In 1999 Scott McNealy made his widely quoted comment: " You have no privacy anyway, get over it." The situation has not changed since then, and has in fact, gotten worse. Clearly if you take his statement to heart and make every effort not to include in emails or posts anything that you would not want widely repeated, you will not be in the position of the various folks who have been "outed" by Wikileaks.

That is one aspect of the discussion. But the difficulty I have with Thorwaldson's article is that he does not clearly differentiate between "privacy" and "security". Our privacy is compromised because the security of our systems is flawed and susceptible to hacking. That is real problem. The explosion of all varieties of on-line activity has far outstripped on-line security. Until it is possible to set up personal and business security systems that truly are secure, exposure of our various kinds of on-line data is at risk. Unfortunately governmental desire to access our information is in direct conflict with personal system/online security strong enough to thwart hacking.