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Can we still recover the right to be left alone?

The political theorist Lowry Pressly thinks we’ve abandoned a more creative and humanist definition of the concept.

But Mayer’s 1971 work underlines that such information has to be created in the first place, and she noted how much was not captured in her experiment: “emotions, sex, thoughts, the relationship between poetry and light, storytelling, walking, and voyaging to name a few.” A poet’s list, to be sure, but it helped me understand the argument of Lowry Pressly’s The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. Long before data mining, Pressly points out, people objected to the increasing documentation of human life through the media and all manner of bureaucratic recordkeeping in the late 19th and early 20th century (passports, Social Security numbers, and fingerprints; birth, marriage, and death certificates, etc.). A similar dynamic is at play when we think about facial recognition software being deployed via closed-circuit cameras on city streets, or about a stranger “stalking” us online: All that occurs in the public realm, but we can still feel that something important has been violated, that our personal boundaries are not in our own control.

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