• But that's an outcome of the definition, not the subject. Data that is publicly available and data that is legally available if you pay for it is not secret, and the activity of acquiring information that it's legal to acquire and using it to infer something valuable or interesting is called "learning."

Secrecy is affected because many people mistakenly believe that when they, for example, place an order online for a sexual oriented product, that communication is secret to those other than the vender and the purchaser.

• If they are promised it is, it is. If not, not. That's just like the rule in the rest of the world, right?

For the same reason anonymity is affected because people believe that the vender will not personally know them (and will not disclose the information to people who may personally know them). In fact, people apparently purchase sensitive items via the internet because they believe that such method of purchase protects their anonymity better than does physically walking into a store and making the purchase. In the context of internet searches and browsing of websites many people mistakenly believe they have complete anonymity. Finally, because data can be used unknowingly to the searcher/purchaser’s disadvantage autonomy is affected.

• So far the case rests entirely on people's mistaken impressions, which is not the strongest possible basis on which to contend that something other than education needs to be done.

All three components of privacy and in particular autonomy are intertwined with personal freedom. http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/03/freedom-and-autonomy.html. I begin with what seems axionomic that freedom and autonomy is desirable. From that I follow with a proposal that true freedom requires meaningful choice: “Freedom means having control of your own life.” See Richard Stallman, Wikisource:Speeches, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_Software_and_Beyond:_Human_Rights_in_the_Use_of_Software.

• But you're taking Richard out of context unless you explain that his thinking on this issue is not at all the same as yours, and leads to different conclusions.

The challenge and desire then is to determine which legal system actually provides people with the best meaningful choice and freedom with respect to their privacy and autonomy.

• I don't think Justin's points are to be dealt with as space allows. Collecting information and making judgments about it is constitutionally-protected learning. You can no more make it required that I get people's permission to learn about them than that I get their permission to learn mathematics. What I know about the senior Senator from New York or the President of Columbia University or the guy who rents my house in the country is not something I can be commanded by anyone to forget, or refrain from using to make inferences that are either useful or beautiful. Any other result vitiates the very idea of free expression. If that proposition is true, your argument fails completely. If that proposition is false, where and how is it false?