At a time when we’re sharing more and more on the web, Matt Buchanan wonders if deletion is the only way to privacy: http://nyr.kr/YkLXq0

McElwee challenges his viewers to respect his privacy, and in return his films never have a dynamic of unearned disclosure.

Jessica Weisberg on the autobiographical documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee: http://nyr.kr/X2FMEY

Cartoon by Robert Leighton. For more: http://nyr.kr/TCbM1G

The F.B.I.’s request to access the private Gmail account maintained by General Petraeus would have been only one of 34,614 such requests Google received from governments as well as civil litigants around the world between January and June, 2012.

John Seabrook talks to Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, about how these requests are handled, and how the Electronic Communications Privacy Act affected the Petraeus scandal: http://nyr.kr/W7O4aH

…the sex party is vexing for the Party because it highlights the gap between the artifice of official solemnity and the unadorned reality beneath, a gap that has become more pronounced in recent years as the Web eats away at the monopoly on authority. 

Click-through to continue reading Evan Osnos, a New Yorker staff writer living in Beijing, on the “Lujiang Indecent Photos Incident”: http://nyr.kr/NHXedM

How to Get Privacy Right

The smartest solution, or at least framework, that I’ve read comes from Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. According to an essay that he published last year, titled “Databuse,” we should let certain things that we now consider privacy abuses slide. It doesn’t matter, in and of itself, that we have oceans of personal information floating around in government databases, or that advertisers know ever more about our lives. It’s disconcerting, but not harmful. Companies should tell the truth about what they’re doing, and consumers should have control over the data that’s collected. But don’t fret that marketers have collected keywords on everything you’ve tweeted about, or that the running-shoe ad on Facebook appears to know the size of your feet.

Comment: The Republicans’ Lost Privacy

And that is what makes Romney and Santorum’s criticism of Griswold so troubling. Over the years the modern Republican Party has reflected both libertarian and authoritarian tendencies. Both survive, in a way. When it comes to taxes and regulation, the libertarian side of the party is ascendant. Even the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism has faded from view. But with regard to civil liberties, the G.O.P. has embraced state power with a vengeance. Whether it’s the rights of wartime detainees, or abortion rights, or the rights of gay people to marry (or to be free from discrimination), contemporary Republican leaders reflect clear moral disapproval. (Even Ron Paul, who is often described as a libertarian, is a fierce opponent of a woman’s right to choose abortion. And Rick Perry recently announced that he’s against a right to abortion even in cases of rape or incest.) Privacy is often described as “the right to be left alone,” but that’s not a value that seems terribly important in the G.O.P. right now.