IS PRIVACY BECOMIMG A MERE ILLUSION ?

Google just acquired Jaiku, a company that broadcasts information regarding what you're listening to, and can announce even where you are, in real time to Google, enabling your friends, family, and presumably billions of strangers to learn, from moment to moment, what's going on in your head and your life.

Continuous transparency, track-ability, and streaming personal disclosures seem to be hallmarks of the current Internet age, and some are growing alarmed by the risks posed by emerging technologies to privacy.
But one of the concerned doesn't seem to be Jaiku co-founder Petteri Koponen, who said to the New York

Times that "Many people maintain their illusion of privacy," and therefore they may wish to limit some of the information that these new devices and programs broadcast.

Is this what privacy has become: Only an ILLUSION?

Separately, a company named Pudding, also located in Silicon Valley, is offering free internet phone calls to subscribers that permit their conversations to be bugged, i.e. to be monitored by voice-recognition programs enabling advertisers to place screen-pops on their computers as they flit from one commercially-valuable topic to the next.

When I voiced my concern to the President of Pudding in a live debate on CNBC, he acted oblivious to the loss of privacy that the foreseeable misuses of his service could cause.

Like a buggy program, he blandly reiterated, "We're just trying to provide a service."

Granted, the word "privacy" never appears in the United States Constitution, but it has come to be regarded as a fundamental right, bestowed by implication under the 14th Amendment, and enforced by courts.

Sometimes, it is defined as "The right to be left alone."

Is wanting to be left alone, in today's iPodded, iPhoned, and Googled world, simply an illusion?

When people seem so eager to waive their rights to privacy, by posting videos on MySpace and YouTube and by blogging, and by subscribing to Pudding and Jaiku for their "cool applications," should we protect these publicity hounds against their own folly?

More to the point, should we be concerned that the "reasonable expectation to privacy," which is the widespread legal standard, is shifting radically because of the inventions of technologists and the willing acceptance of the voyeurs and exhibitionists they serve?

In other words, are the nerds, freaks and early adopters rapidly eroding everyone else's right to be left alone, to reasonably reject electronic intrusions and the looming shadow of Big Brother?

If the rest of us don't speak up in a timely way, our silence might be construed as constituting "implied consent" to irreversible, 24/7 surveillance of nearly any kind.