No, I Can't Give You a Reference from Wizardly Wizards Inc.

You remember what the guidance counselors and the college reps told us in high school: never put anything publicly online unless it's something you're willing to have come up in an interview. You don't want to apply for a job and find out the employer is against college drinking culture after he or she sees your red cut photo album on Facebook, privacy set to public. I don't want a future employer to read my Facebook profile and see that I used to work at "Wizardly Wizards" as Professor of the Dark Farts (job description: keeping all of the prisoners in Asskaban), and a future employer won't see that since I intentionally erased it from my profile.

The fact that I can remove things like this from my profile implies that this data that I own is mine, and is therefore inherently private.

In the Circle, however, I wouldn't be able to erase this data, or any, for that matter. As Annie says, "'We don't delete here, Mae'" (206). This is an interesting difference between our world and the world that Eggers has created in The Circle. In both worlds, privacy and data are connected. However, they are connected in different ways; the relationship between privacy and data differs between the world we know and the world that Mae is coming to know in the Circle.

In our world, you can get rid of something online with relative ease in almost any case. Tagged in an embarrassing photo on Facebook? Just un-tag yourself or report it. Don't want people to know where you lived when you were younger? Then simply don't provide that data. In our world, quantifying ourselves online is not required, and is sometimes even looked down upon; in our world, data is private, and we can choose whether or not to share information about ourselves (as long as we are abiding the law, etc.). There aren't many consequences to posting personal data online because it can easily be deleted (and yes, I know, stuff is never really gone, but no one except this class is going to know that I worked to keep the prisoners in Asskaban unless they do some real digging). As a result of personal data being private in our world, it can easily be assumed that most people won't share everything about themselves online and that data cannot accurately describe a person in his or her entirety.

However, in Mae's world, the world of the Circle, quantifying one's self online is quintessential. TruYou, "your one identity" (21), is the epitome of this concept. It is literally a collection of data, of ones and zeroes, that quantifies your identity. All of your personal information, all of your private information, is kept in an online database with access delegated by the Circle, making all of your private information, such as date of birth, address, phone number, email, social security number, banking information, and so on, available for anyone given access to that information by the Circle. Your data is no longer your data, and your data is no longer private. In Mae's world, data is public, the polar opposite of the world we live in. Though most people have accepted it, Mae struggles with it when she is analyzed onstage during the LuvLuv presentation. Having her private data become truly public embarrasses her, revealing what she truly feels about the Circle's no-privacy-allowed culture.

To conclude, data and privacy are related in both our world and in Mae's, but in completely opposite ways. To us, our personal data is private, and it should stay that way. This is also how Mae feels, but rather than admit it and go against the raging current of the Circle's peer pressure, she caves to their idea of total quantitative publicity.