Privacy as control of one's personal information is an unstable concept. When more accurately viewed as predominantly social phenomena, privacy and identity, and the relationship between the two, become remarkably unstable. The concept of privacy as a legal right to exclusively control one's own personal information is premised on the limited definition of information as being in some tangible form that can be possessed and transferred. In this limited sense of information, technology seems to bring about two fundamental changes affecting privacy. One is temporal.
Digital media is potentially immortal.
The importance of this, however, is merely relative to the persistence of collective and individual human memory. For example, despite the lack of any physical evidence, it is widely known that the size of Napoleon's genitalia was rather unremarkable. The question of evidence brings us to the more important change technology creates, which is hermeneutic. Circumventing the ambiguities of interpretation, and thereby apparently dispelling all doubt, a video seems to show it as it really is, or was. Technology thus solves the cumbersome problems of discovering the truth.