Various lines of demarcation, or facades of countenance, have always separated the personal and the public. In the case of information, the relationship between public and private becomes a complicated set of liabilities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, information control generated a visual register called the Data Protection Pattern (DPP), which helped to veil personal information in print media like envelopes and shipping forms. Letters and numbers, and other semiotic ingredients are used in excess to create a speechless slurry of text. Today, a new global network of unsecured data transfer has still to be resolved. While DPP continues to proliferate in print media, it provides the model for carriers of electronic information, which are physically erased by overwriting the entire data carrier, or at least in the sectors used, with a confusion of pattern. The sheer spectrum of data protection patterns from letters, numbers and logos to camouflaged and ornamental graphics can be read as a kind of primordial soup of our time, all denied any meaning and yet offering a strategic field from which to generate an ambivalent space, to thicken the skin of discretion, to inhabit the flatness of exposure and control and to celebrate the deep surface of public life.