Tag: privacy

Can we still recover the right to be left alone? – The Nation

“Surely we are correct to think that we have, or ought to have, moral and legal rights to exercise control over such information and to protect us from the harms that can ensue when it falls in the wrong hands,” Pressly writes. But to treat that as the end of the debate is to accept the terms set by the state and capital. Rather, he maintains, “privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information, but because it protects against the creation of such information.” We now assume that Mayer’s experiment in data-gathering has been perfected, that all of human life has become information hoovered up by our own devices. Pressly argues that this assumption is incorrect—and that to the extent that it is true, such a state of affairs must be resisted in order for our debates about privacy to have any meaning at all.