Why Privacy Might Not Be Worth Protecting

A Recent Invention, It Has Never Been a Universal Value—Nor Is It Essential to Democracy  

Is privacy overrated?

The question might seem daft, given how gravely privacy is endangered in our digital age. Spies in government and the private sector routinely devour data for insights into our behavior, insights that may be used to manipulate our behavior. And privacy’s advocates contend that freedom and democracy are unthinkable without it. As philosopher Michael Lynch puts it, privacy affords us control over our thoughts and feelings, which is a “necessary condition for being in a position to make autonomous decisions, for our ability to determine who and what …

How Digital Technology Is Making Us Subservient, Anxious, and Uncertain

The Threat of Constant Surveillance Provokes Fears That We're Losing Our Liberty and Autonomy

In the anxious years since 9/11, surveillance has become one of the essential infrastructures for 21st-century social life, commerce, and government. With an endless number of drones, sensors, scanners, archives, …

What Happens When Personal Information Gets Weaponized

The Government Needs Data to Protect Infrastructure, Without Imperiling Privacy

Michael Greenberger is a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and the founder and director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security. …

How Big Data Replaced Don Draper

New Analytical Tools Are Making Ads More Effective—and Invasive—Than Ever

In the 1970s, I took a careful look at Oreos. Not the cookies themselves, mind you, but the way they were sold; I was an econometrics student at the University …

Do You Know Where Your Big Data Is?

Corporations are Constantly Gathering—and Selling—Your Personal Information, Says Adam Tanner. But You Don’t Have to Roll Over and Give it to Them.

The infamous East German secret police—the Stasi—have nothing on 21st century corporations when it comes to extracting personal information from individuals. Adam Tanner, author of What Stays in Vegas: The …

Will We Have Any Privacy After the Big Data Revolution?

Corporations Know More about Their Customers’ Lives Than Ever Before. But the Information Economy Doesn’t Have to Leave Us Exposed.

Does the rise of big data mean the downfall of privacy? Mobile technologies now allow companies to map our every physical move, while our online activity is tracked click by …