Reasons for Both Pessimism and Optimism: A Response to the Commentaries

We had thought that our piece presented about as bleak a picture of the current privacy climate as could be imagined. These three superb commentaries, however, suggest that we may have fallen short of plumbing the depths of the current problem. Yet, if they are, possibly, even more despairing than we are about the current state of affairs, we read these commentaries as more optimistic about the prospects for an improvement of the situation.