One of the things I most adore about being Web-savvy is the opportunity to stretch reasonable standards of personal privacy. The Internet gives me immense power to learn about the lives of other people -- a difficult lure to resist. For example, when Matt the med student bought my car, I checked him out on the Web and then mentioned his old addresses and phone numbers in front of him. He seemed a little rattled by this, and so I used the opportunity to darkly imply that I could dick around with his credit rating if the negotiations went sour.

In another example, we got a bizarre phone call yesterday at my start-up firm from a young woman who had loads of questions about us but who wouldn't identify herself or her organization. Having worked in the public health field, where people are occasionally killed for their perspective on abortion, this gave me the creeps. The young woman did give me a fax number for me to send her more information, and I quickly reverse-searched it and found it belonged to a large advertising and PR firm in Phoenix, Arizona. Why Winward Cooley Avertising and Public Relations sent this poor intern or junior-level employee to gather info on us, I don't know. But when I sent them their fax, I took great pleasure in writing out their organization's name on the cover sheet. So there, I thought, read it and wonder.

I freely acknowledge my voyeuristic tendencies. I don't traipse through other people's back yards to peer furtively into their bedrooms, but the lure of encountering the hidden details of others' lives is an illicit thrill in which I sometimes indulge. I never knew this about myself as I grew up in the woods of Virginia, where there was no one to see, ever. But when I got to college, my freshman dorm room was situated across a courtyard from three floors of windows in which people constantly did the most amazing things. I was hooked on the minutia of their lives: studying, smoking, sleeping, sex, and just sitting around were all equally riveting. It was far more interesting and satisfying than television, because it was real.

Now the Internet offers the power to peek into the lives, if not yet all the bedrooms, of total strangers. You could easily find more about my background through the basic personal information tags on this site than I would rather you know. It can be hard to resist that forbidden Applet.

I recently received a lovely message from a woman who may be the one stranger who actually reads the Tales with any regularity. She probably doesn't know how totally pleased I was to receive that letter. (She knows it now, of course.) She also probably doesn't know that I was interested in who this person was, so I ran down her name and email address and found her personal website. It had pictures from her wedding, and when she ran a marathon, and other recent life events. I found it very charming. She probably would find the whole concept of me paying a visit to her online social life very creepy, but I only experienced an agreeable sense of quid pro quo.

It's often that easy for the voyeur to justify strolling past the boundaries of privacy. It can be seen as a victimless crime, a few harmless jollies garnished from spying an unknowing subject in the lit window of their life's theater. Or it can be justified by saying that the curtains of privacy are concealing acts so heinous that they deserve public scrutiny. People who are voyeurs by vocation, like journalists and special prosecutors, align themselves with elaborate systems of thought (the People's Right to Know Is An Essential Component of Democracy) to explain how their work transcends voyeurism. Frequently, the explanations are logically consistent enough to forestall what must be a painful personal admission: that they enjoy spreading open the details of private lives to the air of public attention.

It's too bad that voyeurism is in such bad repute. First, because I expect that many people out there are as fascinated by the lives of others as I am, and I hate to see such a glaring disparity between people's enforced public disguises and their inner lives. Second, because every day that we publicly deny our shameful fascination with other people is a day in which we fail to share the realization that we're all wanting something more from each other. Maybe once that revelation is on the table, we'll be able to look for it in each other directly, instead of shamefully, furtively, through a blurry scrim of curtains and glass.