Read: 2026-08-03
Recommend: 0/10
Worst book I’ve finished this year. The arguments rely on vague language and lack rigor. The author cites numerous other works, but these citations merely restate the same unclear ideas rather than clarifying them. I won’t read this author again.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
“Something is lost, not exhibited or gained, when infinite possibility gives way to the limitations of actuality.”
If the domain of privacy is delimited by the distinction between fixed expression and unexpressed potentiality, and not in terms of secrecy or control (for you cannot control what you cannot know), then we have a sense of what the camera actually invades: the protean realm of personality’s potential.
The response to the invasive question is not a denial but a rebuke and the assertion of a boundary.
It is this boundary to which we refer when we call these questions invasive, and it is on account of the question’s failure to cross it—by the success of the rebuke “that’s private”—that we describe it as invasive rather than an invasion.
privacy rights get their moral force from the prevention of harm to the violated, rather than from an interest that potential privacy violators have in not sticking their noses into other people’s business.
The ordinary view of Voyeur expresses the thought that what we want for Ben, and therefore ourselves, is not just to experience privacy, but actually to have it. This is significant because it suggests, against a strong current of contemporary thinking about privacy, that to some extent we care about privacy for its own sake, and not just because it has instrumental value relative to other things that are important to us, like autonomy, reputation, and material gain.
We can now give a provisional and partial account of the harm in Voyeur: Foos harms Ben not simply by forming a part of his biographical dimension, but by depriving him of a degree of possibility in that dimension that would have existed but for Foos’s spying. In other words, the harm does not consist in what Foos makes of Ben, since what he makes of him is no different from the impression he would have formed at check-in or the continental breakfast. Rather, by forming any impression at all, Foos deprives Ben of something he otherwise would have had. Understanding Voyeur as an instance of deprivation, rather than one of infliction or interference, fits with a common way of describing Foos’s action: he deprives Ben of his privacy.
A leer or sexualized gaze on the street makes us uncomfortable not because we believe that a gaze can actually touch the physical body, as the metaphor goes, but rather because we imagine the ogler’s dirty thoughts to affect, however minutely, the parts of our selves that exist beyond the bounds of our bodies and minds.
What seems to matter for privacy is that the information make it to a human (or similar) intelligence that is capable of understanding that information as not just emanating from me as light from a star, but being about me in a deeper sense of my biographical dimension.
what privacy does is protect against the sensory perception of oneself and an associated range of information and objects.
But it is a mistake to assume that because information results from a privacy violation, information is therefore what privacy protected before the violation occurred. It still needs to be demonstrated that what privacy protected before its violation was the information thereby gained (again, this is what secrecy does).
It is on account of limitations of knowledge and control that we consider sex one of the deepest, most intimate ways of being with and coming to know another person. But it is not just others that we come to know in this way. We also learn about ourselves. Experiences of physical intimacy can be occasions for self-discovery in addition to pleasure.
Against the many exigencies of accounting for oneself, privacy’s protection of space and time for the unaccountable offers us the chance to live with our murky parts by being murky ourselves, to experience the bits of ourselves and others that lie beyond our control and understanding. No wonder we seek privacy to enjoy the fullest experience of losing ourselves with others.
the advent of mass-market newspapers harmed both individuals and society by offering a constant supply of novel and exciting but essentially frivolous information: “Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.”
This means that hiding is characterized not only by a particular relation to the seeker but also to oneself. To hide is to experience individuality at its most exquisite, to feel the sharp edge of self-identity.
Part of what it means to have privacy then, in the fullest sense, involves not being too fixated on the world beyond privacy’s interior in the way that a hider fixates on a seeker.
The confidence that we could be different from ourselves if we wanted, based in a social structure that makes such confidence reasonable and equitably available, is a fundamental condition of healthy agency and human flourishing. This is not an idea confined to contemporary advocacy for the right to be forgotten but has animated more than a century of public moral discourse that pits the value of privacy against the increasing documentation of human life in the information age.
The Russian proverb “trust, but verify” is rightly famous for its irony. To the extent that you verify, you do not trust, and to the extent that you are monitored, watched, or documented, you are not trusted.
So, this book does suggest solutions to the challenges of the digital era, after all, not in the realms of law and technology, but in those of value and understanding.