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Paranoia

What Price Privacy?

John Goff wonders what the real cost of privacy is in the modern world.

In recent years, worries about privacy have increased markedly. Many people have become aware that they are the objects of an increasingly intensive, and not necessarily benign, process of commercial and political information gathering. Concerns about the surveillance of our movements in the streets, in shops, and on the roads; about the use of loyalty card schemes to record our purchases; about the sale of our personal information, and about ‘data-mining’, evoke an anxiety that our privacy is rapidly being eroded. The anxiety is not only that information technology has decisively shifted the balance of power in the politics of privacy, but that the very idea of privacy itself is having to be rethought. It seems that privacy is now something that has to be justified rather than simply taken for granted.

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