On privacy

Privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's about who gets to know you, decide about you, and shape you — and right now, the answer is: not you.

The inferred self

The data economy's real product isn't the data you knowingly hand over — it's the inferences drawn from it. A second self, assembled from a thousand signals, that predicts and categorizes and prices you, is traded between companies you've never heard of and used to make decisions about you that you never see. You don't control this self, can't see it, and can't correct it. That's the privacy problem that matters, and almost no one is talking about it.

“Nothing to hide” misses the point

The comeback to privacy concerns — “why worry if you've done nothing wrong?” — misunderstands what privacy protects. Privacy isn't secrecy; it's the right to context, to be different people in different settings, to not have every version of yourself collapsed into one permanent, searchable record used by anyone with access. Everyone has something to protect: not guilt, but the ordinary human need for boundaries.

Privacy is power

Strip away the abstractions and privacy is fundamentally about power — the asymmetry between those who can see and those who can be seen. When institutions know everything about you and you know nothing about them, the relationship isn't a fair exchange; it's a hierarchy. Framing privacy as a personal preference (“I don't mind ads”) obscures that it's really a structural question about who holds power in a datafied society.

The permanence problem

Older forms of exposure faded — a rumor died down, a bad photo got lost with the negative. Digital exposure doesn't fade; it compounds, gets indexed, gets re-surfaced by a search or a recommendation system years later, stripped of the context that once explained it. A society that never forgets is not automatically a more honest one — it's one where every past self is a permanent liability against your present one, a cost most people never agreed to carry.

Consent that isn't

“You agreed to the terms” is the data economy's favorite defense, and it's mostly theater. Consent requires a real alternative and a real understanding of the trade, and a lengthy document you can't read, negotiate, or realistically decline offers neither. Treating that click as meaningful permission lets institutions call extraction a transaction. The same sleight of hand — a one-sided bargain dressed up as a fair exchange — is the subject of On attention, where the currency is your time rather than your data, and of On platforms, where it's the terms governing the ground you stand on.