Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Privacy

  • We Don’t Want to Know

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ There are any number of reasons not to snoop. One violates another person’s privacy. One communicates suspicion and distrust. One presumes too much. But the biggest, best, most important reason is this: You don’t want to know what you are going to find out. And you will find out something […]

  • Our Own Naked Sun

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ In The Naked Sun (1957), Isaac Asimov imagines Solaria, a low-population world in which residents live on estates so large that one never encounters one’s neighbors in person. As robots are employed in virtually all manner of labor, the only human inhabitants of these estates are their owners. This contrasts […]

  • Information, Communication and Insecurity

    by Mark English ____ There are, these days, countless new and improved ways of losing documents and missing messages. If I and my friends are in any way typical, one routinely loses a large proportion of one’s stored data without even trying; whereas in the past we generally lost only what we deliberately threw away […]

  • In Sight. Out of Touch.

    by E. John Winner The “private individual” is a rather late development in human culture. I could make that case by discussing poetry (especially from the Romantics) or psychology (not by analysis, but by discussing the confidentiality of the therapy session), but I’d rather get into the grit of life that every human confronts at […]