  As privacy issues have gained social salience, entrepreneurs have begun to
offer privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) and the U.S. has begun to enact
privacy legislation.
  But "privacy" is an ambiguous notion. In the liberal tradition, it is an
individualistic value protecting citizens from intrusion into a realm of
autonomy. A feminist critique suggests that the social utility of privacy is to
exclude certain issues from the public realm. Sociologists suggest that privacy
is about identity management, while political economists suggest that the most
salient privacy issue is the use of personal information to normalize and
rationalize populations according to the needs of capital.
  While PETs have been developed for use by individual consumers, recently
developers are focusing on the business to business market, where demand is
stoked by the existence of new privacy regulations. These new laws tend to
operationalize privacy in terms of "personally identifiable information." The
new generation of PETs reflect and reify that definition. This, in turn, has
implications for the everyday understandings of privacy and the constitution of
identity and social life.
  In particular, this socio-technical practice may strengthen the ability of
data holders to rationalize populations and create self-serving social
categories. At the same time, they may permit individuals to negotiate these
categories outside of panoptic vision. They may also encourage public
discussion and awareness of these created social categories.
