July 27, 2009 - With every high-tech gadget we buy, we give up a little more privacy. Many devices today are in constant communication with their manufacturer. Furthermore, it's not just consumers who are losing their rights; the technology gives authoritarian states whole new ways of keeping tabs on individuals.

Don't look now, but no matter where you go, you're connected. We - or most of us, at least - have opened our front doors to large corporations, hardware manufacturers, software firms, and search engines. We have allowed them to rifle through our jacket pockets and handbags. Now they can do as they wish with us, or do the bidding of the powers-that-be, in the form of a totalitarian government, for example.

Don't believe it? Well, consider a recent incident involving the Internet bookseller Amazon and two works by - ironically enough - George Orwell. Amazon had been selling the titles, "1984" and "Animal Farm" to owners of its Kindle reader, the special e-book device the bookseller developed. However, it turned out that the publishers of the Orwell books didn't own the electronic rights to the works; and so, to the surprise of buyers, Amazon erased the two books - which had been paid for and delivered - from the electronic reader. It turned out that Amazon's readers had unwittingly purchased pirate copies.

Now if this had happened in a normal bookstore, the customer would never even have known. A bookseller who had mistakenly sold pirated copies of a book would never have snuck into customers' living rooms, pulled the offending books from their shelves and left cash to the value of the purchase price on the kitchen table as recompense. In real life there are practical and legal obstacles to this sort of behavior. But in the electronic world it was simple. Probably Amazon won't even have to worry about legal problems relating to the action.