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Concerns about the decline in personal privacy have long troubled citizens, scholars and politicians. The issue was most famously raised in “The Right to Privacy,” published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 by jurists Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice.

News coverage of the “Arab Spring” has often focused on the potential role of social media in facilitating the Middle East’s ongoing  political upheaval. Tools such as such as Facebook and Twitter, it has been suggested, helped citizens communicate and organize when governments were persistently unresponsive to their requests, and may have played a central role in the still-unfolding events.

For increasing numbers of people, sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are becoming crucial platforms for communicating with friends, family and work colleagues. Just as the mass-market introduction of phones, radio and the telegram changed patterns of emotional, social and political interaction across society, so too are Internet-based technologies and applications now. Precisely how these changes will play out, though, is just emerging.