Privacy is the capacity to negotiate social relationships by controlling access to information about oneself. As laws, policies, and technological developments increasingly structure our relationships with social institutions, privacy faces new threats and new opportunities.

The essays in this book provide a new conceptual framework for analyzing and debating privacy policy and for designing and developing information systems. The authors are international experts in the technical, economic, and political aspects of privacy; the book's particular strengths are its synthesis of these three aspects and its treatment of privacy issues in Canada and in Europe as well as in the United States.