Professor Steve Wicker, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, pointed out during a recent lecture that lots of data is not only collected about us over the Internet, but also because we use public utilities like phone and electrical services. Stack that up with the fact that many web users, especially young ones, are tripping over themselves to give away even more personal information in exchange for the chance to chat, network or find a date and personal privacy begins to look like an artifact of a bygone age. There’s a whole lotta data out there about us. No one asked me. Did you sign anything?

And I know this sounds like I think personal data collection is a bad thing. Wicker pointed out that an early definition of U.S. privacy boiled down to “the right to be left alone.” This idea may be beside the point for those of us who have settled into daily routines that include sorting through email, blog comments, rss links, IRs, social network spots, tags and phone messages. My fellow semantic web junkies and I feed the gaping maw of the Internet with content hoping that strangers will find it, please.

The current Wikipedia definition, “Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively,” seems better suited for those of us who like to think that we are in control of being seen when we want to be seen—a kind of peek-a-boo privacy.

Wicker suggests that the our ability to control what is saved, counted and analyzed about us, however, is in decline. He develops technologies that aim to protect our ambient information, since we all seem to like using the Internet and electric lights. Autonomous technologies like pre-processing and local aggregation can help make it more difficult to use personal data without our permission.

Reuse of all kinds of data for education, particularly in classrooms on the other hand, holds the promise of engaging students of all ages in large scale data analysis. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Galaxy Zoo is one example of astronomy data that has been made available for “citizen analysis.”Leveraging many different types of data sets, no matter how they are collected, for comparative analysis by education and interdisciplinary research would theoretically take advantage of semantic web architectures that leverage access to parts and pieces of digital data objects while at the same time managing rights and privacy.