Privacy is fundamentally different from secrecy or hiding—it is a form of 'oblivion' that creates a natural barrier to knowledge about ourselves, which serves as a public good that enables trust, autonomy, and human flourishing. Unlike secrecy (which involves discrete information that can be shared), privacy involves a constitutional limit to knowledge that cannot be information itself. This distinction matters because privacy allows us to develop as individuals while still living together as social beings, creating a productive tension that is essential to the human condition. In the digital age, where surveillance technologies make us feel compressed and constrained, understanding privacy as a fundamental human right rather than merely a matter of managing privacy settings is crucial for defending our dignity and autonomy.
Privacy and Surveillance in the Digital Age
Added:Lowry Presley, thanks for joining me.
>> Thanks so much for having me. All >> right, so you wrote this book, The Right to Oblivion, about the right to privacy, the like the loss of privacy. I don't know, the obliteration of privacy, maybe. Uh why don't you just tell us a little bit about how you became so interested in privacy um to write, you know, to work on it when you were in graduate school and then to like write an entire book about it? The reason I started thinking about privacy was basically the the use of let's say philosophy as a kind of tool for self-standing or I won't say self-help but uh there seemed to be like a a conflict >> in my self-standing. Um one is that uh I've always thought that privacy was very important to me. I've felt it deeply. I've protected it throughout my life. So I had a strong understanding um that privacy um was important to me. But you know, I couldn't have really articulated to you here's A, B, and C, why it's important to me. But I really valued it. I was sure.
>> At the same time, I was also sure uh that I was an open book or unfiltered >> and um and I had lots of evidence for that as well. Lots of times where I hadn't held back or I'd said things that maybe had gotten me uh into trouble. Um, and so that seemed to me to present like a conflict in my self-standing. Like was I wrong that uh um about how much I cared about privacy or was I wrong about how open I was even not just with friends and intimates with strangers.
>> Um uh I wanted to to know like am I self-diluted in one way or >> and to see if those two things are actually in conflict. Maybe actually they're they're not >> exactly. And so what I came to learn by thinking about this, I went to graduate school. Um I wrote a dissertation on privacy and then this book. What I came to understand what in retrospect seems really simple like yes I do really value privacy but it turns out like I don't keep a lot of secrets have secrets.
Everyone does but I don't place a high value on secrecy. I'm not particularly reticent. um there are other forms of you know withholding uh that aren't really important to me but I hadn't I wasn't able to think that sort of obvious thought that there are different words for these different things before I started thinking about it um I think just because the ideas of privacy that I was working with at the time the the ones we inherit in our era sort of run those different things together >> I think when most people are thinking about privacy I think I was definitely thinking in this before I read your book was purely in terms of my privacy in relationship to like apps and websites and like tech companies because we even have like this nomenclature of like privacy settings and you say like how private of a person are you is almost measurable by how many of those safety features you turn on or how much you're willing to like divulge to some large corporation. Um, do you think that's just like too narrow of an understanding of privacy?
>> Uh, without a doubt. I think um uh but you know I think it's it's um it's interesting to think about that. So in the book um I have a historical chapter about when we really started thinking about privacy as something that's important to human beings as such that there's a fundamental interest in privacy as opposed to all of these other kinds of you know secrecy, confidentiality and so forth. it doesn't really get going doesn't emerge in the public consciousness until the middle of the 19th century as a reaction primarily to the invention of the photograph camera but also you know the the the first real explosion of newspapers as the first mass media things that look like today um and people back then were thinking about privacy through the lens of of a camera of that technology they were using newspapers and these new technology to think about the value of privacy in their lives so um I don't think it's a bad thing um to use technology as a sort of lens to think about these um fundamental human goods.
Um the danger I think uh today is when we use the technologies of our time to think about what privacy is. So to think of privacy through the lens of privacy settings online uh or on social media I think that's um a mistake for two reasons. One is that um it just gives us the wrong idea of what privacy is really. You know, when you're deciding what the different audiences for information is, who will see them and won't. Um this this is um a restriction on information better described in terms of confidentiality or secrecy. That's how we naturally describe those things, not privacy. Um the second reason I think it's um um bad and dangerous, the first one is maybe wrong. The second one is dangerous. It's because the camera and the newspaper uh weren't technologies that had a they weren't technologies involved in an economic system whose profit motive was deeply tied to the demunition of privacy. They were just ways spurs for us to think about um privacy. But the privacy settings on social media using social media that or the the technologies of the digital age of the data economy to think about the value of privacy uh is seems to me to be deeply misguided because we're sort of taking for granted that what Mark Zuckerberg calls privacy settings are tracking the reality of what privacy is really why it's really important to us and not the reality of his business model. And I think we spent so much time thinking about privacy through the lens of you know these privacy settings that we've uh forgotten the sort of the older more powerful ways of thinking about privacy that had once I think point to like you know a deeper um value in human life but also that give us tools to defend privacy against I don't want to say fight against but defend privacy against um the sort of depradations of the digital age.
>> Yeah. So we naturally I think want to just like take whatever our current technologies are and like those sort of define I don't know the world for us in some ways like the categories that we think in are kind of given to us by the the tools that we use actually this is a point that Neil Postman makes in technopoly he says that well you've entered technopoly he says this is different than a technocratic age when technology is your thought world so like what your your tools are basically really define what you can think about. And so sort of technology for us, the technology that defines our thought world is like the app and it's the phone. And that's why I mean we have so much anxiety about our relationship to these these devices. But we typically think that like oh it's just a matter of like managing them properly and we're not asking if the categories they give us to think about the world are the right categories. Or maybe you don't even want to say right or wrong, but you want to ask are there other alternative categories that we could we could uh we could be using as well.
>> Yeah, these tools shape us. We think that with these are things that we um uh can use to achieve sort of pre-existing ends maybe more efficiently or with less friction uh or or whatever and that we're somehow freestanding of these kinds of tools. But you know, I wouldn't be the first person to say this. the the long history of of tools have changed the way that we are and you know uh the our idea of the self is just one way that they changed it. So uh you know examples from the um the spread and invention of a particular kind of printing technology that allowed them to cheaply distribute newspapers made them sort of um affordable for most people.
Um the stereotype and the cliche >> these are originally uh terms used for newspaper printing. So, you know, the stereotype is an an image that we you'll just have like a stock image that you can print um like an engraving for a variety of different stories. And we eventually come to think of uh the stereotype as a kind of person maybe a harm to a person something to be avoided but we're using this technology as a way of thinking about and it doesn't have to be as you said in terms of good or bad but I think it naturally is something close to that because we're using these tools and technology to think and think in new ways about what the self is >> and what does it mean for our life to go well? What does it mean to relate to one another? What is a friend to take an example from the digital age? What's a connection?
>> Um, you know, all my students are on LinkedIn. Yeah.
>> What does it mean to connect? What does it mean to have a conversation?
>> What does it mean to like something?
>> What does it mean to like something? And it's, you know, it's very hard to notice these changes and it's hard to point them out without sounding like kind of like a grump, the nostalgic um for the um uh the old time. But like one of the most important things we can do especially in an age where technology is really rapidly changing in a way at a rate that it hasn't um uh previously in our long history is like to at least make it visible. So we then we can talk about it and see how we would like to be what are these doing to us. So, why don't we go back a little bit then to talk about the camera and like what was the debate about privacy and the camera and we can like sort of work our way through a little bit of this history here to see like because the point you make here is that was the first real public conversation about the value of privacy. Um, is that because there just wasn't a value of privacy before that?
Did we invent privacy as a right in response to the camera or did it just make salient something >> that we ignored for a long time?
>> So I think uh a bit of yes and a bit of no. So the the use of privacy and similar um uh words in English definitely predates the 19th century. It goes back to 1500s. Heard of like privy as a as an outhouse, king's privy council. Um private correspondence. Um but but it isn't used to describe an interest that human beings have just by virtue of being human. We might say like a human right, a moral human right.
>> Um until the middle of the 19th century.
And the big moral panic does have to do with um uh cameras mainly, which it was 1888 was George Eastman's Kodak, which made the the capturing of candid shots >> um uh uh possible for the first time. So you don't have to sit in a studio still for a long time and note the language of you know candid candid normally means you know freely expressing oneself and we naturally use it to describe photographs. Now this is getting back to the tool >> um self uh point. So we the language existed but the concept of a fundamental human interest or right to privacy that inherent in human beings not as writers of letters that don't you don't want to be intercepted or or people who are homeowners and property owners that have four walls but just by virtue of being a human being that you have some need of privacy doesn't um come online until this time >> and the there there I mean it's it's you know it doesn't spring from a single source But they're really sort of two main things that people are reacting to at least in the the Anglosphere and they're newspapers, mass media. So, and it's in a sense what they're reporting on now, people's lives, but also the information coming in.
>> And then the the camera and the camera is so interesting because there were again it's like a new moral language that's being developed at this time. So there's not a script of when it applies and when it doesn't, but you do see sort of a remarkable consistency in some aspects of people's complaints. One aspect, and we can talk about that in a second, but one thing that makes the camera so interesting in the 19th century so interesting, um, is that you don't see people complaining only about the camera and privacy within like the four walls of the domestic home or something. In fact, most of the complaints about cameras, the technology was pretty um rudimentary compared to today were about people's pictures being taken in public.
>> Yeah.
>> Um and the the first one of the first and and maybe it is the very first CA legal case to try to um to try to um vindicate an individual's right to privacy after a violation was unsuccessful because there was no law on the books and judges have to follow laws. um was a woman who had her picture taken on stage at a public performance by a paying member of the audience.
>> Okay?
>> And the judge in that case is like this was a moral violation of privacy. Sadly, we don't have a law to cover it. And then later that's taken up um in these famous this very famous 1890 article on the right to privacy from Warren and Brandeise um to be like an example of a privacy violation. And what's so interesting is that they had a sense then that uh there was some kind of violation of this this human uh interest. Something important in human life is being upended, violated or harmed by uh an unconented to picture >> even out in public. And so that's very interesting.
>> Yeah. the the Brandeise article is trying to make a case for the right to privacy, >> but legally speaking, the problem is like the US Constitution makes no reference to privacy. Yeah. And you have to do a lot of work, hermeneutical work to say actually implicit in it, there was always a right to privacy because we just could take it for granted or something. But it's very it's it's actually a hard case to make because we just weren't thinking maybe explicitly in those terms. And I think now if people are going if they're walking in the street and someone just snaps your picture, I would have a natural aversion to that. Someone just takes my picture without asking me. But the line that you would hear is like you don't have a reasonable expectation of of privacy, which is an odd thing to say actually uh because I don't know how we're defining reasonable in that case because a lot of people would be offended.
>> Well, it's an extremely slippery slope also in a in a like a completely toothless standard. Um because what's reasonable to expect changes. So if suddenly uh if the government starts it might be illegal now because we have a reasonable expectation to not be surveiled everywhere out of doors but if suddenly the government starts doing it and that becomes the norm or if we do it with our phones and our you know our our meta glasses um what's reasonable to expect changes >> there's no like underlying firm moral basis for what's reasonable to expect.
That's why that's just such a bad standard legally or morally for thinking about what we have a right morally or politically to expect in terms of privacy. Um because yeah, I mean with the invention of the photograph camera and and the certainly like the portable snapshot camera, it became less reasonable to think that people were going to make documentary images of youth >> out in public. Yeah.
>> Suddenly.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't in some ways you had a reasonable expectation that no one would take your picture if you were walking down the street when it was technologically impossible.
>> Yeah.
>> And then when it becomes technologically possible, we still think like well just because it's possible doesn't mean it's permissible. And yet the way this sort of played out in history was like actually it is permissible at least in the US. Um anyone can take your picture if you're out in public.
>> Yeah. And there are a lot of you know so the question for private there were a lot of complaints about this and even at the time um there are complaints about detective cameras people taking sly pictures in a button hole or you know in a book or um famously someone put one in a revolver like somebody being very cheeky and maybe making a point put one in in a you know a gun which to take um uh candid again pictures >> um of people and it's worth um you know noting that what they're worried about with privacy at the time with the camera isn't that well if you sit for a portrait you're somehow giving up your privacy but like you're consenting to it or whatever. Um uh what they're worried about is in private or in public >> these sort of candid exposures this like taking a moment out of the of the flux and flow of life as it's lived and fixing it in a permanent form. And so I think this kind of um goes to sort of explaining your intuition and mine too about someone taking a picture of me on the street. Even though I expect to be seen >> by everybody, it's completely unreasonable under any circumstances to expect no one to look at me when I'm out on the street. And it's completely unreasonable to think nobody like form a mental image of me or nobody like have an opinion, form some kind of knowledge about me when I'm out in public. also self-defeating like we we need to be recognized and seen to and you know to have a real life um out in public. Um so the intuition I think starts to and we have the intuition well the photograph is um problematic. We don't like that and we think we should have a right to not be photographed out in public um you know when we don't want to. an intermediate case maybe helps us get it.
Um, you know, how we feel about this.
Like what if somebody's taking notes about you? You know, you're in public, you don't have a moral right or a reasonable expectation, I don't think anyone thinks, to not be looked at, for not even people to make, you know, mental notes about you. Oh, look at that guy's tattoos. Those are cool.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, but I feel like our intuitions tend to change. And I'm I wonder what you think. Let's say if the person is looking at us, but making notes. It's not a photograph, but they're sort of documenting what they see. They're writing it down for whatever purpose.
Doesn't have to be purant. Um, you know, and then a little bit closer to just looking on the scale, we have maybe like the lear or like the sexualized glare, like the hard stare, someone who's following with your eyes. Also seems a little unourred. Not the completely innocent of just being seen and known on the street. Not exactly. Um, maybe not.
I I want to hear what you think. not it not as strong as maybe the writing down stuff, not as certainly not as the photograph, but it seems on a continuum moving from unobjectionable to objectionable. And so then the question is, well, what moves us down there?
>> But yet, here's a case that I I don't have strong feelings about. It's like imagine I'm like eating lunch in like a park or something and then I discover that there's someone at like the bench next to me who has been making like a charcoal drawing of me or something. I don't have as strong of like a an aversion to that. And I and and I wonder if it's partly because they're not capturing like this one moment in time.
One of the weird things about candid photos is that we all know it can be rather unflattering like and it's going to take this moment out of time and then present it to the world completely devoid of context. You can say, "Actually, I looked very handsome right before and right after, but you got me right at like right at the wrong moment." And you may maybe did it on purpose, right? But the the person who's like sketching, it's a couple minutes or longer. And in a way, I I feel less violated by that because they're like providing like an interpretation of like your presence there rather than just like grabbing the moment.
>> And how would that's so that's great. I feel the same way. How would you compare the charcoal sketch to like a list of um you know what you've said or where you went or whatever? Things that seem a bit more factual. the more it becomes documentary, the more I feel strongly against it. If someone were like writing like a very poetic description of me, even if it was unflattering, right, but they wrote this kind of like paragraph about about me, like as if they were writing a novel or something, you know, or um that feels less bad. Yeah, but um because it's kind of them revealing themselves as well in like the act of it, but if they're just like 1201 took a bite, 1202 picked his nose, 120, you know, that feels worse.
>> Yeah. It feels more invasive to use a privacy type word. Yeah. I mean, the the charcoal drawing like a mental impression I think says more at least as at least as much probably more about the artist than you what it reveals. Yes.
You're the you are the the object.
you're the the sort of the subject of it. You're the model. What you're the model for is, you know, the artist's vision.
>> Um that's what that's showing. It's their interpretation of what you look like. Yeah.
>> In an artistic medium. Um the list >> isn't interpretive. It doesn't really reflect on the list keeper. It's certainly um uh not like their view of whether you picked your nose at 12:01 or 12:02 p.m. when you got up and down from the bench. Brother, these are like just about you and they're factual. Um, and so that goes to the I think what really bothered people in the 19th century about the camera. It wasn't that they were doing things that were illicit or they're going to get caught out, you know, with a lover or something like the the paparazzi. The big complaint was that what the camera Well, it's twofold.
Let me um say that first what the camera does is it creates you know an image that seems to completely bypass uh the sort of the human interpretation of the person taking it. It's just um you know in the 19th century there were all of these um uh people like it's the the mirror of nature or or or nature's pencil or like it's just it's it is like looking through a rectangle at the world at that person at that moment. And I think we still look at pictures like this.
>> It makes like a claim to objectivity.
>> Absolutely.
>> Even though we know lenses have I mean we we use lens now as a metaphor for a particular way of viewing. We get this from cameras because the lenses matter.
There are cameras >> and they knew this at the time. I mean photographs have been retouched and altered almost from the very beginning long before Photoshop. But still we have a belief in the epistemic objectivity of this thing. It creates a piece of information fact. Yeah.
>> The second thing is there was a belief which we still have now we're finally making good on like the the can the candid call backs >> um that uh a person's um like let's say image but particularly the face the body too but particularly the face expresses something about what this person is really like um and so we naturally you know the idea of posing >> is you know Roland Bar has a a bit about photography and posing and posing is like self-defense.
>> Um uh because we still think a candid picture shows you what you really like in the same way that a candid statement >> lets me express to you. Let me be candid to you. Let me speak from the heart.
>> What the ca camera seemed to do >> um for the these 19th century privacy advocates was and essentially to make a candid to speak from your heart for you.
So to produce a thing, a piece of information that has a sort of uh objective character of evidence of a real fact indisputable that is portable and now can be scrutinized for meaning, but also one in which you're expressing something about yourself. So in a way what it the camera did in public or in private was to create a sort of fact or at least like a piece of information about from which different facts can be uh interpreted about who you are about what you're like.
>> And that seemed to the the 19th century late 19th century early 20th century privacy advocates the original ones to be a really profound invasion into the deepest uh realms of personality. I mean the thing that's harmed not the thing that's invaded in a privacy invasion in that famous Warren and Brandeise article is inviolent personality and violent doesn't mean like inviable you can't you know it's normally a wall means like sacred this is a a line past which people shouldn't cross >> so now we live in an age though where I think you should pretty much always assume you're being recorded. I mean, there's, you know, we're in a studio right now. There are cameras. Okay, fine. We did it on purpose. We walked around downtown Austin together. And, um, as we walked around downtown Austin, I'm sure we were recorded by numerous cameras, uh, whether those were security cameras, some of them run by the city, some run by private businesses. There were probably people taking photos of themselves or of buildings or something, and you and I were captured in all of them. I mean, it'd be hard to, you know, actually provide an accurate guess, uh, or even a reasonable guess on how many images were produced of us in, you know, walking around downtown Austin for half an hour, but I guarantee that there were some.
>> Yeah.
>> And so, we've all just become kind of used to at all times something like this could be created about us. And it and it goes well past images now, too. There's uh some settings you can go into into Google and you can find out what Google thinks all of your interests are and they do it for advertising reasons obviously, but you'll find that there are just like these metadata fields. And the funny thing is you're allowed to delete some of them, you know, and I I'm sure Google wants you to if they think you're inaccurate, right? Because they want to know what they're right about. They'll be like, "Oh, you know, you're uh you're you're this old." They'll know like they they guess your gender, your race, your nationality, your general location. that stuff they probably know pretty well.
But then your general interest, like what kind of sports do you like? Um, what kind of art do you like? What kind of And I remember the first time I saw that and I think people pointed it out to me because they thought it was funny because it was a lot of it was so wrong.
Like, oh, Google thinks I like snowboarding and like I've maybe looked up snowboarding once in my life, but I had this like sense of disturbance like what do you mean someone is keeping a record >> of all of my interests?
>> There's an error in their dossier.
>> Yeah. Yeah. But why is there a dossier?
Like and and part of that was because I felt like my interests change and you know who I am changes. But this is like this perfect record of all the things I've ever been interested in. Even stuff that I never talked to anybody about that I just like was briefly interested in and I would I would look into it. Um and it felt just it felt so odd to me to have um it was like a bookkeeper.
>> Yeah. But I was I was like a line in the bookkeeper's balance sheet or something.
>> Yeah. And I think from this photography moment up to today, um I think privacy has been the dominant moral language people have used to complain about a huge range of things that are some are recognizably private, some aren't. That you're stretching the concept of privacy maybe too much. Um but what they all have in common is the sort of increasing fixity to you know to use um your term of the of human life or the human person into information. the com compilation of more and more data about us and the idea that more and more it's sort of a complaint that more and more areas of our lives of human understanding and so on have gone from sort of being uh unknown or known in a in a manner that's not sort of doesn't have the sort of fixity must be a or not a of of information to information. So from uh you know you you got photography and and so on and then I mean the list is so long that I'm not going to remember them all but it'll be too long for me to list. So the census, the passport, hotel registries, school records, um uh the um uh so statistical actuarial tables. I mean I I won't try to remember them all. There's it's just a massive list. computer datab banks in the 1970s was a big site for public outrage about privacy. And this is information that people um it's public information or stuff you freely disclose to your you know your insurer or or whatever and what people were complaining about. It's not that we're seen in public or that we have insurance or or and they have to have some sort of information about us, but rather the sort of the increasing datification of all of our lives seemed to make it more fixed, seemed to make it more constrained. Yeah.
>> Um than before.
>> I was being I feel like I'm being compressed.
>> Yeah. And like you know we use that word in like to talk about computer files like we want to compress them. And the thing about compression is that it almost inevitably loses resolution that you become like a less rich and textured subject the more that you are compressed and you feel like you know all this about me but you like don't know me and and that's that that feels unsettling at least. Think about, you know, they talk in photography talk about capturing >> of course or shooting too, hunting metaphors. Yeah.
>> But capturing.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, you really get the subject.
You get them in interview as well.
>> Yeah.
>> So, what would you say then about this kind of world we live in where I think some people would say that like basically privacy is an outdated right. We should we should embrace like the post privacy world. I mean, um, Dave Edgar's novel, The Circle, is basically about building this world, and he thinks it's like a dystopia. He's correct. But, you know, we see mass surveillance in from corporations, from governments, but also a kind of voluntary mass surveillance of each other and of ourselves through the way that we broadcast all of our thoughts out into the world. Um, do you think that, you know, are you fighting a losing battle?
like you're you're talking about the value of privacy, but everyone's like, "Well, I've given it up already because I like using Facebook and I I make YouTube video, you know, whatever that is."
>> Yeah, I would. So, you do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy. So, I just recommend that we be like very skeptical and think of the source of uh the claim that privacy is dead. you know, famously it was Mark Zuckerberg and um Sergey Brin maybe or one of the other Google guys like these are the people saying privacy is dead. It's it's not they're not sociologists or philosophers. This is like a hopeful pitch. They're like hoping their investors will hear maybe or maybe we'll stop caring about it. Um give them more sources for revenue. But >> Mark Zuckerberg also thought we were all going to be wearing VR goggles by now.
So, you know, at least he he is famously wrong about some things.
>> Yeah. Well, and they all seem worth fighting.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Um, but so I teach class I teach I'm teaching a class right now of uh first year college students on privacy and I've taught this class. This is my sixth year in a row or so of teaching it >> and >> and you teach it at Stanford at Stanford.
>> I feel like that's relevant not to just show that you're a really smart guy who teaches at Stanford but it's a certain kind of university.
>> Yeah. So if any if any students are going to be post privacy it's these and invariably they all value privacy. They might value in different ways.
>> Um but it's not that they um don't value it. Um but there I think there are two things that are sort of get in the way get in their way of really valuing it and being motivated um by their values.
Um one is that it's just hard to articulate >> what just what it is that we value about it. And that's that makes uh sense. And I think as we've been discussing our our current environment ideological and economical makes it harder to um articulate. And second is exactly what you were just saying like the world we almost overnight it seems to me and really like in 20 years during my lifetime um the world has changed so radically with regard to surveillance and what we accept as the norm. So we weren't just today captured on cameras everywhere, but we also had tracking devices on our body in our phones.
>> Also, you know, we used a credit card at a coffee shop and a restaurant. That data is also being registered. And it all sort of seems normal. normal because it's deliberately um um uh hidden.
Because not that long ago, in my lifetime, it would have been almost an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which you were video surveillance is more or less everywhere. Each person uh has an individual tracking device on their body which they voluntarily take and they enter all sorts of information into. The cashier at the restaurant is collecting information on you. the coffee shop. Uh this is this would have been extremely dystopian not that long ago and it's what within living memory within my living memory uh people pointed to like in the in the GDR or today you know um China's surveillance state as like an is one of the most um dehumanizing violations of human dignity.
>> Yeah.
>> Imaginable. I think it's a care it was it was not that long ago um just like a um a central way of portraying how we can and it doesn't have to be the state society and everything can can be can infantilize a human being and treat them in a way they don't deserve to be treated and we've gone so quickly from seeing this as an as absolutely anathema to a free society and the idea of the dignity of the human person to just being the normal way of doing business.
I think part of that is that, you know, that makes it saying, well, then we've endorsed it. I guess we want this, don't we? And that's the the the argument you hear back. Well, if people didn't want these services, um they they wouldn't be using them.
>> Um and I think that's not true. I think part of the reason that that's that this has happened is one, it happened really fast. Um, two, we weren't uh we were sort of enthusiastic about it. Certainly millennials and you know maybe boomers to some extent were enthusiastic about it at first and in our time of enthusiasm it just spread so fast >> um that it was a bit uh uncontrollable but you know I I talk with these kids about privacy and I teach a class on tech ethics also and um they aren't as um as credulous I think as we were >> like I think that the the period in which people don't think you we care about privacy um is over.
>> Uh I don't think it was ever real, but you I don't think you hear it that much anymore. These kids really do. And yet now we live in a world where the the fight to contain that stuff is much much harder because it's now everywhere.
>> And and when we say these kids, we're thinking of like college students right now, college freshmen. Yeah.
>> They're the ones who grew up in what you would have called the post-privacy world.
>> Yeah. They're the ones who their baby photos are might be on Facebook like you know like everything about them was documented in a way >> there the iPhone is older than they are.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they've been used to everyone carrying around these tracking devices and probably they think about it mostly in the fact that it's cameras and it can capture video and audio and take stills. Um, and so they've sort of lived it their whole lives and maybe that kind of they can see it like we we got to be the enthusiastic adopters of those technologies. I was in high school when the iPhone came out. Um, you're a little bit older than me, so you're probably in college by then. And um, it was like, wow, what an amazing piece of technology. I bet nothing bad's going to happen. [laughter] And these kids, they didn't get a choice about adopting it or not. it was just always part of their world. And maybe that actually makes it a little bit easier for them to just see the the negative consequences.
>> Yeah. And they might be, you know, addicted to it in the same way that we all are. I mean, it's designed to be addictive.
>> Um, but they I mean, growing up with and growing up, I mean, I think the big Yeah. As you point out, like the big break period is mobile connectivity, smartphone, and social media. So, these kids grew up with social media. Um and I almost even the ones who tell me that they're you know they still embrace it, they still use it for this and that all of them recognize that it is not just dangerous but it has been bad for them like any sort of addiction like smoking. I think they they have enough of experience with it and experience in at the time when it is it does seem most dangerous to kids in adolescence. Um, and they have, you know, personal horror stories in a way that we, you know, we didn't. And so I think they're they're much more tech-critical. Um, they're much more um uh I wouldn't say they're much they value their privacy much more.
I think they value it the same. Um, but they don't take for granted the idea the the slogans of the technology industry um that it's on its way out. The problem is these are huge economic uh forces, technologies that can be difficult to understand and you know the you can opt out to some extent as an individual. Um but the problem is structural and societal and that leads them I think the rest of us to sort of a feeling of impotence. Well, how can I >> do something about this?
>> Yeah. And even if you decide personally to opt out, other people can just keep documenting you. And they, you know, I had to have multiple hard conversations with my family when I had kids because I don't put their pictures on the internet.
>> Mhm.
>> And it's like a hard line for me. And a relative would take their picture and they would post it on Facebook. And they'd be like, "Oh, it's just for my Facebook friends." Like, "No, it's on the internet now. Like, delete it." And um so I have to it's it's like a part-time job for me making sure that my kids don't wind up on the internet and you know they're like one's a toddler and one's a newborn but I have to like do all of that that that work because so many other people even if they mean well right and and I actually think the analog here or a good historical analogy here is like um the surveillance state that was able to build itself up in um East Germany sort of famously It was like thought that this the Stazzi had eyes everywhere. This is the myth that that that sort of the Stazzi wanted everyone to believe that they're always listening. They're always watching. But when the archives were sort of opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you're able to see that a lot of the time the reporting came from just someone who had a grudge against you.
>> It was people just reporting on on relatives or former friends. And so it was the willingness of people to police each other and to surveil each other that made the surveillance state possible. Uh and and I and I think we're in something similar to that. It doesn't even obviously have to have those negative intentions, but it just takes one person snapping a photo and putting it on on the internet for it to suddenly be connected to this vast web of information which very powerful algorithms can then use and try to classify and sort. Um so you can try really hard as an individual um and try to opt out but if you have any kind of normal social ties that opting out always feels a little bit futile.
>> Yeah. So again if you've seen the the the the movie um the lives of others or any documentary about the the Estasi you know you see at the end of that movie they show the archives and they have so many pages of documents massive archives more than any human being could ever go through. Yeah. Um and so one way of looking at that um is well this is the you know this is one natural nice downside of the surveillance state is that like we just can't do that much with all that information. Well now we do have tools to do to work with all that information and to do inferences about you from other people. So the idea of individual opting out >> no it doesn't just seem um sort of individualistic anymore. It actually doesn't work so much anymore. So now you need collective solutions but even still like that takes a lot of compute takes a lot of in like input um it's hard to even to do that stuff even though we've invented this technology now that can do it and as in East Germany as you point out um the same today like the most efficient uh surveillance technology are human beings and not stasi employees um but informants so most you know most of the information in the east came from informants So that's more efficient because you don't have to pay them. You can kind of scare them into working for you. But that just pales completely in comparison to the fear or the uncertainty about informants. So the most efficient way of controlling people's behavior, I mean this comes from Jeremy Bentham's letters on his panopticon prison and you know later taken up by Fuko and the GDR authorities and so many others is uh is is the best the best is to have people under surveillance constantly. That's impossible. That's very hard. Maybe we're moving to that world. Um, but this the close second best is having people never be able to be certain that they're not >> under surveillance. So in, you know, the East German context is people's friends and family were ratting on one another if they were under pressure, whatever.
Um, uh, so you could even with your most intimate people, the idea was to insert the the uncertainty that even with your greatest intimates, you can never be sure that this wouldn't get back >> to uh the government. Um, and that is, you know, gets us to control ourselves.
If you can never be sure whether you're not you're going to be listened to, >> you will uh discipline yourself in a way that fits with your imagined idea of what the authority wants. You're going to lose a lot of freedom and spontaneity. And it like the political ramifications of that are obvious. So, one way to do that is to have an authoritarian state with, you know, bad punishments for thinking and acting uh wrongly and lots of informants. and so on. But another way is just to have listening and recording and you know not just video recording but metadata recording devices everywhere just integrated into the fabric of social life.
>> Um so that's enough to take away the confidence that >> even if you opt out it's very unlikely that you were going to be unobserved undocumented.
>> In 1984 there's the telescreen obviously but you can try to like hide or maybe there's a place where the telescreen isn't there. Great. But also, um, it's the kids who rat out their parents.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, so there like Winston's neighbors get ratted out by their kids who are like the true believers, right? And so it's it's this you never know and maybe the kids will turn on you or maybe or maybe there's a telescreen where you don't expect, right? That's a that's a big part of >> and the screens aren't always plugged in in my memory, but they could be. You never know when they've or connect. It was like, you know, the old uh telephone um you know, switch box idea.
>> Yeah. I think it takes for granted that someone might not always be watching you, >> but you never know.
>> But you never know. There's no indication on the outside, right?
>> Yeah. And that's enough.
>> And there there were these um you know, these new meta glasses >> that have cameras on them.
>> They're sort of like marketed for content creators and things. And I think um they have a red light that's supposed to say when they're on >> as a safety feature.
>> Uh uh I saw something just this week that a company has already basically has like a like a like a hack you can do. So for 60 bucks they can like send you the thing or they'll do it for you that disables the red light but keeps the recording on. So now if people are wearing those glasses, you could always be record and you and you would have no way of knowing.
>> Yeah, inevitably.
>> Yeah, >> that's going to happen.
>> I I had this experience. I wrote an article about this. I'll link it below in case people want to read it where I bought one of those AI Fred pendants.
Now I bought it as like an experiment. I I was like, "Look, these things suck.
They're awful. you shouldn't use them, but I'm going to use it for a little while and like write about why they're bad. You know, I wanted to be honest about it. Um, and I couldn't last a day with it. And one of the things that I didn't realize it would do was, well, my impression was that you would hold it down and talk to it and then it would talk to you through your phone like and it would just be this unsettling presence. I didn't realize that it always listens. It's always on. And so I went to the farmers market with my son.
We go there like every weekend. and he likes to go get a popsicle from one of the stands. And I got this message on my phone. It buzzed and it was like, "Oh, popsicle time." And it was like I felt, you know, I I I I actually smashed it when the hammer when I got home. Like I destroyed the thing. But it felt so like what have I done? I've invited this surveillance technology into my life that maybe I I already do because I carry a phone with me, but I invited this other presence into my life that now was like observing this intimate moment with my son.
>> Yeah. like he he's like two and a half and he just like loves going and getting this like giant popsicle from this like farmers market stand. This is like a thing we do together and I had invited this other presence into it and I felt I felt almost like soiled by the experience.
>> Yes. a lot of it is is gamified um or I mean so we we've been talking mostly about us being surveiled and the objects of surveillance or privacy violations or so on um but this raises the other side of the question which is just as interesting and I think actually we have just as much to lose um when we become the surveillers ourselves and not just we become puriant we become you know um private eyes which to me one thing that just completely shocks me is how we Google people now, you know, you're going to meet somebody or, you know, watch a podcast and you're like, Overnight, without really realizing it, we all became private detectives.
>> Yeah. We even say stalking as if it's a joke.
>> Yes.
>> Oh, I'm so good at stalking.
>> It went from being one of like the most morally reprehensible things you can do to something that my wife says, "I'm a great stalker." And everybody knows what she means. Like, I'm good at finding information about people. I enjoy it.
And so on. Um, and that's a common thing to say like, "Yeah, I was stalking so and so." Like, in five or 10 years, it's gone from being one of the creepiest things you can do to a completely normal activity. And I think there are lots of parallels um for that. The friend, you know, what what is it when we need to document all our lives when we, you know, consider this thing friend? the the meta glasses. You know, it's worth thinking about what are the sort of not just the political and ethical but even the libido aspects of the person wearing those. What does it do to us? What kind of person would want to wear those? Why would it, you know, what kind of the formation to get back to the beginning of our conversation? What kind of person do they encourage us to become? So I have an example that I think let me see what you think about um because this is something I learned from having little kids and you have got a little kids so um maybe you have similar experience um it's about baby monitors.
>> Mhm.
>> And uh so we had uh we had our our baby.
This is a kind of surveillance seems okay you know um >> you do it to make sure they don't die you know >> we do but you would think you know I'm not sure that's why we do it exactly but but That's the reason and it does like if they're coughing with you can run in or something. Um, at first we had the old style audio monitor and so if she woke up crying, especially when you're trying to get them, you know, teach them how to sleep, we'd go back in and we would do the shushing or whatever you do. And that was fine. And that one broke. And then we got a video monitor.
Um, and uh, and the video monitor, you know, we would only attend to the audio monitor if she started crying. But the video monitor, you know, we turn it on every now and then and look at it and see like I don't know is that a weird way she's think but in any I started checking the video more often just in like even in idle moments the way we check our phone and um uh I have my wife has a cousin who had the next step up there's like a little I think it's like an anklet or something they can wear that monitors their vitals oxygen level heartbeat and stuff and that I've seen you check a lot more often, you pay a lot more attention, and when it falls off, you think maybe your baby's dying.
Um, and so my experience with these technologies is um the the each step that I have that gives me more information about the child, the more information I think I need, which before I didn't need it. I was I mean was totally my parents said fine without one. Also, the more anxious I am, the more it occurs to me that maybe she's not okay. And so, this is like maybe she's sleeping weird. Didn't occur to me with just the sound. Maybe her oxygen levels are low. Doesn't occur to me with the video. Um and so uh one thing that I think and I argue for this a bit in the book is that one thing we get from privacy and from limits to information to limits to knowing more we get as the surveillors is uh those limits are part of the way that we produce trust in a society. They give us opportunities to trust and like think of teenagers or people who are tracked on find my or whatever also give us opportunities to be trusted and um I've certainly found the more information I have on the monitor or you know you could I don't do find my but that you know I imagine that's the same um the less trusting I am of like the world of things to work out well because if she disappears from the map or if the the the oxygen levels go to zero or whatever I think something terrible has happened. Mhm. Yeah. I My wife and I don't um share our locations with each other and I've met people who are like horrified by this. Like what do you mean you don't share your location?
And they seem to think that it's because we have something to hide from each other.
>> But I occurred to them like I never have questions about where my like I generally trust where she says she's going and if she has to take some detour that I don't understand like she can tell me about it later, right? And and and it feels the same way. And I and I think that as opposed to thinking of it as an opportunity for us to be dishonest with each other, it's actually an opportunity for us to be by enabling the possibility of dishonesty, it gives us an opportunity to be honest with each other where if we were simply always disclosing our location, there would be actually there's no dishonesty there, but there's actually no honesty either because there's no chance for you to voluntarily reveal what you did that day >> and therefore no trust. you're not trusting and trust I don't think is a thing that we have or we don't have.
It's something we do. It's an experience we have. So as a kid you have the experience of being trustworthy of being trusted by being able to like close your door.
>> Yeah.
>> Go and that seems very important for the development of a self who thinks of herself as worthy of trust and therefore like as worthy of leading her life in her own way >> um in a more general way. Now, that seems really important, but also for me as a parent um or as just a co-citizen >> that allowing others to disappear into their privacy without thinking that it's hiding. The hiding um example, the hiding the friend saying, "What do you have to hide from another is very apppropo?"
me not thinking that when they go behind closed doors they're hiding something or maybe they're doing something but just trusting them to go into their privacy about which I have no idea what's going on is I think a very valuable experience for them but also for me to develop like my sort of subjectivity as a as an adult or a citizen um in a democracy and you like so the hiding thing is that takes us back to our how we started talking about secrets um and this is why I wrote the book partly to like rescue the meaning of privacy from our time. Um because if you say, "Yeah, my wife and I have privacy from one another." Um and the response is, "Well, it seems like you have something to hide from one another." No, >> you don't. If keeping secrets is what secrecy is for keeping secrets, you know, hiding is for those having something to hide. Maybe we hide from one another in certain cases, then you should be suspicious about why we're hiding. Is it a surprise party? Do I have a secret uh family on the side? No, not a private family. secret life. Yeah.
Secret family.
>> Um uh and so to the extent that we come to think of like privacy or these moments of these barriers to knowledge about us even in the most intimate relationship as those of hiding. I think what we do is uh we replace sort of ordinary healthy trusting unknowing between spouses, friends, parent and child with something more grasping, more impatient, something like more close to the suspicion of surveillance.
>> So you can imagine you go home tonight and tomorrow um you notice all of like the different privacies that structure your everyday life in the most forthcoming relationship imaginable.
spouses, cohabitating spouses, co-parents.
>> Um, there's can be lots of privacies, the bathroom door, what she's thinking in a pensive moment, you know, what she's texting.
>> Um, and you can imagine, okay, what would happen if I instead of naturally, as we do, seeing those things as private, >> I started thinking seeing them as secret >> or as hidden.
>> Yeah.
>> Suddenly the dynamic of the relationship changes in a very radical way and trust turns to suspicion and what had been like a sustaining thing >> falls apart. Yeah. My wife and I have like I don't think we ever we never sat down and made these rules.
>> Of course not.
>> Right. Relationships where you have to like explicitly codify all the rules are a little bit weird, right? But if if if I see a letter if I saw a letter from someone I didn't recognize in the mail, I wouldn't open it. I would give it to her. If I see a hospital bill, I typically know if she's gone to the hospital, I'll open it because one of us got to pay the hospital bill. You know, it's just like we have these unspoken barriers where it's totally permissible for me to do that like to to open up the hospital bill because it's just part of like kind of our life together, right?
It's just like a financial thing we got to take care of. Um, but if she got a letter, I might later ask her, "Oh, what was the letter?"
She could tell me. She would, you know, by default, she would tell me basically everything that was in it. Um, and yet I probably would never ask her, "Can I read it?"
>> Unless she was like, "I'm really bothered by this. Can you read it?" I might say, "Do you want me to read it?"
Sometimes you you would ask that, but I wouldn't ask, "Can I read it?" And and and I see it as actually a way of showing respect for her.
>> That she like, you know, in a long-term relationship, the boundaries between your two, like the two persons get blurriier and blurriier. You start kind of doing life together. You start doing weird cognitive offloading together. You know, like I'm the one who takes care of like the bills. She's the one who does like the schedule. You know, like these these sorts of things are very natural in like long-term partnerships, but you don't want to obliterate the distinction between you and act like I now have the right I mean, I even think putting it in terms of rights is weird, but I have the right to know everything.
Um, because in some ways it reduces her as a person. And if she were to do that to me, it would reduce me as a person.
And I don't want to be in a relationship with like a reduced human person. I want to be in a long-term marriage with like a fully realized human being and her privacy is actually part of her full realization of her life.
>> Yeah. One of one of the I think that's I completely agree. One of the the sort of the the failings of relationship you often hear about and just like see in the media is withholding. You they didn't if I or like the the a breakup happens friend what happened like I don't know she just she wasn't who I thought she was. Mhm.
>> You know, we blame limits to our knowledge of the real person for failures to information. And of course, you have to know somebody to fall in love with them, to be intimate, to share a life. And at this like the most shared a life uh can be and you know, part of the reason I wrote the book about privacy, it's not, you know, it's more broadly, it's more broad than than privacy. You say, well, that's true. We also need limits to knowledge just as you're um describing even in the most intimate relationships with others but also with ourselves that um you know having these barriers to limit to knowledge and as we've said hiding secrecy privacy they're not the same things that these are the barriers of privacy is uh a way that you generate in your relationship these things aren't naturally occurring facts about your u marriage respect trust um the the I'm not I don't exactly remember how you said it, but like the fullness or depth of your wife as a person. And that's why like say it's a letter from somebody you don't recognize and uh it turns out to be something totally innocuous. Maybe you forgot you met this person at a wedding and just said, "Good seeing you at the wedding. Thanks for coming. Um thanks for the gift." And you know, you insisted to see it. No, I don't want you to see it. You know, it's private. You insist like show me it. Show it to me.
Show it to me. And you showed it and she showed it to you. It doesn't show you you know, she it was nothing that she was hiding. Nevertheless, if I were her, I would feel disrespected, as you said, but I would also feel kind of invaded in a way, almost like analogous to a privacy invasion, even though it wasn't anything I wanted to keep secret, wasn't important. the fact that you didn't respect the boundary any sort like it does it's not a particular boundary that you mark out ahead of time but that there was a part of my life that is beyond what you can get at >> um >> it's not that insult the problem isn't that it was revealed it's that it was mine to reveal or it was hers to reveal in this case like it was up to her and if I if I enforce this if I say no you have to let me read it I'm sort of taking away her ability to reveal it or not reveal it. And and I I think this is actually getting at this kind of this tension we all have to live with, which is like we're public beings like we live together, right? And uh Aristotle makes this this uh remark in the first book of the politics that if a human being who is not a sharing creature is either like a beast or a god and the consequence of that is that either way you're kind of inhuman. to be human is in part to live together and to strive for some kind of unity, >> but we're also individuals. And so it's this it's this weird mix of respecting ourselves qua individual while also recognizing that we flourish together sort of qua social being. Um and that that privacy is like this weird thing that kind of reveals the the kind of tension we all have to live with. And I don't think all tensions have to be resolved. sometimes navigating those tensions or kind of living with them is part of what it means to to be a human who's kind of functioning properly. Um, but privacy kind of sits at one of those those those core tensions between social reality and sort of our individual reality.
>> Yeah. And I love the way you put that because it does seem like an error. I don't know if it's just of our age or human thinking in general that tensions are to be resolved. One of these needs to be the dominant term, but tension can be good. Tension is what makes narrative exciting. It's what makes music move us.
Like tension is nice. We shouldn't want to get rid of all tension and friction in human life or we'd end up with a dull, flat, inhuman world. Uh I think this tension the t like it's useful privacy for individuals. Um uh but I think um we also get something. So we also again we're you know we think of privacy from the side of the person who surveiled or whatever or also from the person you know the privacy of the home from the person inside. Um but I think the people outside of the home get something from their privacy as well and specifically again from it being privacy not secrecy or hiding or something. The fact that we're surrounded here like there's a door here. I don't know what's behind it. I just assume you know I just sort of blindly oblivious to what's behind I don't want I'm not peeking behind that door, that door, what these people are thinking and so on. Like I'm surrounded by privacies all day, every day. And I just sort of subconsciously subrosa understand that there's something beyond there, but it's not something specific like a secret. It's not something that's being kept for me or others like what's hidden. Um it's just a human realm of the beyond in my life. And I think that's a public good that privacy radiates to all of us. It gives us all a sense. We don't even notice it unless you do this thought experiment. And then it is I think for me at least it's it almost gives me vertigo. It's so profound that um it gives those outside of privacy the public world a sense of depth a sense of possibility a sense that the human world can never end. um will will always exceed what is known and quantifiable about it and that's valuable for human beings. We think we like to change always to outgrow um for societies this idea that natality is very important a political force that we can you know uh uh uh become a new again and I think what private what we get from the p one of the public goods of privacy it's nice that it holds back the people in private kind of radiates this sense to human life that we would lose so to think of if you don't believe if this sounds like you know sort of um flighty you could imagine that if the if you know [snorts] there is no privacy So like in a total institution or an asylum or a prison or whatever, you don't have it. If if everybody lives in the proverbial glass houses or if we came to think of privacy as secrecy, >> as hiding like that good goes away. And the fact that we look at privacy like that isn't a natural fact >> in the same way that like our eyes can't see through walls, but it's a it's socially produced just because we think about privacy in a certain way.
>> Yeah. you carried a backpack around like when you got in my car and like I didn't even think to ask you what's in the backpack.
>> Yeah, great example.
>> What's in the bag?
>> But like I don't you know I mean now that I think about it it's like there could be a weapon in the bag. There could be a present in the bag. There could just be your notes in the bag.
There could just be something you like to carry around you know like who knows what it is.
>> Yeah. So our default about limits to our um knowledge and information um you know it's not a set feature about like human biology. It's a cultural product and our default in the backpack case is it's it's privacy but you don't notice you don't call it privacy doesn't call attention to itself but it's not hard to imagine a world a society in which this kind of I mean here we get like trust in a more circular relationship with privacy um where we treat concealment as hiding and not privacy that's as the default or secrecy and so I get in your car with your backpack and your eyes go to the backpack and suddenly your mind is thinking what's in there >> um that's a very different relationship my backpack to me and also within yourself through the limits to your knowledge. I mean that's a different way of going through the world. We can never know everything and so we go through the world differently depending how we understand the limits to what >> it's a much more paranoid world if you have no limits.
>> Yeah. you know, I I I didn't even think about it in these terms because like, you know, we know each other. We've talked several times and I didn't think about it, but it's like it's an act of trust to let you into like an intimate space like my car, which I guess it's like a private space, too, >> but with your own like with your bag, right? And I don't know what's in there.
Um, it's a small act of trust because I think the likelihood of you having something dangerous in there is incredibly low.
>> But it is still an act of trust. Yeah.
>> And we get to do these little acts of trust. And I don't think it's just something you have to do to get along in the world. Like I think that act these small acts certainly writ large but even in the car case they're productive like trusting that there's you know the treating the the the bag as privacy.
It's a trusting way of treating it. And I also don't realize this at the time but of course like I would notice it if it weren't the if this if you had treated me suspiciously. I have the experience of also being trusted. This like builds this sense of not just trust between us, this social trust, but it habituates us to be trusting or to habituates me in a sense that like, yeah, I'm trustworthy. I belong in this society. And you can see sort of like where like suspicion is racialized in a society. For instance, to take this one, um, our history and and presence, you could see how like mistrust, institutionalized cultural mistrust conduces to a sense of who belongs in a place uh or not. And I think like privacy and because we're again, we're always going to have limits to what we can know. And so that these we understand these limits as privacy. The ones that aren't secrecy and come to jail and so on is privacy and not hiding or so on is like a lynchpin of that trust.
>> I want to ask you to explain just the title of your book a little bit for everybody because it's the right to oblivion. Privacy and the good life. And I feel like we've talked about privacy, talked a little bit about the good life, but what is this right to oblivion?
Because that's kind of a very cool title, [laughter] but like what's what's up with that?
>> Okay, so I'll tell uh two things about it. One is I wanted to find a a word or a term to describe the kind of unknowing that privacy produces that we've been talking about the thing that's behind privacy. So you know comparison to secrecy the thing that's behind secrecy are secrets but secrets are like a piece of information. If you don't know something like completely and and and explicitly then you don't know the secret. if if you tell me like half of something, half of your, you know, your your your secret, whatever it is, I don't really share it. But secrets can be shared. Um, and the way that they're shared is like I come to know all of the information about the thing you're hiding. Um, so what is behind secrecy is just some piece of information that's kept from others, but maybe not all the world, but is at least kept by one person. This is not coincidentally how we think of privacy in the age of social media privacy settings. So to defend privacy and to make sense of all of these intuitions and to draw out this kind of productive power of this particular kind of unknowing um that privacy um protects and produces. I needed you know a word to identify it.
And I couldn't call it, you know, you can all you can be sort of circular and call it say secrecy protects secrets because we know what secrets are. It's a discrete piece of information. But we can't really say what privacy protects is the private life or something because then the question remains, what is it about the private life? What is it that this epistemic barrier gives to our life um in the home? And so um so there's not a you know a good word uh to use for it but um I picked oblivion because it turns out let me just say what the I mean by oblivion. By oblivion I mean it's it's a kind of unknowing that is fundamentally constitutionally opposed to the existence of information. So it's a kind it's kind of limit to knowledge that describes the limits of uh information what is knowable not just what's known. So a secret has to be information to exist. Oblivion cannot be information to exist. So two distinct kinds of unknowing. And the reason I I I chose oblivion is because it's not just privacy that produces this kind um of unknowing. The most well-known kind, well there are two well-known kinds, but they're both off, you know, they've both been described historically in terms of oblivion. One is death and one is forgetting. And so when you forget something, really forget it. It's not like, you know, Pache Freud and my Freudians here that that it's not that it's somewhere in your your basket or your memory bank or your computer and you just can't get at it. That's something different and it's a different experience, but that's not really forgotten. You're just having trouble retrieving it. something that's actually forgotten or that's you know consigned um to um uh well to oblivion is something that is beyond your power to recall. This is how we use it for death too. The oblivion of death is uh it's a barrier beyond which knowledge uh you know perception and so on can't pass um and on the other side of which we just don't have any way to say what's over there. In the same way secrecy, we know there's a discrete thing. We can't say anything about that realm of the unknown. Nevertheless, the barrier of death of forgetting and of privacy creates that unknown. It's because there's a barrier that we know that there's a beyond. And because we see it as privacy, forgetting, death, these sorts of things. Uh we see it as the barrier that creates the kind of oblivion. It creates a different kind um of beyondness. And so one reason I liked oblivion is that it ties these things.
people, you know, paradoxically, it's often thought that the right to be forgotten, the right to delete public information off the internet is a right of privacy. It's extremely paradoxical because it's only public information that's unproatically been in the public sphere for a certain amount of time.
Yeah.
>> It's not what we really mean by privacy.
>> It's like a it's like a it's like the the right to not be indefinitely recorded.
>> Yeah.
>> But that's different. But what we want it what we what that right wants to do is sort of reinstate a kind of oblivion or obliviousness in our um uh in the people around us as if like that had never happened. So you can't actually make somebody forget it. You want it to sort of disappear.
>> Um and so another reason for using the language of oblivion is the kind of unknowing that corresponds to it which is obliviousness.
>> And we tend to use it peoratively but if you think about it we talked about the the things of privacy we don't notice.
the backpack, you're oblivious to what's in there. We don't want people staring at our drapes or our laptops wondering what's going on in there. It's a kind of unknowing, suspicious unknowing.
>> Um, you know, we more associated with like secrecy or hiding looking for the hider.
>> We want people to just not even notice that we're on live. We want them to just walk by and and sort of bl ignorance our drapes and not be listening in or peering it. That's what we want from privacy. We want people to be oblivious to our lives. So, this is a it's a kind of a knowing that we all produce in concert. Um, and one last thing I'll say about um, oblivion because it ties into what we were talking about earlier, the sort of public um, expressive radiating goods of privacy >> um, but also you know forgetting I'd say and death in some cultures that really integrate death >> into um, uh, in to the world of the living is that the the term uh, the comes from the Latin word for forgetting. Um but the the Latin word um you know the etmology is sort of uncertain. So ob means like toward or against the the um the prefix and liio we're not super sure apparently what I mean not we I'm not like a philologist but they're not like completely sure what it where that comes from but the general consensus is that it means something smooth. So it's like against or toward a smoothness. And the reason I like that is because though oblivion is a kind of a knowing, it's an absence of knowledge. It's an absence of information. It does is kind of like a void or a lack. Nevertheless, it's a kind of void or a lack that we can integrate into our daily lives. And actually in in myriad unnoticeable ways with privacy and by integrating this kind of absence of oblivion in all of these quotidian spaces. Uh I think we add depth and a sense of potentiality to the human person but also to the the human um say the surround the social material world that we build. Mhm. You know, I inspired by what you've been saying so far, I was thinking about my own relationship to my children as they get like a little bit older that there are going to be times when the phrase I wanted to use was they're going to start hiding things from me.
And there will be times where they hide things from me, right? But before they start hiding things because they're like ashamed of it or whatever. There are just going to be times where they start doing things in private. And I think my impulse as a parent just because I want what's best for them and I want them to be safe is to like not let them do that because it because extending the right of privacy to someone involves giving up control.
>> But as I think about it, doing that for your kids is like a huge step in their development of their maturity even from a very young age. like letting them do things for themselves, but also letting them do things in private is going to let them develop into more fully realized human beings quick more quickly, but also like they're going to be better human beings because of it.
>> Y >> um and yet, yeah, in the case of being a parenting, there's like a little bit of anxiety there, right? Because >> I don't know. Yeah. Uh um and I think that's probably a barrier I'm going to have to overcome because I'm now thinking about what it would be like to rob my kids of their privacy. Um even when they're young, you know, because like if we put it in terms of rights, it's a little bit strange because we we think kids have rights, but we think of them as like kind of coming into some of their rights, right? Like they have certain rights from the very beginning, but they kind of develop more and you know, um legally they don't have like full legal rights of free speech and stuff like this until they're older.
Like I I mean but and so I don't want to maybe put it in like as the strict like rights talk, but I owe them something or it would be better for them to kind of start carving out privacy, maybe even at a younger age than I would typically expect. You know, my my son's like two and a half, but like already he wants to do things for himself and it's just a very small step from wanting to do things for yourself to wanting to do things in private.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think that's um completely right and I feel the same anxiety and in my experience and I think this is true you know reading ethnographies of of parents with tracking technologies or or kids with the fine my stuff that those this anxiety of our kids going off and doing something having private time isn't sort of a a steady state constant of human psychology in fact I think sort of ironically but maybe by this point not surprising urprisingly um it's directly correlated with how empowered we are to know more about them. So this is like an ironic disempowerment of the powers of surveillance that it lets us know more and more precisely and more constantly about them.
There was a woman on the airplane sitting next to me checking her Ring doorbell from just idly from the the seat. You can know more than ever before. It's amazing. Um, and it it makes us feel disempowered, >> more anxious. And I think this is a deep logic of surveillance that >> the ability to surveil makes you want to collect everything because you never know when it's going to be a crucial moment for the kid dangerous moment or for the surveillance state or paparazzi or just now curious person on the internet. You never know what's going to be important when you [clears throat] coalated or get it all together. So I think that's a um sort of a cruel irony um of our time. But certainly one remembering that these, you know, these magical little rectangles almost sort of like they're sort of like cursed gifts from a fairy tale that they they give us these unbelievable powers and yet they end up limiting us in a in a way that you know it's the ironic moralized ending [clears throat] um of the fairy tale.
>> And I loved to to loop back to the very beginning of our conversation. I think yeah this the relationship of a parent and child is distinct in in certain ways. I think what you how you were describing your desire to give your child privacy and why it would be good for them perhaps good for you but also why it's hard. I think that maps on pretty well to our um uh opening conversation about our morning in Austin going everywhere being surveiled um uh by everyone because uh in the same way that it could be I think damaging to a child to never have any sense that they have privacy in the same way that that is infantilizing because you you want them you said it's part of their growth becoming an independent human being in the same way that that's infantilizing I think it's infantilizing ing of adults to be surveiled in that way. I think it's like and of course it's like a a moral insult to treat an adult as if they were a child. Um and I think it is likely can't say certain but it's certainly likely to have negative effects on you know an adult populace in the same way that it would uh on a child. It's going to make us not just different people but a different sort of society where it it threatens to the possibility is certainly there.
>> Well, Larry, I think that's a great place for us to end. But before we go, we always ask for a book recommendation for our audience. Looking for something that nobody's reading but you think everybody should. So, do you have something for us?
>> Uh, yes. A book that I that nobody's reading, but I uh think everybody should uh is other than mine obviously. Yeah.
is um uh parallel lives by uh Phyllis Rose.
>> Phyllis Rose was um um feminist literary critic um English professor. She wrote a a biography of Virginia Wolf was a finalist for the National Book Award.
And this book is it's the most darkhorse book I've ever read in my life. My friend gave me a copy, friend whose judgment I really trust. But the copy I mean the cover is just very schmaltzy and it's it says it's parallel lives story of five Victorian marriages.
>> Oh, I care about Victorian marriages.
Yeah.
>> Um I'm not interested in I don't have a freestanding interest in the period and like I'm interested in marriage but I don't have to read a whole book about just five old ones.
>> And from her her introduction and then she gives a portrait of different marriages. They're famous people you'd know. There's Thomas Carlile, there's John Stewart Mill, there is um well on the spot. I'm not uh remembering them uh them all, but I I'll remember more in a second. But >> but at least Carlile um yeah uh Dickens uh is another one and just so her view of marriage uh her analysis of um really of like the lives of these women um but also the men how they kind of led parallel lives together. They have they're separate. I think that that's the meaning of parallel lives is that although they're entwined, they're sort of they're living different versions of this marriage.
>> It is one of the most beautifully written and insightful and profound um books on just what it means to be a human being as such, but also with others that I've ever read. Um, I think it's a masterpiece and it deserves to be much more widely read. Well, >> that sounds great. Well, Lowry Presley, thanks for joining us.
>> Thank you so much for having me, Jared.
It's been fun.
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