response to the contemporary challenge. The Internet age has introduced a new range of threats to our privacy. Our concern is no longer exclusively with old-fashioned sorts of intrusion- the peeping Tom, the prying journalist, the wiretapper, and the electronic eavesdropper whose trespasses originate from without but increasingly with the newer forms of intrusion that emerges from within, that we ourselves facilitate and allow into our personal space. The Internet enables us to upload as well as to download, to produce as well as to consume digital content. Its technologies, particularly the new social media, permit and entice us to transmit a great deal of personal data to an electronic realm over which we exert very little control, a social network where our lives of necessity become an open e-book. This is the difference that the Internet makes, the unique threat that the World Wide Web poses to our privacy: its invitation to live our lives increasingly online and in public, to the point that we might be said to have waived any“reasonable expectation” of privacy'®’ and, indeed, to have rendered that concept essentially meaningless. If in fact we
enjoy“zero privacy” in the age of the Internet,'*' the blame lies not solely or even primarily with unwanted, external intruders but with ourselves.
Any cogent and coherent halakhic discussion of privacy in the age of the Internet will accordingly have to advance beyond the conceptual boundaries that have heretofore defined the subject. The current halakhic discourse on privacy, much like that in Western law, speaks mostly to the protection of the individual from damage caused by others invading his personal realm. The new discussion of which I speak will have to focus upon protecting the individual from the damage that he brings upon himself. It will have to acknowledge that we will not make much headway in protecting our Internet privacy from the unwanted attention of others without first addressing our own conduct. And here is where it really does help to be Jewish , for the very same fundamental principles that lie at the base of the traditional halakhic discourse on privacy also provide us with the intellectual resources needed to frame an adequate response for the challenge of our time. I refer,