Some people wonder why I don't talk about my private life online, or 'silly things' like whereabouts I live in the world. The response  I generally give is "it's private". Some people however seem to think that in the modern age privacy is a bad idea, that if you want it you must have something to hide - as if privacy isn't a basic human right (Toilets have locks for a reason). Bruce Schneier's written an excellent article about privacy which sums up the debate as liberty vs control. I personally think that it really boils down to privacy matters and if its none of your business, it's none of your business no matter who you think you are, however aside from that final summing up I think its a great article.

It's also one of the reasons I'm interested in mechanisms to allow private communication to be integrated into Kamaelia, since the people engaged in private communications need to trust their not being evesdropped. This turns out to be a harder problem with Kamaelia than you might expect, mainly because of the high degree of decoupling in Kamaelia. (This is probably a good thing overall, since if you do manage to implement something you can trust you'll probably have a higher degree of trust in the system as a result. There's other practical applications at work (such as field journalists in hostile zones, or places with extreme censorship), but for me the basic need is one of privacy.