Wired thinks privacy is trendy. Witness the rise of companies that sell, well, privacy: AskEraser, ReputationDefedner, MyPrivacy.

For Allessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University and Jens Grossklags or University of California at Berkeley, it’s matter of the behavioral processes that go into different marketplace activities. Protecting information is a different than giving away information.

According to their study, “When 25 Cents is too much: An Experiment ion Willingness-to-Sell and Willingness-to-Protect Personal Information,” sometimes even the smallest amount of money will do. They found that

individuals almost always chose to sell their information and almost never elect to protect their information even for values as little as $0.25.

According to Grossklags and Acquisti,

Individuals protect their personal information when they use technologies such as firewalls, curtains, document shredders, caller-id or sunglass to shield themselves from potential observers. People might also show reserve when communicating with others. To attain complete privacy they could even restrict their contact with others to a minimum.

To the contrary, individuals act as sellers of their personal information when they purchase goods with loyalty or credit cards, carry cell-phones, or purchase goods that contain RFID tags. Similarly, information is offered to others during communication online and offline, whether persistently stored or not. In extreme cases, individuals might aim for complete openness to the outside world – for example, when they are participating in game shows with constant visibility to a broad audience; a modern panopticon.

But what about the growing segment of the population that extends its social life – and its political activities – into the online space? It’s not so easy to remain hidden when you chat with family members and organize fundraisers over Facebook. Nor is it easy to camouflage yourself when you donate to anything online, sign a petition about an issue you care about, use YouTube to post a debate question, or sign up to a campaign email list.

Technology-charged politics has required information. It’s no secret that we buy – and trade – it everyday, and we append voter history and consumer data to it.

What happens when we combine that data with the little details that you and I share openly and automatically about ourselves online, on our social networking profiles or video posts or on the comments we leave on blogs?

The result is a multi-media directory that includes photos of you with your family, running a 10K race, or at a political fundraiser; what issues you respond on blogs, how quickly you respond, and the language, syntax, and grammar you use; which videos you like and which ones contain images of you; and which political activities you participate in (online and offline), how much you donate, and how often you vote.

Is this kind of information useful?

Is it valuable?

Is it a goldmine or a privacy threat?

We’ll discuss this – and more – at the 2008 Politics Online Conference in Washington, DC. More to come.

You couldn’t miss the story in this Sunday’s New York Times, planted in the middle of the front page.

The headline: China Enacting High-Tech Plan to Track People.

In Shenzhen, authorities are using surveillance cameras to detect unusual activity and spot criminals.

The city is issuing “residency cards” to its citizens. The cards will be embedded with information – information that exceeds name and address. The cards will also include what many Americans consider to be highly personal information: work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, policy record, medical insurance status, landlord’s phone number.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world largest efforts to meld cutting-edge technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

Reading the article, however, I found myself confronting two very different emotions: fear discomfort and fascination.

I fear am discomforted by the power that we have created to track our physical, financial, and ideological shifts and changes as easily as tracking the weather or traffic. I’m fascinated by the potential such technology has to assist our everyday lives, from staying healthier to deciding where to eat lunch to alerting me when I pass by the nearest polling booth on Election Day.

Or perhaps we – humans, citizens, politicos – aren’t very good at doing smart technology – despite the fact that many of us find it fascinating and repellent. We can’t look away from films like Minority Report, which depict a somewhat threatening future filled with precisely this type of surveillance. At the same time, many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of video cameras monitoring our streets and RFID chips embedded in our state-issued identification – or even within ourselves.

This is one of the issues that author Adam Greenfield raises in his well-considered text Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Greenfield broadly defines “everyware” as a multiplicity of pervasive, ubiquitous things: “smart objects, embedded sensors, and the always-on networks that connected them.” In other words, information and networking capabilities in places, objects, and even people

Greenfield suggests a guiding principle for navigating the sometimes invasive spaces that emerge when technology and ethics uncomfortably intersect: first, do no harm.

We’ll continue this conversation in the over the course of the next few months, leading up to our 2008 Politics Online Conference (details to be announced soon).

Considering the attention, political and otherwise, that search engine privacy and security has gotten over the last few months and even on this blog, it’s no surprise that Google rolled out a new series of youtube videos that explains exactly what Google does with all of that data they collect online from the millions of users worldwide. Check it out.

Who doesn’t use a search engine at least once an hour, if not more frequently, over the course of an average work day?

What was life like before we could access information in real time with few taps on a keyboard? (Actually, I caught a glimpse of what life might be like before search engines during this week’s episode of Flight of the Concords, when the band’s manager can’t call Quincy Jones because he doesn’t have a proper computer, much less a functioning Internet connection, but I digress.)

Search engines give us almost immediate access to almost comprehensive amounts of data. They make life easier, and, most importantly, they’re free.

They also know a heck of a lot about you. Most search engine capture your IP address and an identifier for your web browser (stored in a cookie) in addition to the content within your search query. They use that information to target advertising to you, which in turn helps keep search engines free, and improve the quality of the search engine, which keeps them mostly effective.

A few months ago, Google announced that it was the first search engine to publish a data retention policy. Beginning in December 2007, Google will “anonymize” your search engine data after 18 months – if you don’t return to the site.

Most search engines companies since then have developed similar policy, mostly in response to the European Union’s data protection authorities, and most have vowed to anonymize your data 13-18 months after your last visit to the search engine.

Yesterday, the Center for Democracy & Technology released its working paper on Search Privacy Practices:

Many of the Internet’s most amazing innovations are supplied for free thanks to advertising, but the mere presence of advertising-related demands does not justify overlooking privacy concerns.

CDT recommends a federal privacy law that will “protect citizens from bad actors” who may use your personal information for more than just search marketing.

Can search engines evolve without capturing and maintaining your information for a year and a half?

Here’s another the question: How much is your privacy worth? Is it worth less than the convenience of being able to download information when you want it on your time?