today i finally read through the privacy thread and am really appreciating it. what is really interesting in the discussion is the way that talking about privacy (individual or privacy as a public good) automatically opens up questions about property, labor and commodification of the public sphere. after spending the last few years asking the question how to deal with privacy in systems design, i have found that undoing this entanglement does injustice to what privacy has become in surveillance/information space(s). this type of disentanglement also has a negative effect on the type of privacy research in computer science but surely also in other fields like law and sociology. specifically, the focus of privacy research has been on confidentiality and anonymity. christian fuchs also mentions in his blog entry on the google buzz: "Therefore special privacy protection mechanisms are needed. All large collections of data pose the threat of being accessed by individuals who want to harm others" i am interpreting the "privacy protection mechanisms" to be legal protections as well as confidentiality and anonymity tools. although such solutions are very important and i would not want to spend a day without them, i have argued here (http://bit.ly/bpajqx) why in a surveillance society there are just as well situations in which confidentiality and anonymity can work against the individual or a community. david phillips has also written a lot about the importance of being able to negotiate the public and private divide with respect to queer politics. he opens up the discussion on what privacy can mean in a society which has integrated digital into everyday life, and how confidentiality and anonymity can be the means for negotiating the public private divide, but are not goals in themselves. a recent case in which anonymity itself can backfire is the documentary film "i love alaska" (http://www.minimovies.org/documentaires/view/ilovealaska ). a couple of dutch filmmakers produced this film based on the profile of an anonymous user selected from the aol search data released in 2006. the film is on the one hand very interesting: the filmmakers saw the queries of this anonymous user as her prose and used it to narrate their film (without her knowledge). one of the interesting developments of our digital times has been the possibility of "participatory surveillance" (Albrechtslund,2008) which the film confronts the viewer with. it is exciting, touching, frustrating and curious to experience these queries. at the same time, the film is aggrevating (despite its cold calm) as one sits through very personal queries, written in full sentence into the aol search engine. it is impossible not to question what it means for data to become anonymous* and hence to question what it means to do something with anonymous data, or what happens to digital discretion once data goes anonymous? the filmmakers also put one profile under the magnifying glass, void of time stamps, reducing the profiled person to couple of not so sunny queries a day, reframing the queeries as a representation of some very deep truth about the querying person. but, as even google's vincent cerf will admit, it is not that single "identifiable" profiles are at the center of corporate attention, but rather aggregation of "de- identified" surveilance data often used for various types of social sorting and efficient services. hence, the film once again derails the focus of privacy from one of a social problem to that of a personal/ individual problem. the profile selected for the film is also worthy of questioning with respect to gender, class, age, sexuality, obesity etc. current data protection and companies like facebook and google have reduced privacy to a solitary ritual of setting your privacy controls on miniscule subsets of the data they compile and process about indivduals, communities and networks. this way of framing the problem unfortunately also makes it difficult to have some of the discussions about public services, the commons, etc. when it comes to surveillance and privacy. i agree with zeynep: Our social commons have moved online; it does not make sense to tell people to avoid these services as they essential to participating fully in the life of the 21st century. yes, but the question is, how can we make the existing discussions as well about the commons, property and material matters, and not just about individual choices on privacy...any ideas? s. * legally and technically anonymous data is in a sense vogelfrei. in the middle ages people could be declared vogelfrei (free as a bird) meaning that person was free to do whatever she pleased, but at the same time others were also allowed to do whatever they wanted to her, as no more legal protection was offered to that person. today data protection in europe for example does not protect anonymous data. what anonymity means is another big matter related to identity which is fun to discuss and lots of maths, but maybe not tonight. 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