about privacy

danah made an excellent post on privacy and government spying.
I have mixed feeling about the whole privacy issue.
Of course i don't like the idea of the government spying on me but at the same time I hate the whole "what about the privacy issue?" argument that is given at each time a company is trying to do something useful using customer's data.
For instance, i don't care about my privacy when I use last.fm because I think that me giving up a little bit of who I am is nothing compare to the added value last.fm brings to me in terms of social recommendations.
I don't really care as well about my privacy when I put my pictures on Flickr or hang out on MySpace...up to a certain extent as I realized little by little.
Same thing when using Google desktop search, there is so much thing Google knows or could know about me, but I don't really sweat it because I somehow trust them with my data and think they bring me considerable value in return.
Really privacy does not really exist anymore when I think of how much my banks, the government, Google...have for digital bits about us.
And I guess I had a little bit of that "so what I am not doing anything wrong, so why would privacy be such an issue" that Danah finds irritating.
At the same time, I totally and more and more understand her point that we are not always behaving in the "accepted social norms" and that it is important to protect that.
I came to realize this after several little incidents at my work showing me the limits of wanting to be transparent and open "digtally" and the impact it could have on the image I wanted to project:
- a coworker making me the reflexion that I was listening to some weird shits after I made all my itunes library accessible on our work network including some more breakcore and experimental electronic tracks that are pretty "noisy", and that it gave him a new perspective on me.
That's true that this is something I like but the image that goes with it is not something I want to portray at work. So I moved some of my tracks back to private and left what I thought would be "socially more acceptable"
- me showing to my boss Mercora and Last.fm and him fixating on: what is it that you're listening to? The new Pornographers? What is that? It is just an inoffensive pop band but going through the length of explaining it to my boss is something I could have lived without.
- my old manager saying "so had some fun last WE?" after I uploaded a bunch of pictures on Flickr of me and a co-worker celebrating at a very fun party where in some of them we may have looked a little tipsy...there again I moved these pics to "friends only", not that Sean, my old boss, cared at all but more because again of what image did I want to portray to my work sphere, as well as because of the fact that it was not just about me but about my co-worker as well.

So I guess there is what I am okay with portraying and there it is fine that my "attention data" are used and displayed because I find value in it... and then there are these embarassments or "not always socially acceptable" moments that I would prefer and should be able to keep to myself or a chosen inner social circle or even a trusted service provider. And I would love to have control over that.
Which is why an organization like Attention Trust is so important and why the ability to control who sees what will be a highly demanded service in the future.

Anyhow, excellent post from Danah with some serious food for thought