So although it's important to inform ourselves, I think technology is only one of the many options. There are legal options. Congress could pass laws prohibiting information gathered for one purpose from being disclosed from another without the consent of the individual concerned. Double Click, the nation's largest advertising broker, got into tremendous trouble when it tried to link our actual identities with our online and offline browsing habits because people in America don't want to leave like citizens in East Germany, where we have, you know, dossiers of all of our most intimate activities. But my belief, in the end, is it's a range of options that necessary, is that one of the most important is politics.
People have to be persuaded about why privacy is important and they have to care about it.
It was politics that persuaded Double Click to stop compiling its dossiers. It was politics that persuaded Real Networks, the largest music purveyor and jukebox on the net, to stop collecting unique identification numbers that linked my actual identity with my music preferences or gave it that potential. It was politics that forced Intel to remove the unique chips from its word processors that made it possible to link every document that I type with my actual identity. As long as people care about privacy, we can stop the surveillors in their tracks. Well, Jeffery Rosen, thank you very much.