This book explores commodification processes of personal data and provides a critical framing of the ongoing debate of privacy in the Internet age, using the example of social media and referring to interviews with users. It advocates and expands upon two main theses: First, people's privacy is structurally invaded in contemporary informational capitalism. Second, the best response to this problem is not accomplished by invoking the privacy framework as it stands, because it is itself part of the problematic nexus that it struggles against. Informational capitalism poses weighty problems for making the Internet a truly social medium, and aspiring to sustainable privacy simultaneously means to struggle against alienation and exploitation. In the last instance, this means opposing the capitalist form of association - online and offline.

The threats to privacy are well known: the National Security Agency tracks our phone calls; Google records where we go online and how we set our thermostats; Facebook changes our privacy settings when it wishes; Target gets hacked and loses control of our credit card information; our medical records are available for sale to strangers; our children are fingerprinted and their every test score saved for posterity; and small robots patrol our schoolyards and drones may soon fill our skies. The contributors to this anthology don’t simply describe these problems or warn about the loss of privacy--they propose solutions. They look closely at business practices, public policy, and technology design, and ask, "Should this continue? Is there a better approach?” They take seriously the dictum of Thomas Edison: "What one creates with his hand, he should control with his head.” It’s a new approach to the privacy debate, one that assumes privacy is worth protecting, that there are solutions to be found, and that the future is not yet known. This volume will be an essential reference for policy makers and researchers, journalists and scholars, and others looking for answers to one of the biggest challenges of our modern day. The premise is clear: there’s a problem--let’s find a solution.

In "Privacy in the 21st Century" Alexandra Rengel offers an assessment of the international right to privacy within both a historical and modern context. The book explores the underpinnings of privacy in religion, philosophy, and the law. The author explores the evolution of the legal concept of the right to privacy and offers a comparative law analysis of the global protections of privacy offered by individual states, international agreements, and recognized international legal norms. The author peers into the future of privacy, the technologies which affect the right to privacy, and the ways in which privacy may be protected in the future within the domestic and international law contexts. The author offers her insightful views on possible solutions to counteract encroachments on the right to privacy.

A biography of Tor--a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, and global politics at the internet's core. Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real "dark web," when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy, Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor--a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet. The story of Tor begins in the 1990s with its creation by the US Navy's Naval Research Lab, from a convergence of different cultural worlds. Drawing on in-depth interviews with designers, developers, activists, and users, along with twenty years of mailing lists, design documents, reporting, and legal papers, Collier traces Tor's evolution from those early days to its current operation on the frontlines of global digital power--including the strange collaboration between US military scientists and a group of freewheeling hackers called the Cypherpunks. As Collier charts the rise and fall of three different cultures in Tor's diverse community--the engineers, the maintainers, and the activists, each with a distinct understanding of and vision for Tor--he reckons with Tor's complicated, changing relationship with contemporary US empire. Ultimately, the book reveals how different groups of users have repurposed Tor and built new technologies and worlds of their own around it, with profound implications for the future of the Internet.