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, loc. 549