The central premise as I see it in Brin's book is that 'the watched become the watchers'... he advocates a society wherein the means of surveillance are themselves made public, so that everyone watches everyone all the time, and there is no way to surreptitiously abuse it. I find that a bit implausible, but there's a lot of strength to the concept of publicizing and distributing the control and power over surveillance technology.
Basically, I see individual privacy in high/sustainable/'enlightened' TL / GOV / LL worlds as being similar to Brin but based on more than the mutualization of access to the technology - rather, I envision a concept of privacy as the public's most fundamental resource. I was part of a group that wrote a paper last year on the use of RFID tracking technology in healthcare, and I focused on the privacy aspects. Thinking about it in a futuristic projection gave me a bit of insight during the process so I'm glad to share a bit of it here.
Essentially, the 'public commons' is the original middle ages concept of a 'shared' space (like public parks, grazing lands, etc.) and is the reason we have a concept of 'environmental protection', for example. Privacy can be understood in that context: there's a maximum capacity for the system to be impacted beyond which all benefit is lost - and the use of that resource is best administered by representatives of the public. Privacy in a sufficiently advanced society where technology is in balance with personal freedoms would be similar, to me - in a 'future world', each of us would 'opt in' to be surveilled to some degree based on our personal comfort, and in so doing we would take responsbility for maintaining the ongoing integrity of the data and know that those who use the data will be required to follow the requirements we select for its reuse or mining.
Worst-case examples include the kinds of rampant identity theft already underway, to say nothing of abuses of locational privacy and patterning. This is where the technology is used to monitor an individual's behavior and/or possessions. Just a few more - using advanced tech, thieves can now scan people leaving pharmacies for controlled medications. Items can be stolen by swapping tags. Patient identities can be swapped, or medical histories confused, by simple modification of tags or data. Individuals can be tracked, stalked and exploited by this technology in all sorts of societies, not just our own - like for example the fairly well-known recent example of a repressive society (not sure which, but I can find the link in my notes) in which an RFID tagged girl went out to see a movie without her father's permission and was killed in punishment). Legislation permitting the tagging of inmates (and legislation barring the practice) is in place or working its' way thru the state legislatures of a number of U.S. states. The technology is already being used in this way. And of course, all the data gathered in the past can be used to deny future access to services to individuals who may have spent time in rehabilitative therapy, in contact with marked individuals, etc... on and on.
But if, like with environmental law, there is a shared cost of maintenance of privacy (including regulations and fines) as well as payments to access the individually-approved and managed data points, the common, universal right of personal privacy can be supported. That's how I envision a society that balances technological progress with the maintenance of human dignity.
