Donald Kerr is the Deputy Director of the USA Deptartment of Intelligence. He recently suggested:

Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. … Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,”

Some time ago I noted that online privacy is now an oxymoron. Regardless of whether one feels privacy should protected online, it won’t be and in some ways it simply can’t be protected to the degree to which we have become accustomed in our offline information transactions.

We do not know, and in many cases cannot know, where many of our pictures and data and writing and comments and email are stored. We don’t know who misquotes us, scrapes our content, has our credit card data and medical records, reads our email, or even know if we own what we write (many reviews sites will claim they own *your* reviews).

But don’t despair. This loss of privacy is actually not as big a deal as one might think. This is the brave new world of onliners and the benefits of the information explosion easily and dramatically trump the handful of privacy pitfalls. If this were not the case we’d have seen a lot more trouble by now. Also, if we slap extensive restrictions on a futile effort to make sure privacy is kept in the robust fashion we’ve come to expect offline it could slow innovation and exchanges that, on balance, make the web a fun place to be.

CNN Reports