Capitalist data relations redraw the boundaries around the subject’s space of action and reflection, dismantling the effective limits on which depends the very possibility of a self that can trust itself and others. When we strip down autonomy to this minimal space whose integrity is necessary for the self to be a self at all, we touch on the roots of the many and varied forms that privacy takes across the world and that human beings have defended throughout history. This is the philosophical and practical core of contemporary debates about privacy. Privacy, according to surveillance expert David Lyon, is “a pivotal concept that helps to throw light on what is wrong with mass surveillance.” Privacy is a matter of the self’s minimal integrity whose necessity persists beneath all cultural constructions.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 505