In between they touch upon "Digital Dilemmas":

new electronic technologies deal with the very essence of human society: communication between people. Earlier technologies, from printing to the telegraph, have done likewise, and have wrought big changes over time. But the social changes over the coming decades are likely to be much more extensive, and to happen much faster, than any in the past, because the technologies driving them are continuing to develop at a breakneck pace. More importantly, they look as if together they will be as pervasive and ubiquitous as electricity. Whether this will be for good or ill is impossible to predict, because how they are applied will be a matter of social and political choice. Many of these choices will be difficult and divisive.

....The reason to think that the internet revolution will not only resume but accelerate is that advances in its underlying technologies show no signs of slowing down. The power of computer chips continues to race ahead. Moore's law--according to which the power of a computer chip will double about every 18 months (see chart 1)--has proved to be true since 1965

....Victor Zue, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, expects high-speed access to the internet to be virtually free in rich countries within five years.

....Tim Berners-Lee, famous as a founder of the world wide web, is trying to win agreement from a coalition of companies to establish the standards for what he calls the "semantic web", a more intelligent version of today's internet that will take the drudgery out of searching for information by evaluating its context.

....For the sake of argument, this survey will assume that we are heading towards a networked society of ubiquitous, mobile communications capable of constant monitoring. Whether this arrives in 20, 30 or 40 years does not really matter. The point is that the destination seems not merely possible, but probable, so it is not too soon to ask: what do we want this technology to do?

Privacy:

Cookies caused a furore when their widespread use was first publicised years ago, but now they are accepted as standard practice; indeed, their use has expanded vastly, and using the web without them is now virtually impossible. Information they provide is shared by thousands of websites through advertising-network companies. The largest of these, DoubleClick, has agreements with over 11,000 websites and maintains cookies on 100m users. These can be linked to hundreds of pieces of information about each user's browsing behaviour. In addition, users are being tracked through other methods by internet service providers, website hosts and e-mail services.

When I was researching the Encyclopedia of Record Producers discography database I used the Web extensively - I didn't always want the sites I was visiting to know who I was. I purged my cookies daily, even hourly - haha! But now I have so many sites I visit regularly that require registration, I just leave the cookies on and delete them only when the load gets too big, knowing I will have to reregister at my familiar haunts. I have allowed convenience to trump privacy. I'm not the only one.