We Have to Give Up Our Privacy

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” — Jeremy Bentham, describing the Panopticon, 1791

Let me state the unstated thing before you decide to be offended by it: the thing we call privacy is younger than the internet, weaker than its defenders can admit, and — in the specific technical sense I will use — privacy is a wasting asset. Not a right being eroded by villains, but a fortress built on a melting glacier, which we keep reinforcing because we have mistaken the act of reinforcing it for the act of being free.

This is a provocation, but it is not even a slogan. A serious case against privacy cannot be a rant; it has to walk through the strongest arguments for privacy and come out the other side still standing. So I will give the privacy supporters their best argument — the historical, the legal, the philosophical, and above all the one objection that genuinely survives — and argue that even after all of them are granted their full force, what is left standing is not the right to hide. It is something else, something the quantum machine now patiently waiting to read today’s encrypted traffic has made unavoidable.

What privacy is, and why no one can quite say

We talk about privacy as though it were a possession: a vault, a wall, a drawer with a lock. It is none of these. The leading legal scholar of the subject, Daniel Solove, opens his major treatment by conceding that privacy is “a concept in disarray”, a word so overloaded that it names a dozen incompatible things at once (Solove 2008). Alan Westin’s classic formulation defined it not as secrecy but as control: the claim of individuals to determine for themselves when and how information about them is communicated (Westin 1967). Helen Nissenbaum reframed it again as contextual integrity: not concealment, but the expectation that information flows according to the norms of the context in which it was shared (Nissenbaum 2009).

Notice what has already happened. The most sophisticated defenders of privacy have spent a century quietly abandoning the popular picture — the locked drawer, the wall — in favor of something far more modest and far more conditional. They defend not a fortress but a negotiated boundary, and a boundary is by definition a thing that moves.

It has certainly moved. The modern legal right to privacy is not an ancient inheritance; it was invented, and we can name the year. In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review, and they wrote it for a concrete and recognizably modern reason: the arrival of instantaneous photography and a sensationalist press had made it possible, for the first time, to capture and circulate a person’s likeness without consent (Warren and Brandeis 1890). The “right to be let alone” was a reaction to a technology. Before the portable camera, the village simply knew your business; the medieval household slept many to a room; the parish register recorded your sins. “Being left alone” is not a human universal. It is a brief, wealthy, modern artifact, roughly the age of the suburban bedroom door.

This matters more than it seems. If privacy is a contingent response to a particular technological moment, then it can also be a contingent casualty of another. A right that was switched on by the camera can be switched off by the things that came after the camera. There is nothing in its history to suggest otherwise.

The law’s own confession

Ask a defender of privacy whether it is a human right and they will point, correctly, to the instruments: Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for private life, family, home, and correspondence.

But read the second paragraph, because the drafters did. Article 8 is what jurists call a qualified right. Paragraph 1 grants it; paragraph 2 immediately permits the state to override it “in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” Compare this with Article 3, the prohibition on torture, which admits no exception, no qualification, no balancing, not even in time of war. The drafters knew exactly how to write an absolute right when they meant one. For privacy, they declined.

So the very documents we wave to defend privacy contain, in the same breath, the clause that dissolves it the moment crime walks in. This is not a betrayal of privacy law; it is the design of privacy law. It was never written as a fortress. It was written as a door, and the state was handed a key on the day the ink dried. To treat privacy as sacred and inviolable is to misread the instrument that supposedly enshrines it.

The fait accompli: you already surrendered, and not to the state

Here is the part that should end the panic about government surveillance, because the surrender already happened — commercially, voluntarily, years ago, without your vote.

You are surveilled right now, minutely and relentlessly, by entities that answer to no constitution. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism documents the architecture: your behavior is rendered into data, the data into predictions, the predictions into products sold in markets you will never see (Zuboff 2019). The location your phone leaks to brokers you have never heard of; the three seconds you hovered over a photograph; the hour you fell asleep; the route you run — all of it is harvested, scored, and sold. Not by a ministry. By the free email you depend on and the social feed you opened twice while reading this.

The asymmetry of our fear is the tell. We are terrified of the state, which is at least in principle accountable — it holds elections, answers to courts, can be voted out — and serene about the corporation, which knows you better than your spouse, predicts you better than you predict yourself, and answers to a quarterly earnings call. If we are going to be this transparent anyway, the privacy partisan owes us an explanation for why the only watcher worth fearing is the one we can, in theory, dismiss. The secrecy you imagine you still possess is, for the most intimate facts of your life, already gone. To defend it now is to mount a defense of a ruin.

Quantum on Arda Akgül

We Have to Give Up Our Privacy

What privacy is, and why no one can quite say

The law’s own confession

The fait accompli: you already surrendered, and not to the state