Compartmentalizing our distinct personal identities is increasingly difficult in big data reality. Pictures of the person we were on past vacations resurface in employers’ Google searches; LinkedIn which exhibits our income level is increasingly used as a dating web site. Whether on vacation, at work, or seeking romance, our digital selves stream together. One result is that a perennial ethical question about personal identity has spilled out of philosophy departments and into the real world. Ought we possess one, unified identity that coherently integrates the various aspects of our lives, or, incarnate deeply distinct selves suited to different occasions and contexts? At bottom, are we one, or many? The question is not only palpable today, but also urgent because if a decision is not made by us, the forces of big data and surveillance capitalism will make it for us by compelling unity. Speaking in favor of the big data tendency, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg promotes the ethics of an integrated identity, a single version of selfhood maintained across diverse contexts and human relationships. This essay goes in the other direction by sketching two ethical frameworks arranged to defend our compartmentalized identities, which amounts to promoting the dis-integration of our selves. One framework connects with natural law, the other with language, and both aim to create a sense of selfhood that breaks away from its own past, and from the unifying powers of big data technology.

Improve your edtech vetting and procurement processes for safer, more cost-effective and transparent edtech decision-making.

When someone who is living paycheck to paycheck falls victim to an online fraud or a breach, the cascade of repercussions can be devastating.

Amidst never-ending headlines about data breaches, data misuse, and opaque data-sharing agreements from major companies, users have few legal options to actually protect their privacy in court. Instead, they rely on technology.

Many e-commerce companies are appointing chief privacy officers to protect consumers, and advocates for privacy rights say they have big job ahead; privacy officers themselves describe their jobs as work in progress; Richard Purcell, chief privacy officer for Microsoft, says effort to weave data protection services into very fabric of corporate culture is paying off in recently announced features in Microsoft Internet Explorer browser software program, which enable users to determine just how much information about themselves they will release to Web sites they visit; DoubleClick, biggest Internet advertising company, has taken public beating from advocates for privacy rights; it now authorizes its privacy officer, Jules Polonetsky, to rip up contracts with companies that do not comply with DoubleClick's rules for protecting consumer privacy; DoubleClick is eager to build reputation as company that protects privacy; photo (M)

The bill would have been the second of its kind in the nation, but the gap between the version supported by the tech industry, and the more stringent version favored by privacy groups, proved too big to close.

At its heart, privacy is about how data is used to take away our control.

On "obscurity" as a requirement for human flourishing.

Really rather good guide to jargon.

On FIPPs and why they suck.

Folks know what you read last summer.

Fraudsters are looking for a clean credit history, and are using stolen identities to create them.

Any time I’m confronted with a standard GDPR privacy warning on a web site, I reflexively click the option to accept cookies and move on. Recently though, while reading an article at The Times of L…

Today, forty education, privacy, disability rights, and civil rights organizations released ten principles for school safety to protect all students’ privacy, dignity, and right to an equal education.

Zuckerberg’s privacy manifesto failed to account for the myriad ways people interpret privacy. To do that, Facebook needs human-centered design.

“Privacy may actually be an anomaly,” said Vint Cerf, one of the architects of the Internet, at an FTC workshop on the Internet of Things on Tuesday. Cerf, who’s currently Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, argued that privacy is a construct of the modern industrial age. In the past, his...