For many of us, George Orwell’s “1984″ was required reading at some point during our formative years. The picture it painted of a world where privacy was virtually nonexistent and the consequences faced by an individual who dared to oppose the system provoked in many of us an almost instinctive reaction against such a totalitarian exercise of raw authority.
In the 23 years since the actual year 1984 came and went — happily with few of the horrors envisioned by Mr. Orwell when he finished the novel back in 1948 coming to pass — we have allowed our privacy to seep away. Instead of ceding control of our private information to a single all-powerful regime, however, we dole it out in bits and pieces to a diffuse network of eager information-gatherers, many if not most of them in the private sector.
