Has privacy become a luxury good?

Julia Angwin, a senior reporter at ProPublica, writes in the New York Times about how it takes a lot of money and time to avoid hackers and data miners.

“In our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good. After all, as the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. And currently, we aren’t paying for very much of our technology.

Not long ago, we would have bought services as important to us as mail and news. Now, however, we get all those services for free — and we pay with our personal data, which is spliced and diced and bought and sold.”

But, she asks, do we want privacy to be something that only those with disposable money and time can afford?