When Warren and Brandeis claimed that what the camera invades—that is, what the right to privacy protects—is neither secrecy, seclusion, nor property, but “inviolate personality,” they are drawing on that tradition of thought about the self we discussed a moment ago, which traces back to the Romantic idea that the essence of the human person was a

the fact of appearing in a photograph per se but to the way that a photograph appears to reify the living multiplicity of a human being in a static object to be known; how the snapshot turns the fluid polysemy of life as it as lived (and as it dissipates into the flux of living memory) into something like information, if not information per se:

It is still incredible to me that in only the past five or ten years, the common usage of “stalking” to describe an obsessive attention to another’s information or person has gone from denoting a serious and highly stigmatized moral infraction to the now utterly common, morally neutral activity of scouring the Internet to see what can be learned

For instance, in a recent book calling for new protections of “mental privacy” to guard against the emerging dangers of neurotechnology, Nita Farahany recounts the threat to mental privacy posed by the use of brain-scanning technology in criminal investigations.67 Although scientific research casts sufficient doubt upon the reliability of the

If I am oblivious to my surroundings, I might be worse at navigating through them, but I might also be wildly happy, lost in reverie, or deep in thought. The point is that obliviousness describes a particular form of not knowing: One doesn’t know what one doesn’t know and, just as important, does not suspect that there is something unknown to them,

Talese’s story presents a challenge to common ideas of privacy because it seems clear that the victims of Foos’s spying never suffered any material or psychological effects from his violation of their privacy. Must we then understand Foos’s actions as a bit of harmless wrongdoing, from which it is but a short step to “no harm, no foul”? Similar

Following in the vein of Foucault, if not his exact tracks, Édouard Glissant seeks to resolve the ethical and political questions of writing and identity with the value of what he calls “opacity,” which has since been taken up by postcolonial, feminist, and queer theorists and activists as an ethics of the fluid self in an era captivated by the

The connection of branding to the phenomenology of being shackled to one’s past is sometimes hinted at, especially by reference to one’s past as a “scarlet letter.” For instance, Rosen writes: “The permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past”

Henry James’s journal entry for November 17, 1887, reads, “One sketches one’s age but imperfectly if one doesn’t touch on that particular matter: the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private.”8