I think, as so often happens between you and I, Justin, that we actually mostly agree, but are getting tripped up in terminology. Dodging the anonymity/privacy bullet for another time, however, I'm still compelled to address this point: "I do not give my soul in a conversation, a trip to the grocery store, an argument on the street or searching for alternate means of contraception." I don't disagree at all, in fact, with your contention that aggregation of data poses an incredibly serious harm to your identity. But I think you're missing a subtler point from my essay (and as its author, I am probably responsible for you missing this point). In the second part of my essay, I am arguing that urban spaces help create precisely the attitude you embody in the quotation above: that is, that the mundanities of what you do, aren't you, and so don't need to be protected. You say they only need to be protected in aggregation, because this is the point at which people can draw conclusions about you from the data, and I may or may not agree, but my point goes in another direction. It is that different spaces can teach us different things about what each of those individal actions (having the conversation, going to the store) mean in terms of identity. You say you don't cede your soul in your what you buy at the market, but I believe that you do, and moreover, I believe (and my essay argues) that the reason you and I feel differently about this is that I grew up in a space that fostered privacy and you grew up in one that didn't. Part of the reason, I think, that you don't feel any of these things, absent aggregation, represent you is because you live in a space which removes your responsibility for them. You don't have to catch your own fish or make your own contraception (please, god, don't try that)-- but if you did, you might feel that each discrete act represented a part of you, of your identity and your soul, and thus you would feel more inclined to protect that against intrusion, even where the threat of data aggregation was less pertinent.

Is that responsive to your argument? We clearly disagree at least on one point, which is fine, but I worry that my work wasn't clear enough if this is the disagreement than we are having.

-- DanaDelger - 18 Feb 2009

I think the difference of opinion between the two of us centers around Dana's assertion that "when [the city dweller] realizes that [the government] want more than to enter his home but his soul, it hardly matters—he ceded it to the multitudes long ago." I think that this misstates what happens. I do not give my soul in a conversation, a trip to the grocery store, an argument on the street or searching for alternate means of contraception. It is wrested from me when the data are put together in a dossier and conclusions reached about who I am. The taking of the soul is not about privacy or anonymity, but about the harm of data aggregation (or is it about all three?).

Data aggregation can be done in either the city or the country. It is easier to lose yourself by accident in the (or our hypothetical) country, where everyone knows who you are and there is a clear, space-drawn line between public and private. This is what we have, for the purposes of this conversation, been calling privacy-if you cross that line, you risk losing control of your soul. But in the city, it must be taken from you, collected systematically from places you shop, by people following you or from microphones in convenient places. This is what we have been calling anonymity, and it is a much more blurry line. Both of these concepts protect your soul. Dana and I agree here too (see her second paragraph in response, above), what I think we disagree about is the consequences.

I do not think that the city dweller thinks that she has opened herself to the harm because she is more observed than she was when she lived in the country. I do not believe it any more than I believe that by tearing up my diary (if i kept one) into 1,000,000 pieces and scattering them to the wind, I could expect someone to know what I wrote about on the day before my wedding.

-- JustinColannino - 18 Feb 2009

Between Ted and Justin’s comments, I think we’re experiencing a confusion of terminology. There is a difference between “privacy” and “anonymity.” Just because they can, and often do, overlap, does not make them coterminus with one another. I think that the city/country dichotomy presents this paradox: When I am in New York, everything I do is anonymous, but nothing is private. In Wyoming (or the perhaps idealized Wyoming that I present in the paper), nothing is anonymous (everyone knows your name), but more things are private. This dichotomy, I think, perhaps partly explains the difference between our theoretical city and country dwellers. Ted, you noted that anonymity is part of the bargain we make with the city, but I think this is less a bargain and more a bait and switch. This goes to Justin’s point—because we are anonymous in the city, we don’t realize how much privacy we have “ceded to the multitudes.” That is to say, we don’t recognize how much the aggregation of data (Justin’s point) and the internet (Ted’s point) has made even our theoretically anonymous conduct non-private and, of course, commercially valuable. By contrast, spaces which disallow anonymity force us to be more thoughtful at least, if not more militant, about policing our privacy, because we cannot escape the fact that our conduct comes back to us and our identities in a fundamental way.

You both pointed out how our expectations of others “not caring” may have also reshaped our expectations, and I don’t disagree. But again, I think this may go back to the difference between what is anonymous and what is private. I still maintain that we have ceded privacy to the multitudes as an inevitable effect of urbanization, but I will concede that our ideas about anonymity have perhaps blinded us to some extent to that loss. Part of my point in this essay was that certain spaces force you to feel very acutely what constitutes your identity (killing the deer verses buying soup cans at the mega mart) and therefore alters your conception of what it means to protect that identity. Anonymity, the kind a city provides, cuts you off from that link--- you don’t feel your actions are you and so the fact that they aren’t private means much less than if your space forced you to constantly recognize what ultimately constitutes your identity.

-- DanaDelger - 17 Feb 2009