Devices of the Soul (Hardcover)

Chapter 19. Privacy in an Age of Data

The battle for privacy, waged upon fields of data, will be lost. The reason it will be lost is that, precisely insofar as our social functioning becomes a matter of interacting data, to that degree there is nothing to which a decent concept of privacy can attach. There exists, on the fields of data, neither a self whose dignity is worth defending, nor a self that a global data-processing system is capable of defending. If a decent sense of privacy does not apply, in the first instance, to the socially embedded individual—if it does not first flourish as an ideal in intimate, personal spaces—it cannot flourish in cyberspace.

Privacy is inseparable from a certain willingness to lower one’s eyes and to hold sacred what one knows or chooses not to know about the other person. When it has become a mere drive toward anonymity, it necessarily vanishes as a meaningful standard for our life together, signaling instead our disconnection.

In other words, the ideal of privacy gains substance only in those primary contexts where we know each other well enough to care. Given such contexts as a dominant reality of our lives, we may be able to rise above voyeurism, prurience, and the temptation of gossip so as to respect what deserves respecting in the other person. Lacking such contexts, we cannot win; we will be assimilated to the realities of our technology, where one data bit looks just like another and there can be no special protection for any of them. ...