Interesting paper on the use of census and other population data as an input to large-scale human rights abuses. The work goes on to detail many historical versions of this problem, from American Indians to Roma in Europe. Even stipulating that the overlap between this work and social software is both oblique and partial, reading this raised the ickiness factor for me from the amount of data our social networks are casually gathering. We are privatizing census functions, allowing private individuals and firms to gather material once reserved only for the state. We're already seeing things like danah's stories of White Supremacists harassing black users on Friendster, and the googlebombing of "Jew". Our systems are not yet of a size or representative depth to make these kinds of abuses much more than ad hoc, but I wonder if we're privatizing systematic abuse as well.