Earlier this year, New York magazine published a long piece called "Say Everything." Sub­titled "Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll," the piece breathlessly revealed that about 60 percent of modern American youth already have their biographical details and images online at MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, or similar social-networking websites. New York's reporter made a big deal about how "the kids" made her "feel very, very old." Not only did they casually accept that the record of their lives could be Googled by anyone at any time, but they also tended to think of themselves as having an audience. Some even considered their elders' expectations about privacy to be a weird, old-fogey thing--a narcissistic hang-up. One teenage girl was asked about cases in which sexual material featuring girls her own age had been posted on the Internet without the subjects' permission. "It's either documented online for other people to see or it's not, but either way you're still doing it," the girl replied. "So my philosophy is, why hide it?"

Some prominent technologists have arrived at roughly the same conclusion--if a little more reluctantly. As Sun Microsystems chairman Scott ­McNealy put it in 1999, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." The view that surveillance is already ubiquitous led David Brin to argue, in his 1998 book The Transparent Society, that our only real choice is between a society that offers the illusion of privacy, by restricting the power of surveillance to those in power, and one where the masses have it too. Brin prefers the latter.