Privacy isn't dead, we've just made it very expensive.<p>However I'd take it a step further than the author who says it's a signifier to say that, now, privacy <i>is</i> class. (with the cavet that class is multi-dimensional, and not a scalar hierarchy) I've written to the effect before that Apple's iPhone is entry into the middle class because the values encoded in its aesthetics and features separate you from being a worker to being a "creative." This was the vision Jobs sold - that you too could become a sophisticated beturtlenecked urbane architect designer offering valuable insights and observations if you bought this product. The iPhone and its (excellent) privacy and security features elevate you from the problems of office stiffs unsticking printer jams to a world where you don't have to think about that stuff and can focus on your beautiful thoughts without needing to struggle. "It just works." - so you don't have to. Sure it's expensive, but nobody who has one notices. In a microcosm, that's what class difference can feel like. That is, wealth is what you have, but class is what you don't need.<p>Having privacy means you don't have to spend effort to manage your public persona. The (S)mart people I know do engage social media just enough to be unremarkable, but no more.<p>I'm not that smart, though my own approach to privacy has not been strong anonymity with opsec either, because the effort to live in-effect as a fugitive just elevates your percieved antagonists to an equal, or in the case of state actors, elevates ourselves to imagining ourselves as super villain threats.<p>Privacy to me now means actively choosing how to relate to technology and people, with a sense of a personal perimeter of calm that I value, and maintaining personal privacy means I can have things that are mine to share, and that creates value for others. With that in mind, you can just set a low bar and costs to keep out of the way of dragnets and spam.<p>To have had the knowledge that privacy was an issue at all has meant both having a sense of (often, ridiculous) self importance that I was no mere "user," and spending a great deal of time understanding technology, at a time when access to it was more rare. So from the outside, privacy looks like a class signal. From the inside, privacy is the necessary condition to bring intentional value to relationships, and the people who would take it from you are basically petty thieves - a fact of life in any human environment.<p>Sure, the Zucks, Jacks, Sundars and NSA's of the world get my information and stuff, but their problems are things I just do not have.