The reading for this week raised a number of issues that I have mulled over at one time or another.  Rather than summarize each article, I will address the points that stuck out for me or which raised questions.  I appreciated how well Beldad et al. provided typologies and various ways in which privacy has been discussed.  The belief that people own their information (p223) and that privacy is control over that information (p221) strikes me as problematic.  I agree that these are accepted notions of privacy, but they are untenable beliefs.  Unlike intellectual property discussed in last week’s readings, we are not the producers of our personal information.  A person’s social security number, voting history, address, or even their birthday are not thing produced by the person.  At most they are co-productions of one’s existence and actions in the context of some other institution.  I can think of no other example where I can claim ownership of something I neither produced, purchased, nor use outside their respective institutions.  And while I agree that personal information is a commodity, the idea that it has “become” a commodity denies that it has always been a commodity and may blind researchers to the ways in which that information is used in the expression of power by looking too hard at the means by which the information was collected and disseminated.  The belief of ownership of information runs contrary to core democratic principles of open government.  We demand individual privacy while at the same time we demand the openness of government and access to what it produces (which is why we have the Freedom on Information Act).  This ignores that the productions of a democratic society are the collective productions of individuals.  All so called personal information is created to facilitate our involvement and participation in that society.

The problematic nature of these beliefs is further illustrated in the Bodle article.  Not as an express point, but in its glaring absence in the discussion.  As a student of rhetoric, particularly how it can be used covertly, I found Bodle’s article interesting and compelling; and I cannot disagree with any of observations or conclusions.  However, what I believe was left unstated or understated was how the information at the heart of the discussion was produced.  While the thrust of Web 2.0 is user-generated content, the means of production still resides wholly with the company.  If I let a person into my shop to use my tool and my materials and bore the cost of production, what rights do I have relative to what is produced? I would argue that I have quite a lot of say in what happens to the final product.  While the language of Google’s Privacy Policies is vague and misleading, to assume information you provide while using their services (usually for free) should remain under your strict control without clear and explicit statements to the contrary is naive.

What really seems to have changed is the ease at which information can be accessed and the ease at which it can be cross referenced with other information.  To illustrate this further, consider the Supreme Court Case earlier this year about the use of GPS trackers.  While the tracker gathers the exact same information that a “tail” would, the ease at which this is possible caused the court to find that the use of GPS trackers require warrants while the traditional “tail” has not and does not. (A discussion of this can be found here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scotus-gps-ruling/)

Finally, regarding Ford’s use of a continuum to distinguish between public and private, I believe her model misrepresents the nature of two concepts.  However, Jurgenson and Rey also fail to address this fundamental misrepresentation.  Whether they are distinct and separate concepts or part of a continuum, this view implies that information can be placed on this continuum by the user with the assumption that it will remain where placed.  Furthermore, such a scale also implies that public or private can be measured or marked in some objective way.  Concepts of public and private are very subjective.  In truth, public and private are imaginary concepts to which we arbitrarily assign meaning for our own comfort.  Nothing is private that cannot be made public.  To act with an expectation of privacy is to justify actions which you already know would cause embarrassment or harm your relationship to another.  It is an excuse for duplicitous behavior.  Mitt Romney could argue that the fundraiser where he made the recently posted comments was a private event.  I don’t think he should get a pass on what was said just because he intended it to have a certain degree of privacy.  More than the contemptuous nature of the statements, the fact that someone who has been running for president for the past seven years would carelessly assume that anything he said could not potentially be broadcast worldwide displays a cognitive flaw that argues against his qualifications to be president.

I do want to make one additional clarification.  To me, there is a very real difference between privacy and security, even though the actions we take to acquire both are similar.  The Hope Diamond is on public display at the Natural History Museum, yet it is very secure.  At the same time, many things I might wish to be private are not very secure.