This story is part of The Privacy Divide, a series that explores the fault lines and disparities–economic, cultural, philosophical–that have developed around digital privacy and its impact on society. It’s been almost six years since an NSA whistleblower exposed the reach of government surveillance and a year since a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower unveiled the corporate side of the surveillance coin, and the risks of something as simple as an online quiz. But the public has been hearing and sounding alarms about digital privacy for an eternity. “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson way back in 2003, after his Hot or Not-esque Facemash website, built from photos he scraped in bulk from dormitories’ online “face books,” caused a campus uproar.

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Three months later, thefacebook.com launched. By 2010, he was declaring digital privacy essentially extinct. In the face of all the data abuse, many of us have, quite reasonably, thrown up our hands. Some have even parroted Zuckerberg and the other big tech executives who have heralded the end of privacy. But privacy didn’t die. It didn’t go away. It’s just been beaten up, sold, obscured, diffused unevenly across society. To mutate William Gibson’s quote about the future and its unevenness and inequalities, privacy is alive, it’s just not evenly distributed. Like the disparate impacts of surveillence, what privacy is and why it matters to us has always depended upon who you are, your age, your income, gender, ethnicity, where you’re from, where you live, what you value. And yet, even if we don’t all define or care about privacy the same way, we can mostly agree on what it looks like when it’s in jeopardy. Privacy is personal. It’s about the creepy feeling that our phones are literally listening even if they’re not, and the numbing feeling from an endless parade of data breaches that tests our ability to care anymore. It’s the unsettling sense you have given “consent” without knowing what that means, “agreed” to contracts we didn’t read with companies we don’t really trust. (Forget about understanding all the details; researchers have shown that most privacy policies surpass the reading level of the average person.) Privacy is the annoyance of being bothered and the pain of being violated. The concept of modern privacy is often traced to an 1890 law review paper by Louis Brandeis, who was frustrated by the loss of privacy the elite had suffered at the hands of journalists and gossip columnists. The right to privacy, he wrote, was primarily “the right to be let alone.” These days, one of the central tenets of stringent data privacy law is the right to be forgotten.

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