Excellent short essay on rethinking the meaning and nature of privacy in the Facebook age.
All of this leads me to see a parallel between privacy law and environmental law, another area where a technological shift forced us to protect a dwindling resource that earlier generations could take for granted.
The idea of passing laws to protect the natural world was not one that came naturally to early Americans. In their experience, the wilderness was something that hungry bears came out of, not an endangered resource that required lawyers to defend. Our mastery over nature was the very measure of our civilization.
But as the balance of power between humans and nature shifted, it became clear that wild spaces could not survive without some kind of protection. […]
In the span of a little more than a century, we went from treating nature as an inexhaustible resource, to defending it piecemeal, to our current recognition that human activity poses an ecological threat to the planet.