The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America

From the Publisher: As reading, writing, shopping, and gossip increasingly take place in cyberspace, the part of our life that can be monitored and searched has vastly expanded. On the Internet, every Web site we visit, every magazine we skim, and the amount of time we spend skimming them creates electronic footprints that can be traced back to us. Many people are discovering that e-mail, even after it is deleted, becomes a permanent record that can be resurrected by employers and prosecutors. In this groundbreaking and unflinching book, Jeffrey Rosen examines the legal, technological, and cultural changes that have undermined our ability to control how much information about ourselves is communicated to others. Rosen argues passionately that privacy is important because it protects us from being judged out of context in a world of short attention spans, a world in which information can easily be confused with knowledge. Accessible and erudite, The Unwanted Gaze is the definitive book about the issue that citizens in our new information economy say they care about most.