INTERNET, PRIVACY, AND PROGRESSIVE HALAKHAH Mark Washofsky

The Internet is an all-pervasive cultural phenomenon. From its modest beginnings in the 1960s as a network linking individual computers, through its explosion onto the wider public scene in the 1980s and beyond,' it has served as a means of almost instantaneous communication- a source of data, an avenue for commerce, an arena for the sharing of ideas— and has become a veritable way of life, the space within which we express ourselves, the virtual location of numberless social communities. To borrow the advertising slogan of a well-known credit card, the Internet is everywhere you want it to be. It is also showing up, however, in places where we may wish it weren’t. In a world already characterized as a domain of“ubiquitous surveillance,” the Internet facilitates the collection, rapid dissemination, and preservation of one’s personal information: data, opinions, and images that one might rather keep concealed or restricted to a small circle of friends. While governments and private organizations have long gathered information concerning citizens, clients, and customers, the new Web-based technologies increase the degree of danger exponentially. News— whether factual or fictional, whether of public or of prurient interest- can move around the world with the click of a mouse. Businesses and bureaucrats are able to track a person’s Internet use(“browsing history”), learning a great deal about what she thinks and what she reads, about her commercial, recreational, and ideological preferences.” The very ubiquity of the Internet— the fact that anyone with a computer can link to stores of data that previously may have been housed in isolated libraries and file cabinets— means that the sorts of embarrassing information that once faded from the public consciousness may no longer be forgotten with time. The Internet never forgets; somewhere, somehow(probably through Google), somebody will find a link to information that once would simply have eroded from neglect." The consequences of all this for the value we call“privacy” are sobering, quite