The following editorial appeared Saturday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

We have no privacy anymore. Get used to it.

The stories of our lives – traffic tickets, the way we pay our bills, our Internet viewing habits, the D we got in freshman calculus – reside in bits and bytes in computers. For better and for worse, the technology revolution has linked those electronic blips, and it’s now much easier for prying eyes to see the digital you.

Government and business can and should do more to protect private information, especially the sort that can be used for fraud. But more of our secrets are coming out.

Forget the quaint notion that we can outlive our past. Potential lovers Google each other to weed ne’er-do-wells and felons from the dating pool. If a drunken driving arrest made the newspaper, up it will pop. Commercial data aggregators make a good living selling information about a person’s previous lawsuits, divorces, bankruptcies and arrests.

Applicants for jobs should expect their prospective bosses will take a look at their credit reports. Trouble paying the bills could keep a person from getting a job. Insurance underwriters also look at credit reports and use them to raise auto insurance rates.

The availability of all this data is not the worst of it. Identity thieves victimized 7 million Americans in 2003, along with their creditors. Last year, thieves tricked ChoicePoint into revealing personal data on 145,000 Americans, including their Social Security numbers. ChoicePoint is one of the biggest data aggregators serving business, but it’s not the only big company tricked out of data or hacked into.

We’re not even safe in our own homes. Home computers may hide “spyware” programs that track our travels on the Internet, and along with e-mail addresses report that behavior to a private company that targets consumers for advertising and/or sells the data to others. More malicious programs swipe logons and passwords, making bank and brokerage accounts vulnerable.

Much of commercial data aggregation is for the good. It’s good that singles can find out the criminal history of a prospective date. American consumers want credit, and bankers won’t lend money without good data on creditworthiness. Businesses need good workers, and a credit report is one clue – although a limited one – to a prospective employee’s conscientiousness and reliability.

But business and government need to tighten up rules and regulations. Laptops with sensitive data never should leave a secure office. Congress should ban intrusive spyware that saps privacy and slows personal computers. Companies that fail to safeguard data should face stiff government fines.

American consumers also must learn to act in self-defense. Good computer security software helps, as does the regular changing of passwords.

The information age has made life easier and business more efficient. But we’ve lost something too: It’s harder to keep our secrets secret and our pasts past.