One of the earliest examples of how little privacy there is at the Circle can be seen when Alistair calls out Mae for not going to his Portugal Brunch. Even though Mae has never met, let alone heard of Alistair or his Portugal Brunch, he finds out about her and expects her to be there.
The reason that Alistair even thought to invite Mae is because of the data from her computer, which was uploaded to the cloud, which contained pictures of Mae's trip to Portugal from five years ago. Before their meeting, Mae had thought nothing of upload all her data into the cloud, but now it can be seen that anyone can search and access her data. This means that she truly has no privacy in the cloud.
Another instance of people getting into Mae's data unexpectedly was during the Gus's Dream Friday presentation. When Francis volunteered to be a participant in LuvLuv, Mae thought that was embarrassing enough until they started looking into her data to be his date.
Even though technically none of Mae's data that they went to was private, since she had posted it all, it still felt like a breach of her privacy. This is because all of this miscellaneous information alone did not paint a picture of who Mae is, but together they showed more about Mae than she would have wanted the crowd to know.
It seems that in this instance, data is less private when a person chooses for people to see it at that time, but when past data and information comes up without the person wanting it to, it is felt to be more private. Although, as Francis pointed out, Mae had put all the information out to the world, and the software just collected it all.
This is not the first time that Francis hasn't worried too much about a person's data being private. Earlier, Francis had explained to Mae about how ChildTrack would implant chips into the bones of children to prevent them from being abducted.
In theory this is a great idea to protect the children, but it still takes away the child's privacy and freedom. Children don't always want their exact location to be know constantly even though this is would be a fairly reasonable trade off, for parents, to know that their child is safe.
The true problem that could be seen with the ChildTrack and all the other data, is that it could be misused. If a bad person got a hold of the data and used it wrongly, or if a new power took over the Circle and misused the data, then everyone's privacy would be gone, and their data could be used against them.
It seems that the ideas of data and privacy are intertwined together because the more data a person lets out into the world, the less privacy that they have. It seems that Mae is still not completely on board with all of the lack of privacy at the Circle but she is starting to soften up to the idea of it.
I like the way you set up an inverse relationship between data and privacy. However, I am not sure if that argument always holds up. Even though Mae has less privacy after uploading photos of her trip to Portugal and other similar activities, it is still up to her to post them. Additionally, if someone wants to keep a vacation they took private in the first place, then why post about it? Simply put, Mae should not have been confused or upset that someone saw her post about Portugal and made the inference that she liked the country. Although increased data can reduce privacy, in this case it was completely under control of Mae and was not a breach of privacy.
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