From the abstract of a paper from eight years ago:
Privacy shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable. It protects the situated practices of boundary management through which self-definition and the capacity for self-reflection develop… [a] society that values innovation ignores privacy at its peril, for privacy also shelters the processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges.
– What Privacy Is For, Harvard Law Review
The need for agency over one’s privacy is something we examine on a regular basis on this site. What about privacy from the state? This is less clear. For instance, avoiding being surveilled by pervasive security cameras in a city is a lot more difficult than being surveilled on the Internet. Covering one’s movements in the real world from a state that has access to your phone’s cell tower connections is less practical than covering one’s movements on the Internet from one’s ISP.
One of the books I read this year was Why Nations Fail. The authors describe how governments across the world and across time evolve either inclusive or extractive political – and economic – institutions, and that these are what determine whether a nation’s development is sustainable. States have a predilection to extractive institutions because the process of making them inclusive leads to what the authors call creative destruction – certainly not an original term – in which established powers lose influence at the expense of others. Surveillance, especially in this age of digital information flows, is uniquely extractive and uniquely consolidates powers in the hands of the entities doing the surveilling. Hence the extreme reaction to, say, the revelations by Snowden.
I bring this up to make the point that it is unrealistic in the short to intermediate term to expect any voluntary curtailment of surveillance by governments – neither the country nor the form of government matters. Governments inexorably find themselves controlling the “processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges” that the paper abstract refers to, and thereby controlling privacy. Similarly, they are incentivized not to roll back data collection by internet companies, but to regulate them in a way that gives the government access to collected data, usually ostensibly justified under national security or its synonyms.
I have no position personally on how much privacy is “good” – the implied absoluteness betrays its naivete. I do hold strongly that you should know and have control over how much privacy you give up. This knowledge is important because of what the paper says; the only safe way to explore boundaries internal and external to you is privately. This knowledge is necessary because privacy typically slips away slowly and, as we have reasoned above, is hard to win back.