Sometimes, blogging imitates life.

See You See Me.   New at Reason: Can you register at Friendster and still have a "reasonable expectation of privacy"? Julian Sanchez suggests we need new legal categories for privacy.  [Hit & Run]

I just had a conversation about this late last week when a friend reminded me to check out my own Friendster profile.  It's interesting, because I am a huge privacy advocate, and I even occasionally rant about it (or so I've been told), but I absolutely distinguish between commercial/personal "privacy" and governmental monitoring/categorizing/misuse of my information.  From the article...

Perhaps most of us aren't as protective of our information as the folks at, say, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Yet this conflation of very different sorts of uses of information fails to accurately capture people's attitudes toward privacy. We may be willing to selectively reveal different facets of ourselves in different contexts: That doesn't mean we're all ready to star in individual versions of The Real World.

Unfortunately, that's a distinction that U.S. law fails to capture.

And therein lies the problem; while I can theoretically sue Amazon.com for inappropriately handing over my information to, say, an advertiser, and I could ostracize a friend who inappropriately revealed truths about me, I'm powerless--we are all powerless--in the face of a government that increasingly wants to monitor our activies without cause.