We Have to Give Up Our Privacy

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”- Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House (1791)

Let me say the uncomfortable thing before you decide you are against it: privacy, at least as secrecy, is not the ancient fortress its defenders imagine. It is modern, conditional, technically fragile, and increasingly hostile to the systems we already chose to live inside. In the world we actually inhabit, privacy has become a tax on coordination. The more serious conclusion is not merely that privacy will fade. It is that it should: the information we produce should be available to the public and private institutions capable of using it to prevent harm, detect fraud, allocate resources, price risk, improve services, and make society legible enough to govern.

That is not a slogan. A serious case against privacy has to survive the best case for privacy: the historical case, the legal case, the philosophical case, the encryption case, and the emotional case for the closed door. The conclusion is not that people deserve humiliation or exposure for sport. The conclusion is sharper: freedom cannot be built on hiding, and modern order cannot be built on ignorance.

I. What privacy is, and why no one can quite say

We talk about privacy as if it were a thing you own. A vault. A wall. A drawer with a lock. It is not. Even privacy’s strongest theorists have never been able to keep it that simple. Solove (2008) begins by calling privacy “a concept in disarray” (p. 1). Westin (1967) made control central: privacy is the ability to decide when and how information about oneself is communicated. Nissenbaum (2009) moved the argument again, toward contextual integrity: the problem is not only that information is revealed, but that it moves outside the norms of the setting where it was shared.

Notice what has already happened. Serious defenders of privacy have spent decades backing away from the popular picture of privacy as pure secrecy. They now defend something more modest and more intelligent: boundaries, context, appropriate flow, limited use. That is stronger as theory, but weaker as myth. A boundary is not a fortress. A boundary moves.

It has moved before. The modern legal right to privacy is not an ancient inheritance. We can name the moment it entered American legal imagination: Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 Harvard Law Review article, written in response to new media conditions - instant photographs, gossip journalism, and the sudden ability to capture and circulate a person’s life without consent (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). The “right to be let alone” was not discovered in a cave. It was invented under pressure from a technology.

That matters. If a legal idea was switched on by one technological age, it can be forced to change by the next. Before portable cameras, before phones, before databases, before recommendation engines, the village already knew too much about you. The medieval household was not a sanctuary of individual isolation. “Being left alone” is not a human constant. It is a brief modern wish, roughly the age of the private bedroom door.

II. The law’s own confession

On paper, privacy is a human right. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects people from arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, and correspondence (United Nations General Assembly, 1948). Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects private and family life, home, and correspondence (Council of Europe, 1950/2021, art. 8).

But read the second paragraph, because the law already did. Article 8 permits interference when it is lawful, necessary in a democratic society, and justified by national security, public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others (Council of Europe, 1950/2021, art. 8(2)). That does not make privacy meaningless. It does mean the document itself refuses to treat privacy as absolute. Compare that with Article 3, the prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, which the European human-rights system treats as absolute (Equality and Human Rights Commission, n.d.).

The drafters knew how to write an unqualified right when they wanted one. For privacy, they did not. Privacy was not written as a fortress. It was written as a door, and the state was given a key under named conditions.

This sounds brutal only because we usually speak about privacy in sacred language while living under legal language. The law’s version is colder. Privacy matters, but it can be balanced. It can lose. It can be overridden. A right that can be overridden may still be a right, but it is not the kind of right on which an entire theory of freedom can safely rest.

III. The surrender already happened, just not where you were looking

Here is the part that should make our panic about data sharing feel late: the surrender already happened, commercially, voluntarily, years ago, and without a vote.

You are already monitored by institutions that turned observation into infrastructure. Zuboff (2019) names the architecture surveillance capitalism: behavior becomes data, data becomes prediction, prediction becomes a product. The Federal Trade Commission’s recent work makes the point less theoretical. It has described large platforms as engaging in vast surveillance and collecting or retaining data from users, non-users, and data brokers (Federal Trade Commission [FTC], 2024a). It has also brought cases involving location-data brokers accused of selling sensitive location information (FTC, 2024b). Read that not only as scandal, but as evidence: the machinery already exists. Privacy did not stop it. Privacy mostly taught it to operate through consent screens no one reads.

So the honest question is not whether data will be collected. It will be. The question is whether we keep pretending that public and private data systems should be separated by a moral wall. I think that wall is sentimental. The state sees patterns companies cannot see. Companies see patterns the state cannot see. One understands crime, taxation, borders, public health, schools, and emergency capacity. The other understands movement, demand, attention, payment, logistics, preference, and risk. Separate them in the name of privacy and both become stupider. Let them share, and the hidden costs of disorder start to fall.

Privacy on Arda Akgül

We Have to Give Up Our Privacy

I. What privacy is, and why no one can quite say

II. The law’s own confession

III. The surrender already happened, just not where you were looking