Every day our lives become more known by governments, surveillance capitalists, and, perhaps, even ourselves. Privacy scholars and advocates, to a large extent, have sought to limit the ability of institutional powers to know us—and thereby manage us—by underscoring the need for individual control over what data are shared, with whom, and for what purposes/ends. The European General Data Protection Regulation’s emphasis on notice and consent is an example of this approach. And while the GDPR represents one of the most significant regulatory victories for privacy advocates, its overall utility is debatable, suggesting that privacy scholars and advocates, despite their valiant efforts, have a long way to go. In his new book, The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, Lowry Pressly encourages us to think beyond the “privacy as control” paradigm in favor of a less utilitarian and, perhaps counterintuitively, more ethereal understanding of privacy—privacy as the right to oblivion.
For Pressly, part of the problem with the “privacy as control” framework for information management is that it naturalizes the ex ante existence of information in the first instance. He argues that, by contrast, privacy is important in part precisely because it helps create space for not knowing, for forgetting, for the lack of information, and for the preservation of mystery. Drawing from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, and—to an extent—law, the book contends that the axiom “knowledge is power” is, in many ways, an overstatement, at least when it comes to self-knowledge and individual fulfillment. For Pressly, privacy is key to human flourishing because it helps integrate oblivion into our lives. By oblivion, he refers “to a form of obscurity that does not conceal some information but describes a state of affairs about which there is no information or knowledge one way or another, only ambiguity and potential” (p. 15).
To support this claim, Pressly examines societal and legal reaction to the advent and proliferation of photography (Chapter 1), conducts a literary analysis of undiscovered privacy violations and why they nevertheless bother us (Chapter 2), explains why privacy is distinct from hiding and the attendant suspicion that accompanies it (Chapter 3), analyzes the importance of forgetting for individual well-being (Chapter 4), and concludes by explaining, via Hannah Arendt, how privacy is not only critical for individual flourishing but for a vibrant public realm as well (Chapter 5).
All told, Pressly makes a powerful case for a more capacious and less-instrumental understanding of privacy and what it is for. And there is something beautiful, romantic, and refreshing in the idea that privacy, private time, and private space is principally for unknowing—that, without that lacuna, we would become inundated and overwhelmed by knowledge, even self-knowledge. Part of what helps us grow, mature, and move on is not knowing all the answers about ourselves. To put it perhaps too glibly, sometimes ignorance is bliss.
As Pressly observes in closing, his focus on the importance of privacy as oblivion isn’t necessarily intended to point to a specific regulatory direction or solution. But to the extent his excavation of the ways in which privacy can support individual human flourishing leads to more widespread societal appreciation for why privacy matters, then his book offers an important normative justification for why policy makers and individuals need to take privacy seriously. It is a persuasive and, as I said, beautiful account of why we must safeguard our ability to not be known by others—or by ourselves.
As important an intervention as it is, at times the book nevertheless elides certain themes and interventions of privacy scholarship. For one, Pressly overlooks some of the preexisting literature supporting the idea of privacy as sanctuary (or, in his words, oblivion) and a precondition for individual and societal human flourishing. Indeed, there is a bit of a tension throughout the book because Pressly, on the one hand, suggests that this vein of understanding privacy as oblivion has a deep historical pedigree (even in, for example, the famous Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis article from 1890 on “The Right to Privacy”), but on the other hand, he emphasizes its novelty. Here, I think Pressly may be understating the degree to which contemporary scholars have made similar points, albeit perhaps not in the language of “oblivion.”
More important than this gloss—which happens often in scholarship and which most scholars, including myself, are guilty of at times—is the book’s failure to meaningfully engage with the distributional aspects of privacy loss. This happens along a couple of dimensions. First, by framing the importance of privacy as, in essence, universally important to all, the book in many ways flattens the right to privacy. But as scholars such as Anita Allen, Khiara Bridges, and others have rightly underscored, privacy is not equally important for all people. Those at the margins of society, including Black people, queer people, immigrants, and women, face incredible downstream harms and violence when their privacy is violated. As such, the interests of these minoritized communities ought to be centered when thinking about how best to bolster societal appreciation for the value of privacy and, in turn, legal protections for that privacy.
Relatedly, while I agree with Pressly that privacy protections ought not to be limited to certain categories/silos of information (and here I am guilty of presuming the existence of some classes of information ex ante), society is still struggling to gain protections for the most obviously sensitive categories of information, such as intimate information. This suggests that there may be some continued value in triaging our efforts toward those categories of information that, if disclosed, will cause the most downstream harm to individuals, particularly to those at the margins.
Finally, for this reader, Pressly’s emphasis on individual oblivion neglects the importance of group enclaves. Put differently, as Julie Cohen has underscored, privacy scholars ought to move away from notions of selfhood premised on notions of solitary, individual development. As scholars such as Nancy Fraser have documented, subaltern counterpublics play a key role for community regroupment and development. All of which is to say that while I agree that privacy is important for oblivion and individual flourishing, I think it is equally important to underscore how privacy is critical for group/community flourishing. Pressly, I think, hints in this direction with his closing discussion of Arendt, but in my view, the conclusion tends to view the public benefits of privacy in the instrumental fashion he critiques at the outset of the book, rather than emphasizing that oblivion’s value to communities is inherent/self-contained.
Those suggestions aside, I found The Right to Oblivion to be an important intervention at a critical time—it challenges us (and challenged me) to not just look inward, but to create space and time for not doing so.
