Nine months after 9/11, Hasan Elahi, an art professor at Rutgers University, was detained at the Detroit airport after the F.B.I. received a bogus tip that he had stockpiled explosives in a storage locker. Six months of interrogations and nine polygraph tests later, the F.B.I. let him go.

Elahi has self-consciously, if a bit ostentatiously, surrendered his privacy via a personal Web site.

He began posting logs of his phone calls and pictures of his whereabouts. Up went his banking statements. He took to revealing the coordinates of his exact location on his Web site in real time. He snaps time-stamped digital images and uploads them.

Elahi is merely living an exaggerated version of a life we all live now. Our cellphones serve as de facto tracking devices, sending data on our whereabouts to our service providers; our digital cameras stamp the photos we snap with a date and time; and surveillance cameras in public places capture our comings and goings.