I suppose we could just roll over and accept that this is the way the world is going. “Privacy is dead. Get over it,” as Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, reportedly once advised. Or we can fight back, to restore some of our lost privacy. We can do this by setting our own standards and sharing them. We can do it by working directly on companies like Facebook, whose ultimate sources of revenue we are. You can use Facebook to shape Facebook.

We can also try to push our governments in at least three ways: to curb their own incursions into our privacy; to regulate overintrusive companies better; and to punish private violations, like the one that drove Tyler Clementi to take his life. The very networking technologies that reduce our privacy can also empower us in the fight back. Unlike the movie, this is genuinely dry, slow and boring stuff; but our future liberties will depend on it.