This episode is presented by eBay.

Rob, everyone loves a deal and a bargain from time to time, don't they? Absolutely, mate. And you know where you can grab a great deal? Talk to me. Where? The eBay app. Yes, you are correct. You didn't need to talk to me. I already knew it. I love eBay. When you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. there's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else.

Then when you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. There's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else. Then when you're selling, it's so simple and most

importantly, free. It's free, Rob. When it's this easy to sell for free and there's great deals

on things you love. You can't help but say when it's eBay. It excludes vehicles and business

sellers.

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the seven days starting September 3rd, 2008. I'm Steve Merski. And I'm not watching you. But somebody could be

watching you, or listening to your phone calls, or going through your personal records.

The future of privacy is the subject of the special single-topic September issue of Scientific American

magazine. I spoke with editor-in-chief John Rennie about the issue this past Friday.

Let's first talk about where did this idea to do this as our single topic issue come from?

Well, the idea has been around for a while because it ties in so well with both technological issues and certain very important policy ones.

You know, it's a given that we live in the information age. Huge parts of our economy and our lives otherwise consist of us shuttling information around in different ways.

And we have more and more technologies that facilitate that.

What sometimes we can forget is that that information is our information. It's information about us. It's about

information about things that we care about. And although the expansion through all of these

technologies of ways of exchanging information increases the different kinds of services and

goods that can be available to us, at the same time,

it does open up lots of potential liabilities because you never know whether somebody is going

to be looking at your information when you wouldn't want them to. So we had felt Scientific American

had a very good reason to look at this kind of issue just from the technological standpoint,

but also, of course, there

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