ABSTRACT
This book is primarily concerned with public policy issues surrounding privacy and security. However, to discuss these issues in a meaningful way, you need to know a little bit about the technology that underlies these things. Indeed, if it were not for the various technological revolutions of the past several decades, there might not have been any major changes in the privacy and security scene. We give a layman’s introduction to three different topics: the Internet, the workings of computers, and data in general and data mining in particular. We call each a “primer,” after the school-books of old. Each primer is intended to be independent of the others.
