privacy and publicy

 I'm reproducing a comment I wrote on a blog post about how society has shifted away from privacy.

Much more of our lives were public than we ever knew, but that information was functionally  inaccessible due to anonymity.  It is actually fortunate that social websites have alerted us to the  collapse of unintentional anonymity that has resulted from search technology.  Hopefully this will help people (including judges) understand the issues as we try to force intentional anonymity and encryption on our personal records held by the government and other institutions.

Update:  A somewhat related post on anonymity & intimacy.  http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_thompson_obscurity/