Privacy concerns are ubiquitous on the ‘net – as much a feature of the web as analysis, whining and pornography. The most recent kerfuffles over privacy were the false rumours of iPhone phoning home and the definitely-not-false worries about Facebook’s Beacon ads. We are, however, quite used to this now – we hear about something, we kick and whine, sometimes it gets fixed and sometimes it doesn’t.

But what is it exactly we are trying to defend when we protect our privacy online? I would suggest that most discussions about online privacy actually conflate two separate approaches. The first is obvious and is what I what i think we usually refer to: the inappropriate use of personal information by companies and individuals to, at best, target ads and, at worst, engage in identity theft. The second is a more general concern that might roughly be summed up by the phrase “keep your nose out of my business”. It isn’t so much a practical concern as it a personal, emotional one – a vague sense that my activities and tastes are my own concern and shouldn’t simply be available to anyone.

The distinction may seem trite, but I’d argue it’s crucial. This second aspect of privacy is intimately tied to our individual sense of self. As an example, when social music service last.fm was recently purchased by CBS, many decried the idea that their listening habits now belonged to a huge media company – that the transfer of data about one’s music tastes was akin to an invasion or betrayal. A friend of mine left the service immediately going so far as to call such sites ‘behaviour harvests’.

What strikes me most here is the shifting conception of identity at work. We often think of who we are in terms of a core identity that exists within us that is then expressed outwardly. How we conceive of privacy, however, suggests that our identity is also a collection of markers, a congolmeration of the social and economic activities that we partake in. When last.fm users left the service, they did so because their identities had been sold, identities that were not composed of family pictures, beliefs or ideology, but which bands one liked. We are thus not simply ‘who we are’, but also what we do and what we consume and, furthermore, that this situation is not an externally imposed one, but one to which we readily subscribe. In cultural theory this is considered a ‘performative’ approach to identity, where one’s identity is made in acts performed rather than inner characteristics expressed. To wit, socially constructed markers or signifiers define what and who we are.

It is remarkable then how closely this notion of identity as a set of markers fits into the recent buzz around Web 3.0. The disassociation of the individual and his or her markers is exactly what will drive commerce in the ‘semantic web‘ as tags and code, divorced from the people who employ them, become free-floating signs of one’s status and value as a consumer. This web of data or ‘social graph‘ then becomes a network of signifiers in which identity will not be what you do, but the markers of which you are comprised.

I think my gut instinct here is to criticise – to say “oh look at how late capitalism is distorting identity”. But I don’t think there is – or ever was – an alternative. Identity always has been as much a collection of signifiers as it has anything else. But what I do think we need to be careful about is the extent to which we are willing to only define ourselves through our online activities and consumption. This isn’t about maintaining a purist attitude but, rather, the inability of consumer goods and culture to adequately capture the complexity of identity. When we resolutely defend our privacy, we are in effect surrendering it, choosing to define ourselves through mechanisms inadequate to do so. While I’m going to be the last person to decry all this newfangled technology, before we dive headfirst into a purely semantic identity, we might want to stop and pause.