After reading Despite High-Tech Snoops, We're In A Golden Age Of Privacy, the author of Household Chemical asked his students about privacy. The results were interesting:

Household Chemicals: A Private Life:

"...I am currently teaching a media studies class and asked my students their opinions on this topic. It became very apparent that their personal privacy is very dear to them. Confirming Geewax, almost all of them had private bedrooms while growing up, and a fair number had private bathrooms. Thus, when probed about their notion of what is personal, they seemed to suggest that personal means anything having to do with bodies and bodily functions, which is to say there is a private body and a public body and never the twain shall meet. On the other hand, data is abstract, disembodied as it were. In this mindset there is really nothing at stake in those traces of data we leave practically everywhere in our electronic lives - they do not impinge on our embodied identities. The data are not us, or at least until the credit card bill arrives.

At first glance, such an outlook may seem dangerously naive, especially in the age of identity theft. However, I wonder if the perceived necessity for physical privacy is symptomatic of a much more profound desire for a stable identity, taken from us precisely because we cannot help but to propagate ourselves in bits and pieces, as data-traces, in our electronic transactions?

At first glance, such an outlook may seem dangerously naive, especially in the age of identity theft. However, I wonder if the perceived necessity for physical privacy is symptomatic of a much more profound desire for a stable identity, taken from us precisely because we cannot help but to propagate ourselves in bits and pieces, as data-traces, in our electronic transactions?"

Labels: identity theft, information breaches