I find most of the public debates on these issues rather myopic, in that they focus on the issue of surveillance by governments as the main problem. What I find to be a much more depressing prospect, however, are the consequences of a low-privacy society that may well come to pass through purely private institutions and transactions.

Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially. Instead of fading memories and ever more remote records about your past mistakes, they will forever be thrown right into the face of anyone who just types your name into a computer (and not to even mention the future more advanced pattern-matching and cross-referencing search technologies). This of course applies not just to mistakes, but also to any disreputable opinions and interests you might have that happen to be noted online.

Moreover, the social norms may develop to the point where it's expected that you constantly log the details of your life online. We do seem to be going in that direction, if the "social networking" sites are any indication. In such a situation, even if you had the option of reducing your online profile, it would send off a powerful signal that would make you look weird and suspicious.

I am worried about these developments much more than about what our sclerotic governments might do with their new surveillance capabilities. After all, even today, they can find out whatever they want about you if they really care for some reason -- they just need to put some effort into cross-referencing the already abundant information you leave behind at every step. However, as long as you pay your taxes and don't misbehave in those particular ways they care about, you'll be comfortably under their radar, and I see no reason why it wouldn't stay that way. Even nowadays, if I were to express some opinions that aren't very respectable, I'd be much more worried about the prospect of these words forever coming up whenever someone searches for my name online than about the much more remote possibility that the government might take active interest in what I said.