The Right to Privacy
I think we're confusing the right to privacy with the availability of privacy. One of those has changed over time, and as Chagur writes, it has been altered quite suddenly with the arrival of computers. But the other hasn't changed, and never will. That's the right to privacy. It doesn't really change if you're a celebrity, if you're a politician, if you're a giant ogre living in North Dakota that feeds on small lambs.
I don't believe the problem has exacerbated because of computers or technology. It's because these things, and their burst of progress in the last few years has brought with it primarily one thing: information. We are up to our ears in information. The good, the bad, the ugly. In a few mouse clicks we find area codes, quotes, Bible inconsistencies, pictures of ancient paintings, literary works and city maps in a matter of minutes. And that's if my finger slips off the mouse a few times. When I'm on, it takes seconds. And if I'm on and have a credit card, I can pull up your last month's cell phone bill for, say, a $100.
And that's where wet1's statement, "The public has a right to know has been used more times than a baseball bat" comes in. That's just about right - and whether you want to pin it on past mistreatment by our government of secrets we may have wanted public or a misuse of this wealth of information by the few that hurts many, it doesn't matter. Perhaps in the onslaught of facts, files, and figures technology has brought us, we were too slow in containing it. It's been said that the real technology in the next years will be containing, indexing, and categorizing every whisper and sigh of fact and figure we can. And hopefully file away some of our secrets in the process.