What does privacy mean in a digital age? Is digital privacy even possible? Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow of governance studies at The Brookings Institution is quite concerned with these questions. This 24-page report on this subject was released in April 2011, and it looks at the nature of what Wittes refers to as "databuse". Wittes argues that when thinking about privacy in a digital age, "we fret simultaneously that we have too much of it and too little." For purposes of clarity and conceptual coherence, Wittes confines his discussion of privacy to "data about individuals held in the hands of third parties." In the work, he offers a brief, yet important, history of privacy and then continues to his main body of analysis and discussion of this area of privacy in the contemporary age. The work is rigorous and thoughtful, and worth reading for anyone involved in information technology, privacy studies, and related fields of law.
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