Some observers envisage that soon, all documents created electronically may have invisible markings that could be traced back to the author or recipient. Sometimes, of course, the fallout can be disastrous for the hapless user, as in the famous case of the (previously) much-respected Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, who was forced to step down in 1998 for downloading pornography on his home computer. But there are other problems even for those who do not have to contend with such extremes in their personal existence. This is pointed out in a new book by Jeffrey Rosen (The Unwanted Gaze: The destruction of privacy in America, New York: Random House, 2000). His defence of privacy is based on the shallowness of the new forms of human interaction in cyberspace. "Privacy protects us from being misdefined and judged out of context. This protection is especially important in a world of short attention spans, a world in which information can easily be confused with knowledge. When intimate personal information circulates among a small group of people who know you well, its significance can be weighed against other aspects of your personality and character... Your public identity may be distorted by fragments of information that have little to do with how you define yourself. In a world where citizens are bombarded with information, people form impressions quickly, based on sound bites, and these brief impressions tend to oversimplify and misrepresent our complicated and often contradictory characters."
 
Similarly, in Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, Simson Garfinkle details the insidious threats to privacy that arise from the Internet, from public and private surveillance cameras, from biometric devices and medical technology, from spy satellites and computer chips, and, above all, from the unrestrained gathering and unauthorised sharing of personal information through computer databases. Garfinkle argues that the main threat to privacy does not come from Orwellian totalitarian states but from commercial interests. Garfinkle begins by arguing that "technology by itself doesn't violate our privacy or anything else; it's the people using this technology and the policies they carry out that create the violations." But he ends by arguing that the "technology is neutral " argument is wrong. "History is replete with the dehumanising effects of technology. By its very nature, technology is intrusive."
 
This argument is reinforced by the statement of Scott McNealy, Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems, one of those in the vanguard of this new technology. His cheerful response to a question at a product show introducing a new interactive technology called Jini, was "You already have zero privacy - get over it." All this may sound unduly alarmist, especially as it could be argued that, just as technology can be developed to invade privacy, so also it can be encouraged to protect it. But the chilling thought does remain, that while snooping is clearly profitable for employers, advertisers and others who want to control, protecting privacy is much less so. This being the case, it is not difficult to see which sorts of technology will get more support.
 
This is what has led to the fear being expressed that more and more people will effectively end up under constant surveillance like the dehumanised hero of the Hollywood film The Truman Show, a character who has been placed on an elaborate stage set without his knowledge or consent and whose every move, as he interacts with the actors who have been hired to play his friends and family, is broadcast by hidden video cameras. Even Orwell would be taken aback.