Solove proposed we relinquish our “1984” fixation and find metaphorical support in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”: “a more thoughtless process of bureaucratic indifference, arbitrary errors and dehumanization, a world where people feel powerless and vulnerable, without any meaningful form of participation in the collection and use of their information.” In part this is about the difference between state and corporate power, but it’s also about effects subtler and further-reaching than the simple surveillance of what we mutter in bed.

We ought to worry, on his view, much less about the Thought Police and much more about how our informational profiles harden into the invisible architecture of our everyday lives. It’s not that we might be observed or killed in our sleep, but rather that the availability of loans or jobs or romantic partners or upscale hotel rooms are already being silently and automatically withdrawn from “people like us” — people with our politics, people of our skin color, people with certain friends or predispositions, people without the wealth and power of Mark Zuckerberg. Or, in the case of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s that our political affiliations are being arranged on the basis of our greatest vulnerabilities. Zuckerberg is more than happy to grant Durbin a victory that leaves all of this potential intact.

The best recent definition of privacy doesn’t require hotel-room carnage to make a case for why we should still pay attention to our persistent feelings of unease. The philosopher Helen Nissenbaum defines privacy not as one right to be balanced with others but as the condition of what she calls “contextual integrity.” When we talk about privacy, she says, we’re not talking about the difference between the intimacy of the bedroom and the scrutiny of the park, but rather the specific norms and expectations that govern communication among various parties at different times and places. The old public-private distinction, she writes, postulates “only two contexts with distinct sets of informational norms for each — privacy constraints in the private, anything goes in the public. The framework of contextual integrity, by contrast, postulates a multiplicity of social contexts, each with a distinctive set of rules governing information flows.” There are things we discuss with lovers that we don’t discuss with bosses, and things we discuss with doctors that we might not discuss with lawyers, and so on.

There are a variety of possible policy implications — beginning with the idea that a one-size-fits-all legal-consent model, where clicking “I agree” signs all your data away, should be regarded as nonsense. But the idea of contextual integrity is most immediately useful as a diagnostic aid in the absence of dead bodies, a way to render precise our otherwise vague sense of agitation. It does a lot, for example, to explain exactly what’s so unsettling about the Cambridge Analytica issue, and why the congressional hearings were so unsatisfying. Many of the questions from our elected officials seemed to turn on the epiphany that what seemed like a service to connect friends was actually a service to sell ads, but most Facebook users are neither that stupid nor that naïve; everybody knows at this point that if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product being sold. Yes, that omnipresent shoe ad might be creepy, but as autonomous subjects we feel more than capable of simply not buying the shoes. Our decision to purchase one shoe over another doesn’t seem to have broad social consequences.

Until all of a sudden we weren’t talking about shoe ads anymore, and we weren’t talking about minor personal decisions that could easily be reversed. It turned out we had been prepared to accept some intermingling of the norms of personal communication with the norms of the commercial marketplace, but even the most cynical among us didn’t quite realize the implications of letting all that bleed into the political. There was at last clear evidence to support a notion of privacy as a social good rather than an individual right — and, finally, a way to talk about why privacy matters without recourse to sensationalism. The “dead bodies” of the privacy debate might finally be laid to rest.