Can privacy survive the evolution of the Internet?

We reported earlier this week that Google’s vision of the future is one in which the internet is all-encompassing and ever present, but what does that mean for privacy. When the internet becomes virtually inescapable in an urban environment, how can we possibly hope to maintain our privacy? 

This week Google’s Eric Schmidt was on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he suggested that the future Internet will be, in one sense, invisible — because it will be embedded into everything we interact with. “The Internet will disappear,” he predicted (via The Hollywood Reporter). “There will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. “Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”