representatives concerned with the gathering and uses of personal data, consumer advocates, and researchers who use personal data. Several papers were commissioned and received.

As the committee undertook its analysis, it was struck by the extraordinary complexity associated with the subject of privacy. Most committee members understood that the notion of privacy is fraught with multiple meanings, interpretations, and value judgments. But nearly every thread of analysis leads to other questions and issues that also cry out for additional analysis—one might even regard the subject as fractal, where each level of analysis requires another equally complex level of analysis to explore the issues that the previous level raises. Realistically, the analysis must be cut off at some point, if nothing else because of resource constraints. But the committee hopes that this report suffices to paint a representative and reasonably comprehensive picture of informational privacy, even if some interesting threads had to be arbitrarily limited.

This study has been unusually challenging, both because of the nature of the subject matter and because the events that occurred during the time the report was being researched and written often seemed to be overtaking the work itself. The temptation to change the work of the committee in reaction to some news story or revelation of a pressing privacy concern was constant and powerful; our hope is that the work presented here will last longer than the concerns generated by any of those particular events.

The very importance of the subject matter increases the difficulty of approaching the issues in a calm and dispassionate manner. Many members of the committee came to the process with well-developed convictions, and it was interesting to see these convictions soften, alter, and become more nuanced as the complexities of the subject became apparent. It is our hope that readers of this report will find that the subject of privacy in our information-rich age is more subtle and complex than they had thought, and that solutions to the problems, while not impossible, are far from obvious.

The committee was highly diverse. This diversity reflects the complexity of the subject, which required representation not just from the information sciences but also from policy makers, the law, business, and the social sciences and humanities. Such diversity also means that the members of the committee came to the problem with different presuppositions, vocabularies, and ways of thinking about the problems surrounding privacy in our increasingly interconnected world. It is a testament to these members that they took the time and effort to learn from each other and from the many people who took the time to brief the committee. It is easy in such situations for the committee to decompose into smaller tribes of like-thinking members who do not listen to those outside their tribe; what