It's a chilling thought, but many futurists believe personal privacy will all but disappear in the next quarter century, as a myriad of tiny computer sentinels track and store our every word and gesture. Futurist Wacker agrees, but for a different reason. People will give up their privacy as long as they're in the channel of remuneration. He could be right. Today we're already seeing the arrival of powerful online profiling technologies that can note our every move in cyberspace.
Advertisers say it's nothing more than a way to target deals to the most interested customers.
Privacy advocates scream foul, but the history of privacy protection is a discouraging series of legislative and policy defeats as law enforcement has successfully gained access to telephones, cell phones and the information highway. Farber predicts that the vast quantity of personal information available by 2025 will prove an irresistible control mechanism for whatever central government exists. Stephen Moore, an economist at The Cato Institute, has high hopes. Others aren't so sanguine. The same forces of human nature will rule the future as they have the past, and technology will continue to be a part of the dialectic of good and evil, he says.