Privacy is universal value. But according to The Economist in 1999 it is finished – killed off by the remarkable capacity of information technology to analyse, trace and re-assemble personal data: affording an unprecedented insight into individual attitudes and activities. Based on the progress made in implementing the OECD Guidelines on Privacy (1980), the author, who chaired the OECD group that devised those Guidelines, reviews their impact, the need to update them and contemporary proposals for new privacy protections suitable to the current technologies. He concludes that the capacity to uphold human values in the context of new technologies, such as informatics and genomics, presents one of the largest ethical questions for the 21st century.