Once upon a time, not so very long ago, cookies were a tasty treat, tracking was something hunters did in the woods, browsing meant taking a stroll through the mall, the preferred family mobile device was the station wagon, and the only threat from a cloud was a thunderstorm.
In that pre-digital age, Congress wrote most of America’s federal privacy laws. Their authors could not envision technology that would allow both commercial interests and law enforcement authorities to pinpoint a person’s location with geo-tracking and profile his lifestyle, financial status and health by tracking his online activities. Nor did they imagine the threat sophisticated hackers could pose to personal financial and medical information as well as corporate intellectual property and trade secrets, whether stored on a laptop, mobile device, corporate server or in the cloud.