This is the space, as Rössler puts it, in which “processes of self-description, self-definition, self-discovery, or indeed self-invention” take place, all of them “dependent upon a person bringing herself face-to-face with herself in conditions in which she can really be sure that she is protected from the eyes of anyone else.” The liberal philosopher Charles Fried had anticipated the problem when in 1970, with what would now be a primitive surveillance technology in mind, he imagined a parolee kept under constant and total monitoring in case he commits another crime; is this, he asks, consistent with any notion of freedom? Fried argues no, because such an arrangement overrides the basic element of interpersonal trust fundamental to human life: trust that respects the independence of the other person, as an other person, to make his own errors. If trust, he argues, were just a matter of risk management, we would probably delegate it to “cheap and efficient surveillance,” but “man can’t know he is trusted unless he has a right to act without surveillance” and so prove he is worthy of trust. … This is exactly the sort of trust-less social order toward which data colonialism is taking us.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 503