“The end of privacy” löd budskapet på framsidan av The Economist, den 1 maj 1999. Intressant nog kan artiklarna fortfarande hittas i fulltext. På ledarsidan skriver The Economist:

Privacy is doomed for the same reason that it has been eroded so fast over the past two decades. /…/ Privacy is a residual value, hard to define or protect in the abstract. The cumulative effect of these bargains – each attractive on their own – will be the end of privacy.
For a similar reson, attempts to protect privacy through new laws will fail – as they have done in the past. /…/
Policing the proliferating number of databases and the thriving trade in information would not only be costly in itself; it would also impose huge burdens on the economy. Moreover, such laws are based on a novel concept: that individuals have a property right in information about themselves. Broadly enforced, such a property right would be antithetical to an open society. It would pose a threat not only to commerce, but also to a free press and to much political activity, to say nothing of everyday conversation.

Inne i tidningen fanns ett fördjupande reportage, där det bland annat stod att läsa:

This year both Intel and Microsoft have run into a storm of criticism when it was revealed that their products–the chips and software at the heart of most personal computers–transmitted unique identification numbers whenever a personal-computer user logged on to the Internet. Both companies hastily offered software to allow users to turn the identifying numbers off, but their critics maintain that any software fix can be breached. In fact, a growing number of electornic devices and software packages contain identifying numbers to help them interact with each other.

Felix Stalder skrev en kommentar på Nettime som även publicerades i Heise under rubriken “The End of Privacy as the Triumph of Neoliberalism“.
Enligt honom var artikeln i The Economist ett paradexempel på nyliberal ideologi som framställer djupt ideologiska uppfattningar som “naturliga” eller “realistiska”:

In this case, ubiquitous creation of sensitive personal data and access to them by anyone able to pay for it. What is natural about that? Nothing! While it is indeed difficult to control digital information once it has been created or gathered, it is possible to prevent data from being created. The introduction of the Pentium III chip (with sports a unique ID number that can be retrieved over the Net) has nothing to do with the unstoppable “tidal wave” of technological progress, but everything with the transformation of the Internet from an environment built for information sharing to one optimized for information selling. /…/
Data trails, as anything online, are constructed, and their paths are indicative of the culture and interests of those constructing them.