Privacy law’s negative liberty tradition conflicts with capitalism’s data extraction drive.

Evidence

Legal scholarship has for more than a century debated the need to protect the physical, communicative, and virtual space of the self. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in the late nineteenth century proposed a “right to be let alone” in response to the incursions of the yellow press and early paparazzi. This “negative” form of liberty was extended in the twentieth century to connect with “positive” forms of liberty such as informational privacy and decisional privacy—respectively, the right to control over one’s personal information and over the process of one’s decision-making. Capitalism’s broader drive to extract value from personal data is clearly in tension with such inherited notions of privacy and the philosophical values that underpin them. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 549

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crisply distinguishes negative vs positive informational privacy and decisional privacy, key definitional scaffolding for the data-colonialism argument.
• XREF: connects to: Privacy protections are structurally incompatible with surveillance capitalism’s accumulation logic — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 601; Privacy fixes leave intact data science’s silence about capitalism — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 433; Default data harvesting contradicts capitalism’s own espoused freedom. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 627 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Privacy protections are structurally incompatible with surveillance capitalism’s accumulation logic #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 601
• Default data harvesting contradicts capitalism’s own espoused freedom. #contradicts (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 627
• Privacy fixes leave intact data science’s silence about capitalism #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 433