Hey Brian,

I enjoyed your article (including the titles and the punchline at the end). I understand your concerns and I still wonder whether the road that the European Union has chosen for the past fifteen years - i.e. having a data protection regulatory framework which imposes specific obligations to all controllers of third party personal data - bears relatively better results by imposing "privacy-by-design" architectures, data-minimization and purpose limitation principles. It is indeed difficult to ensure the protection of user privacy where the very business model of digital libraries depends on the exploitation and process of their users' personal data.

-- NikolaosVolanis - 24 Mar 2010