Laws are bad weapons in the fight to protect privacy. Once we invoke the law, the bad deed has ordinarily been done, and society has lost. Attempting to restrain technological progress is another bad strategy--it's a fool's game and won't work. The best method for protecting privacy in 2025 is the same method we have always used: teaching our children to tell right from wrong, making it plain that we count on them to do what is right.

Outrageously naive advice for a high-tech future? Think again. It has been field-tested, and it works. All over the country, people leave valuable private papers in unlocked mailboxes along the street. Astonishing! Suburban mail is a vastly easier mark than anything in cyberspace will ever be. But our mailboxes are largely safe because we are largely honest. Some technology pundits have been startled by people's willingness to confide their credit-card numbers to websites. But for years we have been reciting those numbers over the phone. And we have all sorts of other long-standing habits (paying our taxes, for example) that reflect our confidence in the honor of our fellow citizens.

As we venture further into the deep waters of technology, temptations increase. When it comes to temptation resistance, we are admittedly not at the top of our game in early 2000. This is an age of moral confusion. We love to talk about law; we hate morality talk. But we will snap out of this dive, as we have snapped out of others before. Among our characteristic American obsessions, two have been prominent since 1776--our technological inventiveness and our stubborn desire to know and do what is right.

And by 2025, the issue will be framed differently. We are obsessed with privacy because we have temporarily mislaid a more important word: dignity. We talk about our "right to privacy," but we don't really mean it. This broken-down, ramshackle idea falls apart the moment you blow on it. Privacy to commit murder? To beat a wife or child? To abuse an animal? To counterfeit money? To be insane, refuse treatment and suffer never-endingly? Privacy is no absolute right; it is a nice little luxury when we can get it. Dignity is a necessity to fight for. And come 2025, life will be better: not because of the technology revolution but because of a moral rebirth that is equally inevitable and far more important.

David Gelernter is chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, art critic of the Weekly Standard and a professor at Yale.

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