in 1999, surveillance was something other people did to you. Brin made the radical argument that surveillance was technologically inevitable--a notion privacy advocates found unthinkable--and that the best protection for individuals lay not in trying to limit the right to collect data on other people but in making sure that surveillance didn't become the privilege of an unwatched elite. Everyone should be able to watch everyone, including government officials; hence, the "transparent society." People hated that argument, because it accepted surveillance.
How 1999. Another approach is simply to ignore old ideas about privacy and make your private life public. In New York magazine, Emily Nussbaum argues that today's young people are doing exactly that and, in the process, completely redefining the idea of privacy.