Privacy is a growing concern in the United States and around the world. The spread of the Internet and the seemingly boundaryless options for collecting, saving, sharing, and comparing information trigger consumer worries. Online practices of business and government agencies may present new ways to compromise privacy, and e-commerce and technologies that make a wide range of personal information available to anyone with a Web browser only begin to hint at the possibilities for inappropriate or unwarranted intrusion into our personal lives. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of privacy in the information age. It explores such important concepts as how the threats to privacy evolving, how can privacy be protected and how society can balance the interests of individuals, businesses and government in ways that promote privacy reasonably and effectively? This book seeks to raise awareness of the web of connectedness among the actions one takes and the privacy policies that are enacted, and provides a variety of tools and concepts with which debates over privacy can be more fruitfully engaged. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age focuses on three major components affecting notions, perceptions, and expectations of privacy: technological change, societal shifts, and circumstantial discontinuities. This book will be of special interest to anyone interested in understanding why privacy issues are often so intractable.


Table of Contents


Front Matter
Executive Summary
Part I Thinking About Privacy, 1 Thinking About Privacy
Part II The Backdrop for Privacy, 2 Intellectual Approaches and
Conceptual Underpinnings
3 Technological Drivers
4 The Legal Landscape in the United States
5 The Politics of Privacy Policy in the United States
Part III Privacy in Context, 6 Privacy and Organizations
7 Health and Medical Privacy
8 Libraries and Privacy
9 Privacy, Law Enforcement, and National Security
Part IV Findings and Recommendations, 10 Findings and
Recommendations
Appendix A A Short History of Surveillance and Privacy in the
United States
Appendix B International Perspectives on Privacy
Appendix C Biographies
Index