Time to 'like' new privacy laws?

What would the Founding Fathers think of Facebook?

Great question. We keep referring almost everything back to the Fathers - so it makes sense to wonder what they'd think of social media. You can just see it:

(Madison: "Well, there goes the right to privacy."

Jefferson: "This is so cool!")

This question - which opens into a bigger one, about the fate of personal privacy in the communications age - is the topic Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the National Constitution Center.

Lori B. Andrews, author of I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did (Free Press, $26), will join other experts to discuss perhaps the biggest techno-sociological issue of our day: Can anything be kept private? Does the common man or woman have a chance when all is digitized, copied, and shared?

The Founders would have had much to consider:

"Locationgate" of 2011, when it was learned Google's Android and Apple's iPhone and iPad stored location data on users.

Online sites that sell personal information on users and their tastes and choices.

Porn and scams and spam spam spam.

Hackers who pilfer personal ID and information.

Facebook's rehandling of your info and who can see it; some now worry about Facebook Timeline, a program that lets you see a person's posts over time more easily.

The public immortality of your e-mail and posts, deathless info-bits that could someday morph to little land mines beneath your career, marital, or business chances.

Your TiVo telling folks what shows you watch (not with your name on it, but still), and your Kinect, which can tell folks what games you play and what sports you like.

And as recently as this week, at the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the debut of "connected homes," where the appliances can talk to you - and third parties.

Yes: What would the Founders think?

Revisiting the rules. Andrews, the main guest at the Constitution Center on Thursday, is professor of law and director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at Illinois Institute of Technology. Andrews says, mostly, comm tech is wonderful. But the law, in her view, is lagging behind the reality.

Greg Lastowka, professor of law at Rutgers, concurs: "We're not one step behind; we're five steps behind."