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Thread: Taking a Stand To Protect Privacy* Europeans question the morality of digital companies.

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[quote=MARRIE,457504]Social mores around privacy vary widely across the globe. In Japan, Google was criticized for being intrusive when its self-driven cars cruised the streets with a camera snapping pictures for Google Street View.

In India, the notion of privacy seems foreign. A shopkeeper might casually ask a childless woman if she has gynecological trouble; school grades are posted on public walls; many people still live in extended families, literally wandering in and out of one another's bedrooms. But a project to issue biometric identity cards to every Indian citizen recently set off a flurry of concern, prompting the government to draft a new law that enshrines the right to privacy for the first time.

Part of the difficulty in regulating online privacy is the speed of technological innovation. Just as it becomes remarkably easy for us to share our information with others, it also becomes cheaper and easier to crunch and analyze that information - and store it forever, if necessary.

Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, is among those who see enormous benefits for private companies and government agencies alike. To fight it on privacy grounds, he argued, would be largely futile. "You can't really have a property interest in data," he argued. "It's going to get cheaper to reproduce it. It's going to get reproduced and stored. It's going to get copied."

Privacy advocates worry about the consequences. Most people may not have much to hide. For a few, not sharing personal information may be vital.

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