The concept of privacy and privacy right, as found in most of the literature, is based on a Western Liberal philosphy, that conflicts with many collective social values among people living in the Global South. With the burgeoning growth of ICT in those countries, the issues around privacy is becoming more and more important. However, little has been studied about how people in different cultures conceptualize their privacy and how their privacy right is treated by the government. Moreover, more and more governments all around the world have been embarking on mass-surveillance projects that are making this tension even more intense.

For the last two years, we have been studying the practices and values around privacy in Bangladesh. The Government of Bangladesh has recently imposed a mandatory bio-metric registration law for every mobile phone user. Through our ethnography and a large scale online survey (participated by 606 participants), we revealed different nuances around ownership, identity, and trust among people that constitute their concept of privacy. We also conducted an ethnography in the mobile phone repair market in Dhaka, and reported how the privacy of data becomes vulnerable in the informal market of technical practice.