And yet somewhere along the way, privacy was recast as a necessity for cultivating the life of the mind. This modern understanding of privacy as an intimate good grew up right alongside the technology that threatened to violate it. The surveillance economy works on such information asymmetry: Data-mining companies know everything about us, but we know very little about what they know. And just as “privacy” has grown into an anxious buzzword, the powerful have co-opted it in order to maintain control over others and evade accountability. It’s a cynical inversion of the old association between private life and the lower class: These days, only the powerful can demand privacy.

Source: New York Times May 09, 2017 09:00 UTC