Internet Privacy across Borders: “Trading Up” or a “Race to the Bottom”?

In the contemporary, industrialized society, people no longer exist and live in fixed locations and spaces. Instead, people are on the move—both physically and virtually—in their personal, professional, intellectual, and social spheres. Within and across these spheres, mobility, rather than stability, is likely to be the norm. Manuel Castells (1996) captures this feature of modern life in his theory of the space of flows, arguing that “our society is constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds, and symbols.”1 These flows—particularly information flows—constitute what Castells describes as the “network society,” where “networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture.”2