Who am I to challenge Google's chief evangelist! The old days he refers may have been correct, but people would only be known by the few. Now, you are known by some faceless marketing department on the other side of the planet, and it's difficult to stop it, or to know who knows what about you. New forms of communications and technology have made it far more difficult to achieve privacy.

He's correct about one part. Yes, it's increasingly difficult to achieve, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. In fact, we should be trying harder to achieve it.

Google's chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. "Privacy may actually be an anomaly," Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."Vint Cerf: Privacy May Be An Anomaly [theverge.com]

Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that's been stripped away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in the first place. "It’s the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity," Cerf said. Cerf warned that he was simplifying his views — "I don't want you to go away thinking I am that shallow about it" — but overall, he believes "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."