ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the privacy and surveillance as 'literacies', exploring how the new practices of 'watching' and 'being watched' made possible by digital media are affecting the ways the communicate, manage our identities, maintain relationships, and negotiate social norms. People have sought to address the privacy challenges described above in different ways, suggesting technological solutions, legal solutions, and solutions that focus on equipping people with different kinds of 'literacies'. New technologies have always been associated with disruptions of norms regarding privacy. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, the development of portable photography was seen as such a threat to people’s privacy that it led US Supreme Court Justices Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to assert that individuals have a ‘right to privacy’, even when they are in public places. The chapter focuses on examples of pretexting that involve outright deception.
