Digital Natives and Privacy

I'm reading three related books at the same time:

1. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
2. Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott
3. The Broken Window by Jeffery Deaver

It's an interesting mixture of reading. All of the books discuss the privacy concerns for "anyone who leads a life mediated ... by digital technologies" (Palfrey and Gasser, 61). No laws for managing digital data currently protect us sufficiently. And Deaver's crime novel, though fiction, is scary because the scenario seems increasingly possible.

I was curious about this idea of the broken window in relation to identity theft, so I searched and found this Wikipedia entry:

"The parable of the broken window was created by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen) to illuminate the notion of hidden costs associated with destroying property of others. Bastiat uses this story to introduce a concept he calls the broken window fallacy, which is related to the law of unintended consequences, in that both involve an incomplete accounting for the consequences of an action. Economists of the Austrian School frequently cite this fallacy, and Henry Hazlitt devoted to it his book Economics in One Lesson."

The hidden costs for digital natives is definitely their privacy and the possibility for rampant identity theft.