'A Design of Subtle Coercion' and the Argument for Privacy
The best case for privacy is not about secrets. It's about having the space to write your own self.
In October 2013, four months after Edward Snowden revealed a massive NSA surveillance program that swept up the phone records of millions of unwitting Americans, PEN America, which advocates for writers and free expression, surveyed more than 500 American writers to ask how the revelation had changed their work. Sixteen percent of respondents said they had avoided writing or speaking about a particular topic, while 24 percent said they deliberately steered around certain subjects in their phone and email conversations.
No one had ordered them to modify their behavior. Yet, people engaged in the profession of saying things were, by their own account, self-censoring.
They self-censored because they knew, or suspected, their communications were being monitored. And it’s when we realize we’re being watched that I think the strongest argument for privacy emerges.
It’s not an argument about secrets, but about who we are and who gets to author who we become. In other words, it’s about our autonomy.1
Too often people dismiss the importance of privacy with the oft-repeated line: I have nothing to hide.
In some ways it’s a reasonable enough position. Isn’t privacy for criminals and bad people? In 2009, Google’s then-CEO gave the canonical version of this logic: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” If you’re not a criminal, a dissident, or a journalist protecting sources, why should you care?
The standard answers to the privacy skeptic are familiar: Data breaches put you at risk. Private information can be weaponized by stalkers, adversaries, or the government—your personal information is open to the highest bidder. Data can be permanent and what is innocuous today might not be tomorrow.
These may be true, but they accept the view that privacy is a cost-benefit question that pits your data against your safety or convenience. Privacy advocates say the cost outweighs the benefits, while skeptics remain unconvinced.
“The key misunderstanding is that the nothing to hide argument views privacy in particular ways—as a form of secrecy, as the right to hide things. But there are many other types of harm involved beyond exposing one’s secrets to the government,” writes privacy scholar Daniel J. Solove.
It’s those other harms—in particular the harm to one’s self—that lay a stronger foundation for the argument that people should care about their privacy.
Have you ever avoided typing something into Google because it was too revealing—perhaps a medical or legal question? Have you ever angled your phone screen away from someone sitting next to you even though you’re only texting a friend? Would you hand your unlocked phone to your boss and let them scroll through your messages or photos? In each of these cases, it’s not about having something to hide. It’s about choosing when and where barriers exist.
If we strip away the ability to control who sees what, we do not end up with a more honest self. We get one flat, guarded self that performs for everybody. And the performing self is one that conforms to the expectations of others.2
It’s the unobserved spaces that allow for us to draft and revise our actual “selves.” We are not born the people we are today.3 We are shaped by our experiences, the people we associate with, the things we read and consume. But also by our thoughts, the feelings we sit with, and the things we decide to keep to ourselves.
This is essential to how a person is authored, and without space for this exercise, we lose the ability to write our selves.4
The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham figured out how observation changes behavior in the late 18th century, though he thought it was a feature, not a bug. His “panopticon” was a prison designed as a ring of cells around a central watchtower, built so that no prisoner could ever tell when or whether the guard was looking at him. Constant surveillance wasn’t necessary if the prisoner was unable to determine when he was being watched.
Two centuries later, the French philosopher Michel Foucault called it “a design of subtle coercion,” making the darker point that surveillance doesn’t just record behavior—it produces it. The prisoner who couldn’t tell if he was being watched begins to watch himself. And he argued much of society has been adopting similar models: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
When we are aware that we are being watched, most of us change our behavior. We begin to perform. And if surveillance leaves no space unobserved, the harm is not just conformity, as Bentham and Foucault described, but a lack of self-development.
You don’t see the Google search you didn’t run or the opinion you let die because holding it was uncomfortable. But you also don’t see the draft of yourself that never got written: The instrument you didn’t learn, the book you didn’t write, or the joke you never came up with because being good at these things first requires the space to be bad at them. We need unobserved spaces to be bad at things, to fail, and to explore our curiosities on our own. Julie Cohen at Georgetown University says, we need space to “tinker.”
Ultimately, without this space, it is our autonomy that surveillance takes.
Recognizing our loss of autonomy also combats another common shrug from those who dismiss the need for privacy: that privacy is futile. The data is already out there; the cameras are already up; why fight it?
But privacy has never been a binary that is either intact or breached. Instead, it is a margin. You do not need to be a ghost to remain the author of your own life. It does not require renouncing technology and moving to a cabin in the woods. What is needed is simply enough unwatched space—enough room, enough latitude to explore—for the drafting to happen.
Margins can be preserved. The problem we face today is that they can also be eroded one reasonable-sounding concession at a time: an age-verification law here, a network of automatic license-plate readers there. Each arrives with a defensible rationale, but each one also tightens the margin where an individual’s drafting can happen. To quote Daniel J. Solove again, “[P]rivacy is threatened not by singular egregious acts, but by a slow series of relatively minor acts which gradually begin to add up.”
So here is the case compressed: a person who is always watched is always performing; a person who is always performing is always conforming; and a person who is always conforming is being written by others.
Privacy is not about hiding the self, but rather a precondition for having one.
Read this—it’s important! Nothing here reflects the views of anyone but me. Further, I am not a lawyer. I am not here to provide advice or tell you what to do. If you find yourself the subject of a law enforcement investigation, hire a licensed attorney who can advise you on your specific situation.
The autonomy argument for privacy has been advanced by a number of scholars. I primarily base this column on the work of Julie Cohen at Georgetown University and her article What is Privacy For?, which develops the connection between privacy and self-authorship in depth. I also base this column on Daniel J. Solove’s “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy and Neil Richards’ Intellectual Privacy.
Cohen states the goal of privacy is ensuring that the development of the individual does “not proceed in lockstep” with the development of the community. There must be flexibility for these two things to develop somewhat independently and to push and pull on each other.
Cohen argues we tend to think of our selves as fixed individuals but instead we are “malleable and emergent.”
Cohen argues that a “[l]ack of privacy means reduced scope for self-making.”