Privacy in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Abstract The twenty-first century has not been kind to privacy. Section 1 will offer a brief snapshot of the state of privacy in the digital age. Section 2 will argue that to digitize is to surveil, and that increasing surveillance comes with the territory of transforming the analogue into the digital. Section 3 will go through each of the goods that we saw in Chapter 7 that privacy protects and assess how they’re being affected in the digital age. The section ends up concluding that, if we want to preserve these goods, we ought to scale back surveillance. Section 4 responds to three objections: that we are not losing privacy because algorithms (not human beings) are doing most of the collection of personal data, that the digital age presents us with an opportunity to have a radically transparent society in which privacy isn’t necessary anymore, and that surveillance in the digital age is unproblematic because it’s done with the consent of the population. Section 5 offers some practical suggestions of how to better protect privacy in the twenty-first century: data minimization, setting limits on the storage of personal data, and banning the trade in personal data. Section 6 concludes the chapter with some final thoughts about consent and control.