choices for the Digital Age (Toronto, Uni of Toronto Press 99) edited by Colin Bennett, whose discussion of the Canadian legislation in relation to international developments we noted above.

We mentioned the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) above.  Marc Rotenberg, its Director, along with Philip Agre, edited the excellent essays in Technology & Privacy: The New Landscape (Cambridge, MIT Press 97).  They explore privacy-enhancing and privacy-eroding technologies, philosophical issues, and legislative responses in Europe and elsewhere.  

Mark Stefik's The Internet Edge: Social, Technical and Legal Challenges for a Networked World (Cambridge, MIT Press 99) is characteristically thoughtful. 

Amitai Etzioni offers fashionable but generally unconvincing communitarian arguments in The Limits of Privacy (New York, Basic Books 99), summarized in his 1999 article Less Privacy Is Good For Us (and You).  

There's a more thoughtful treatment of philosophies and legal developments in Judith Decew's In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics & the Rise of Technology (Ithaca, Cornell Uni Press 97).  

Jeffrey Rosen's The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (New York, Random 00) is another philosophical treatment. It's built around an argument that privacy's important because it protects us from being judged out of context in a "world of short attention spans" where isolated facts - or factoids - are mistaken for genuine knowledge. 

Barrington Moore Jr's Privacy: Studies in Social & Cultural History (Armonk, Sharpe 84) is more insightful; Robert Smith's Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy & Curiosity From Plymouth Rock to the Internet (Cambridge, Privacy Journal 00) is better on the US background.

High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (Cambridge, MIT Press 1996) edited by Peter Ludlow has chapters on privacy principles, network practicalities (Enemy of the State style surveillance is still some way off, with apologies to Hollywood), workplace privacy, data profiling in direct marketing, medical records and why a positive approach to privacy by business makes good sense. 

The Electronic Privacy Papers edited by Bruce Schneier & David Banisar (San Francisco, Wiley 97) is a unique compilation of key US government and private sector documents about encryption, privacy policy, law enforcement and other matters. 

For a personal perspective on how US cyber policy is developed (often on the hop, at great expense, with much noise from the media) you could do worse than turn to Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (New York, Times 1998), a memoir by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Mike Godwin.

Warnings of the 'death of privacy' come in Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (Sebastopol, O'Reilly 00) and the less measured The End of Privacy: How total surveillance is becoming a reality (New York, New Press 99) by Reg Whitaker.  

A view from the academy is provided by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau in Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping & Encryption (Cambridge, MIT Press 99).  Diffie is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography.  

Regrettably, much of the writing about privacy in newspapers and magazines is anecdotal.  H Jeff Smith's Managing Privacy: Information Technology & Corporate America (Chapel Hill, Uni of North Carolina Press 95) largely predates the Web but is of value for its detailed exploration of how many US businesses develop privacy policies and - more importantly - the extent to which those policies are implemented.

Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access by Anne Wells Branscomb (New York,  Basic Books 94) is an overview of the interrelationship between privacy, as viewed in the US, and intellectual property - touching on electronic mail, medical records, government data, credit records and other information. 

There's a more detailed exploration of particular issues in David Brin's thoughtful The Transparent Society (Reading, Perseus Books 98), which highlights the notion of reciprocal transparency, ie government and business sharing with citizens the information collected about them.  

Among the wide range of literature on government secrecy and what used to be called 'national information policy' we've singled out the short essays in A Culture of Secrecy: The Government versus the People's Right To Know (Lawrence, Uni Press of Kansas 98) and Greg Terrill's recent Secrecy and Openness: The Federal Government From Menzies to Whitlam and Beyond (Melbourne, Melbourne Uni Press 00), embracing archives and freedom of information law and policy.  We've explored information policy and government privacy/secrecy in the final part of our censorship guide. 

Three masterful studies by Ithiel de Sola Pool are 'must read': Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 83), Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 90) and the prescient Politics In Wired Nations (New Brunswick, Transaction 98).  

David Lyon's The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society (Minneapolis, Uni of Minnesota Press 94) is a useful introduction to the US literature on pervasive surveillance; more insightful than Michel Foucault's The Eye of Power (in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, New York, Pantheon 1980) and other mannerist tracts. The File: A Personal History (London, HarperCollins 97) is Timothy Garton Ash's memoir of living in the East German surveillance state.

Who Knows? Safeguarding Your Privacy In A Networked World by Ann Cavoukian and Don Tapscott (New York, McGraw-Hill 97) is one of Tapscott's better books, embracing principles and legislation, workplace and medical privacy, the technologies of surveillance and a call to action.  

Gavin Skok provides a useful introduction to questions about 'clickstreams' (ie tracking how you've surfed the Web) in his Establishing A Legitimate Expectation of Privacy In Clickstream Data article for the May 00 issue of the Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review.

Laura Gurak's Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 97) is an account, albeit marred by deconstructivist jargon, of citizen campaigns against Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip, two US proposals with serious privacy implications.  A perspective on the latter proposal is provided by Dorothy Denning's excellent Information Warfare & Security (Reading, Addison-Wesley 99), along with papers at her site.

John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 00) is a useful introduction to both the bits of paper and broader questions of 'identity' in modern societies.

A thoughtful analysis of Australian and international thinking about Privacy in Cyberspace was provided by the Hon Justice Michael Kirby of Australia's High Court in the 1998 University of NSW Law Journal.  It's also available, along with other Kirby papers, in Through The World's Eye (Annandale, Federation Press 00).

In the European Union the European Commission's Data Directive was the subject of None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic Commerce and the European Privacy Directive (Washington, Brookings 98) by Peter Swire & Robert Litan.


We've highlighted other books and sites about privacy in the separate guides to the Web, the new economy and being digital.


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