Privacy in Electronic Public Space: Emerging Issues

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Abstract
Telecommunications networks (including the National Information Infrastructure being promoted by the Clinton Administration in the U.S.) are increasingly being perceived as important to the well-being of the economy and the polity. Use of telecommunication networks is increasing dramatically. Telecommunication networks are no longer limited to the conveyance of voice messages from one point to another. The kinds of information that can be transmitted over telecommunication networks now include voice, data, and images. No longer are these networks limited to point-to-point communication. Conferencing capabilities enable many-to-many communication. Automatic dialers combined with taped human or voice-synthesized messages “broadcast” to many points. Interactive or recorded mass announcement services allow simultaneous access to identical messages by multiple users. Along with these developments, telecommunication and privacy—two terms that were hardly if ever mentioned in the same sentence—have become strongly linked in the past two to three years, owing to a number of reasons.