Till the end of twentieth century, "privacy" was considered a fundamental right for the individual, who was defending his private space as an untouchable one. Then the quickly rising thrill of social networks in this first decade of the twentieth-century has shaken the privacy concept from its foundations, definitely eroding its importance for the individual. Nowadays "privacy", especially for the young generations, sounds more like an annoyance. And for the others, in the end, it seems to be considered like an option, more than an important right to defend. Defending privacy takes time and a bit of commitment. The world after Facebook seems to have already given up to privacy care. It's even paradoxical, considering that to be recognized as a socially popular person, within social network platforms, one has to give up as much as possible his privacy (past, present and eventually future privacy). Nevertheless despite the global show off unceasingly made on Facebook, through the exhibition of very personal pictures, facts, opinions and tastes there's still a personal border that most of us don't want to be trespassed. It's enough to think about an entity that would be able to snoop anytime into our daily computer online us, to have a very disturbing feeling. Even more this entity is suspected to be theoretically possible and plausible, but we repress these thoughts all the time. The gesture that "Men In Grey" are performing in public places, while walking in the city is intervening in this conceptual territory. They have defined it "Network Anxiety". They use a series of security hacking technique to exploit open wi-fi networks, visualizing then the traffic that pass through them, directly in form of files' content. So they walk dressed as business executives, carrying around a couple of sleek professional suitcases packed inside with the needed hardware including transmitters and receivers, and outside sporting a screen visualizing in real time the eavesdropped data, and speaking out loud through a speech synthesizer text (chat, comment, whatever) that is written by users in real time, together with the data of the source (iPhone, IP number and so on…¬). Unaware users can then experience how much of their online activity is exposed and so Men in Grey (behind whom there are two artists: Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev) are able to shake the last bits of (supposed) privacy, throwing it back in user's face. There are many aspects of this work that are worth to be underlined. First, it's an invasion of the user space, much more intrusive than the so-called "surveillance", because the invisible raid into the private screens, brilliantly exposes and mashes up the private sphere. This is accomplished while the user become aware that the "unexpected" that is happening can totally but plausible. And there's another concept that seems to prevail culturally, and it's transparency. The total transparency of web data that we instead wrongly consider private, affect the most intimate privacy that is then a totally underestimated (grey) area. Being confined to the two-dimensional screen that turns off when we don't need it (as our conscience is thought to do when we sleep) what we do on networks seems safe. This veil of fiction is teared off by Men in Grey performance. They are not simply snooping, but transforming in order to be understood, and voyeurism is just an outdated category in their gesture. They are transmitting the intimate to the public, only without control by the individual. Furthermore we can't limit the analysis of Men In Grey performances as just another provocative statement, but we'd also consider it a technical showdown on how far away average skilled people can go into our own digital private spaces. They intrinsically elaborate more on the difference between monitoring and spying, that is drawn on the interest to collect the data and to look for specific individuals. Although exposed here, the individuals are just part of the process and involuntary part of the setting. The Men in Grey machines are then the interface to their content that from private becomes, in an automatic and algorithmic way, public.
