Why Do We Care So Much About Privacy?

Big Tech wants to exploit our personal data, and the government wants to keep tabs on us. But “privacy” isn’t what’s really at stake.

“The right of privacy,” wrote Justice Douglas, “is a powerful deterrent to any one who would control men’s minds.” Douglas did not coin the phrase “the right to be let alone.” It appears in one of the most famous law-review articles ever written, “The Right to Privacy,” by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890.

This article in The New Yorker provides an overview of our right to privacy, and what's really at stake when our privacy rights are infringed.
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