Cell phones, online social networking, and email rule daily life in the 21st century, yet little has been done by Congress to try to update federal privacy laws in order to protect digital communication, an inattention that has brought with it a heavy price according to The New York Times.

Despite the apparent widespread acceptance of the more and more liberal privacy policies of services and sites, the great majority of Americans do not want to have their data collected, their usage analyzed or their activity tracked

Following the Carrier IQ controversy of last year, Representative Ed Markey has unveiled the first draft of a new bill, the Mobile Device Privacy Act, which would force app creators and mobile companies to inform users of the presence of any monitoring software.