Social networks are the defining cultural movement of our time, empowering us in constantly evolving ways. We can all now be reporters, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster; participate in crowd-sourced scientific research; and become investigators, helping the police solve crimes. Social networks have even helped to bring down governments. But they have also greatly accelerated the erosion of our personal privacy rights, and any one of us could become the victim of shocking violations at any time. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world. While that nation appears to be a comforting small town in which we socialize with our selective group of friends, it and the rest of the Web are actually lawless frontiers of hidden and unpredictable dangers.
