Big Tech is Like the Stasi

Privacy is not a timeless natural right. As Sarah Igo describes in The Known Citizen, what is and isn’t private has expanded in some directions and contracted in others over the past century with no consistent underlying principle. Sexual behavior between consenting adults was legally public in the sense that it was criminally regulated well into the twentieth century. Medical records were routinely shared between physicians, employers, and insurers without patient consent. The expansion of legal privacy protection into both of these areas was the result of specific case-by-case struggles. At the same time, financial transactions that were once private are now reported to governments under anti-money-laundering and tax-compliance measures, and communications that were once protected by the practical difficulty of interception are now trivially monitored at scale. These shifts also do not reflect a coherent theory of what should be private. They reflect the outcomes of contests between…