In the continuum of #privacy and #data

I have always regard myself as a public person. It is not so much about me being “known” as much as being comfortable with being known and speaking/act publicly.

Still I have an intimacy, something inherently mine that I do not want to share with almost anyone and many many things I want to share with specific people.

When it comes to politic the line has always being blurry. As a feminist my practise is that the personal is political and the political, as we all know is public, so my personal most often had been, as I said, very much public.

Is this mean that as a feminist, an extrovert individual, I have no sense or right to privacy? Not at all. I’ve been on the internet since many years now. Than, I had a far less or none awareness or understanding of my data being exposed, or should I said exploited?

I was not thinking in terms of sniffing, tracking, surveilling and profiling. I was ingenuous enough to think that my personal space would not be enquired by any entity without my consent.

I was aware of the abuse, of course. As female I know that my consent and the consent of many others can be extorted by partners, self-called lovers with no other intention except to have control over me.

But as I said this happens in abusive relationships and it implies violence. So I was not thinking of corporation’s hungers on my online routines, conversations, explorations.

It was as an activist that I have started realizing that my body in the online world is represented trough bits, pixels and the others variations of computing, visualising and transferring. After that, it did not take longer to understand that all those little data where my distributed-continuous-body, a wired me captured for ever.

During the years I have established my body as public in many aspects and for many reasons and my data have followed the path, still never had renounce to my privacy, to the intimacy of what I do not want to be exposed.

My right to decide when, where or with whom had never changed. I did not play differences between the online and the real life. Both are my life and I have just this one as anybody else and it matter to me.

But, our bodies, our data are continuously collected, accumulated somewhere and bulky analysed most of the time with not any interest on the very self of each specific individual, except as potential consumers, buyer. So it is not about us/me as much as about the money I/we could put in these corporations pockets.

And, I have not forgotten our governments’ hunger and their voyeuristic patriarchal obsession of protecting us from ourselves. The parade of democracy, officials display for big meetings. As citizens I witness, as many others, the empty shell of local and foreigner governments unable across years, countries and parties to do anything good for the people they work for.

So our government steal our data, using the business of democracy and security and corporations steal our data giving free entrance tickets to their global markets. And we? We have to continuously opt out from corporate / governments platforms until we can opt in a world of privacy by default.