Our bad dreams about the haunted house called "Privacy, Circa 2025" are likely to focus on those all-seeing orbiting spy cameras that are always peering at us. They already exist, capable of observing from miles overhead that your lawn could use mowing and your dog needs a shampoo. By 2025, they will be really good. Audio spy technology has been advancing fast too. But the biggest threat to privacy doesn't even exist yet. By 2025 it will be in full bloom.

Today we are engulfed by the signal-carrying waves of broadcast radio and TV. Come 2025, we will be engulfed by a "cybersphere" in which billions of "information structures" will drift (invisible but real, like radio waves) bearing the words, sounds and pictures on which our lives depend. That's because the electronic world will have achieved some coherence by 2025. Instead of phone, computer and TV networks side by side, one network will do it all. TVs and phones and computers will all be variations on one theme. Their function will be to tune in these information structures in the sense that a radio tunes in station WXYZ.

These cyberstructures will come in many shapes and sizes, but one type, the "cyberstream," is likely to be more important than any other. A cyberstream is an electronic chronicle of your daily life, in which records accumulate like baroque pearls on an ever lengthening string--each arriving phone call and e-mail message, each bill and bank statement, each Web bookmark, birthday photo, Rolodex card and calendar entry.

An irresistible convenience: your whole life in one place. Tune in anywhere, using any computer, phone or TV. Just put your card in the slot, pass a security test (supply your password and something like a fingerprint) and you're in. You see your electronic life onscreen or hear a description over the phone, starting with the latest news and working back.

By feeding all this information into the food processor of statistical analysis, your faithful software servants will be able to make smooth, creamy, startlingly accurate guesses about your plans for the near future. They will find patterns in your life that you didn't know were there. They will respond correctly to terse spoken commands ("Call Juliet," "Buy food," "Print the news") because they will know exactly who Juliet is, what food you need and what news stories you want to read.

So it's 2025, and the living is easy. You glide forward on a magic carpet woven out of detailed data and statistical analyses. But should anyone seize access to your electronic life story, "invasion of privacy" will take on a whole new meaning. The thief will have stolen not only your past and present but also a reliable guide to your future.

Such information structures are just beginning to emerge. They are likely to be far safer and more private than anything we have ever put on paper. Nonetheless, by 2025, a large proportion of the world's valuable private information will be stored on computers that are connected to a global network, and if a thief can connect his computer to that same global network, he will have--in principle--an electronic route from his machine to yours.

The route will be electronically guarded and nearly impassable, unless the intended target has given out information he should not have--as people do. And unfortunately, electronic thievery and invasion of privacy are jackpots that keep growing. They are just the crimes for shameless, cowardly, clever crooks. No need to risk life or limb; just tiptoe over wires and through keyholes.

So what else is new? Technology always threatens privacy. Those threats usually come to nothing. They have been defeated before, and will be in the future, by a force that is far more powerful than technology--not Congress, the law or the press, not bureaucrats or federal judges, but morality.

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