J.R.McHale

“A robust privacy debate should ask who needs our data and why, while proposing institutional arrangements for resisting the path offered by Silicon Valley. Instead of bickering over interpretations of Facebook’s privacy policy as if it were the US constitution, why not ask how our sense of who we are is shaped by algorithms, databases and apps, which extend political, commercial and state efforts to make us – as the dystopian Radiohead song has it – ‘fitter, happier, more productive’? This question stands outside the privacy debate, which, in the hands of legal academics, is disconnected from broader political and economic issues. The intellectual ping pong over privacy between corporate counsels and legal academics moonlighting as radicals always avoids the most basic question: why build the ‘private spaces’ celebrated by Mr Zuckerberg if our freedom to behave there as we wish – and not as companies or states nudge us to – is so limited?” — from Evgeny Morozov’s OpEd in the Financial Times