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