With the case, the New Jersey Supreme Court joined European authorities in holding that IP addresses are private. . . .

The New Jersey court specifically examined not just IP addresses, but also the clickstream data associated with particular addresses, and appeared to find an expectation of privacy in that data as well. "With a complete listing of IP addresses, one can track a person's Internet usage," the opinion reads. The court then quoted a law review article by privacy expert Daniel Solove for the proposition that clickstream data can allow the government to learn "the names of stores at which a person shops, the political organizations a person finds interesting, a person's ... fantasies, her health concerns, and so on." . . . .

"I think it is true that people are currently not aware of the consequences of their online reputations," Solove said. "This is all relatively new, so many people are putting information online without having experienced the dark side or realizing the damage it could do to themselves or others. That's definitely a big problem."

The fact that people are comfortable having information about them online does not, however, mean that they don't expect privacy, Solove added.

"The idea that privacy is about keeping deep, dark secrets hidden has become an almost antiquated notion," he explained. "Today, there are lots of other things people want, including control over the information so that it doesn't get used in certain ways."

People may be comfortable having information publicly available, for example, but they might not be comfortable if it were used for advertising purposes, he said.

"These results are very interesting, but how you interpret the data going into the future is fairly complicated because it depends on what we understand privacy to be," Solove concluded. "Some people haven't been bitten yet, and we're also dealing with nuanced understandings of privacy. But you can't conclude privacy is dead."

"When you have a bunch of people together all trying to achieve the same goal, the whole starts to take on a mind of its own," Solove says, "and people start to act in extreme ways that they might not otherwise act."

Professor Solove's deconstruction of the "I've got nothing to hide" position, and related justifications for government surveillance, is the best brief analysis of this issue I have found. These arguments are not easy to zap because, once they are on the table, they can set the terms of the argument. As Solove explains, "the problem with the nothing to hide argument is with its underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things." He warns, "Agreeing with this assumption concedes far too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide." Solove's bottom line is that this argument "myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy."

In his work, Solove addresses the reality that privacy problems differ: Not all are equal; some are more harmful than others. Most importantly, he writes, "to understand privacy, we must conceptualize it and its value more pluralistically." Through several years of work, Solove has developed a more nuanced concept of privacy that rebuts the idea that there is a "one-size-fits-all conception of privacy."

The concept of "privacy" encompasses many ideas relating to the proper and improper use and abuse of information about people within society. Privacy protects information not only because it would cause others to think less of the person at issue, but also simply to give us all breathing room: "Society involves a great deal of friction," Solove writes, "and we are constantly clashing with each other. Part of what makes a society a good place in which to live is the extent to which it allows people freedom from the intrusiveness of others. A society without privacy protection would be suffocation, and it might not be a place in which most would want to live."

Professor Solove's work - much of which he makes available online - helps clarify thinking about privacy in its fuller context, and helps explain what is wrong with reductive dismissals of privacy using the mantra, "I've got nothing to hide." Before rushing to give the Bush Administration more ways to invade our privacy, not to mention absolving those who have confederated with him to engage in the most massive invasion of America privacy ever, members of Congress should look at Solove's work. Too many of them have no idea what privacy is all about, and grossly underestimate the value of this complex and essential concept.

In a phone interview from his George Washington office, Solove, who teaches information privacy law, criminal procedure, criminal law and law and literature, said he is very serious in his belief that the Multistate Bar Exam is a "waste of time" that has no connection to a person's ability to practice law. But, he added, he wanted to take a humorous approach in the Law Review to the issue and poke "a little bit of fun at its understanding of the law."

In 1960, law professor William Prosser said there are four types of privacy violations: public disclosure of private facts, false publicity, appropriation of a name or likeness, and intrusion upon seclusion.

In 2006, law professor Daniel Solove offered four broader dimensions of privacy: information collection, information processing, information dissemination, and intrusion upon seclusion.

Dan Solove, associate professor of law at George Washington University, wrote A Taxonomy of Privacy to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive, concrete manner. He succeeded brilliantly. . . .

The taxonomy is a great advance over prior attempts to categorize privacy. The four classic privacy torts defined more than 40 years ago are virtually prehistoric. They are rarely relevant to modern information privacy violations. . . .

My guess is that Professor Solove’s article eventually will be recognized as a milestone in privacy scholarship. It should change for the better how we talk about privacy and how we think about privacy.

First Amendment wizard Eugene Volokh opposes most regulation of privacy information on free speech grounds. Judge Richard A. Posner similarly says the law shouldn't protect against the dissemination of even sordid information, since we need it to form accurate judgments about others.

Not so, writes Daniel Solove , an associate law professor at George Washington University. He argues that we can't be free unless we can protect some tiny piece of ourselves from the judgments of others. . . .

Solove argues that regardless of the language, codifying an inflexible federal standard that overpowers any state laws would be bad for consumers. "I think we're going to see a kind of net loss for privacy protection."

That approach no longer makes sense, said Daniel J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University. "In the information age," he said, "so much of our information is in the hands of third parties."

"We have to ask ourselves anew the larger question: What surveillance power should the government have?" said Solove, an assistant professor at George Washington University Law School. "And to what extent should the government be allowed to manage the development of technology to embody its surveillance capability?"

Solove and Hoofnagle propose that companies that collect, maintain and/or sell personal data should register with the Federal Trade Commission, and make available on public FTC materials and Web sites the types information they collect, how the information is used, the types of clients they serve and how they screen those clients.

They also recommend that the FTC create a centralized do-not-share registry, much like the national Do Not Call list, that lets consumers tell companies they do not want their information shared with third parties.

Consumers should also be allowed to place freezes on their credit reports, they suggest. Currently, consumers are not notified when a creditor views their report. That can facilitate identity theft, since a lender might grant a thief credit in the victim's name without the victim's knowledge.

"The FBI doesn't need to break into my house and search it," said Daniel Solove. "They can get everything they want to know from Amazon.com or my ISP." Solove, a professor at the George Washington School of Law, spoke at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University on Monday.

"The information in databases increasingly has an effect on our lives in real spaces," said Solove, author of The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. "And the way we think about the problem has dramatic effects on how we go about solving the problem."

"(The proposed legislation) is better than nothing, but it still needs to go further. There are a lot of unaddressed questions," he said.

Giving consumers access to their records at each company is meaningless if people don't know which companies to ask, Solove said.

"(The legislation) doesn't really address issues such as how are people to know who these companies are? Many people hadn't heard of ChoicePoint," he said. "And it's not just ChoicePoint. There are hundreds of data brokers. If you don't know who the companies are what good is a right of access?"

Where O'Harrow is descriptive, Solove is prescriptive. He includes a nearly encyclopedic analysis of the current state of privacy law relating to "digital dossiers" and argues that it falls short. For proper legal protections in modern society, Solove argues, "our understandings of privacy must be significantly rethought."

But is the "Big Brother" image a correct one? According to Seton Hall law professor Daniel Solove, "Kafkaesque" is a more applicable literary metaphor for net privacy. Solove, who teaches a course on privacy, argues in a 70-page thesis that the behind-the-scenes gathering of information more closely resembles Franz Kafka's "The Trial" — in which mysterious officials build a dossier about the main character — than George Orwell's images of "Big Brother's" constant surveillance in "1984."