Several recent and rather alarming developments have once again illustrated how many and varied are the threats to our privacy. Between Cambridge Analytica’s surreptitious harvesting of data from what now looks to be 87 million Facebook users for who knows what nefarious purposes, Amazon and Googles’ apparent plans to exploit so-called “smart speakers” to turn our homes into massive data collection centers, Russia’s continuing attempts to hack our democracy, and more and more news of massive data breaches, not to mention the continuing growth of government surveillance programs, it’s enough to make you wonder if the concept of privacy is simply outmoded. Because there’s so much of this sort of thing in the news these days, and because we’ve done a fair amount of hard thinking about the demise of privacy ourselves, we thought it would be a good occasion to take a deep dive into the question of whether the very idea of privacy is just an outdated notion from a bygone era.

Ken is convinced that the answer is a definite yes. He takes the plunge and gets the conversation started with a brand new blog article, “The End of Privacy: Or Why Your Home is not Your Castle and Your Data is not Your Own.”

And to take the conversation to yet another level, check out the following episodes from our extensive archive: