American Civil Liberties Union

I recently came across this piece by the author William Deresiewicz (from his consistently insightful “All Points” blog), in which he comments on the observation that privacy and solitude are privileges of the modern era that are “rare both historically and globally,” with most people in the world today and in the past being “too poor to even have the space to be alone.” Members of the medieval household, for example,

This tax season, when you visit the IRS’s website seeking tax information, can you be certain that no one else is monitoring which pages you browse?

Unfortunately, right now the answer to that question is “no.” Unlike Facebook, Twitter, Google Mail (Gmail), and virtually every bank and credit card company, the IRS, like most government agencies, does not use HTTPS for encryption and authentication on its website. If you try typing “mail.google.com” into your browser right now, you will see that the URL you end up at is actually “https://mail.google.com.” That “s” after the “http” may seem insignificant, but it means a lot. It signifies that Google is using Secure Sockets Layer encryption, or SSL, to both encrypt and authenticate its communications. When you visit google.com and you see “https” at the beginning of the address, it lets you know that your connection is secure, and that third parties – such as your internet service provider, employer, or university cannot monitor what you’re doing through the use of network interception technology.

The Siri “personal assistant” is sending lots of our personal voice and user info to Apple to stockpile in its databases.

My colleague Ben Wizner and I are in Brussels this week, partly to meet with European lawmakers and others about the new privacy regime that the EU is in the process of putting into place. Unlike the United States, Europe has a set of basic rules and institutions in place to protect individuals’ privacy, and is trying to update its existing rules and institutions for the digital age.

The United States needs similar protections—a basic, overarching privacy law, and institutions with the teeth to enforce it. We are an outlier in the world in lacking those things. However, some U.S. companies seem to be terrified at the prospect of basic, fair privacy rules being put into place in Europe. Not only are companies such as Facebook and Google furiously lobbying against those rules, but the U.S. government has “shocked” Europeans by also lobbying hard against many elements of this update.