What is Privacy? And is there any left?

In the article titled, “Sound scans of the urban body: Cell phones, eavesdropping and ambient music”, John Shiga mentions a part of an article from a British tabloid called The Mirror that said, “Private phone calls are being illegally bugged in the name of art - and taxpayers are footing the bill”. Places like the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London get annual grants of around 1 million pounds by the Government even though they pay people like former DJ Robin Rimbaud to create art from illegal scanning and eavesdropping of phone conversations. Somehow this doesn’t make sense to me. Why would a government support something that is in fact going against their own laws?

Rimbaud suggests that what he is trying to do is make people aware of the collapse of privacy. He thinks that by exposing current society and new technologies by showing his ability to use a scanner and eavesdrop, people will realize that their conversations indeed are not private which might make them think deeper about the issue. If this is the case, then it would be creating an awareness of the lack of privacy which the government has the power to control. So therefore, it would still be contradictory for the government to be giving grants to places that support this invasion of privacy.

According to Rimbaud, the advancements and use of surveillance equipment in contemporary society means that privacy is illusion. This seems to make sense because the more surveillance is available for not only the government, but also most average people, the less privacy there will be and the harder it will be to monitor who is eavesdropping.

This irks me. I’m not normally a phone person, and now I am even less of one. Knowing that just about anyone could be listening in on my personal conversations doesn’t exactly make me want to spend hours talking on the phone. I realize that a lot of people don’t realize to what extent people are able to eavesdrop on them, but there must be better ways to send that message than the ways of Rimbaud. He could give examples, or even use clips of what other people have done, but to join in the very thing he’s almost against just doesn’t seem quite right to me. Yes, he is being creative, yes he’s probably sending out messages about our society that might be good to learn and understand, yes it’s a way to understand the urban body, but are these reasons good enough to justify invading privacy and stealing from phone conversations without permission?
I’m not surprised that this type of surveillance technology is out there. Any sense of privacy probably already is just an illusion and these technologies will probably only continue to become even more intrusive. Maybe soon we will all be watched and listened to in everything we do. Or maybe we already are? Chew on that.