University of Tennessee law professor Maurice Stucke, author of “Breaking Away: How to Regain Control Over Our Data, Privacy, and Autonomy” has been critical as tech firms have grown into giant “data-opolies” profiting from surveillance and manipulation. In a conversation with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, he warns that legislative inaction and wider government complicity in this surveillance are eroding fundamental rights to privacy along with the ability of federal agencies to regulate Big Tech.
Lynn Parramore: Concern over privacy is increasing right now, with people worrying about different aspects of the concept. Can you say a bit about what privacy means in a legal context? With the digital revolution, privacy obviously means something different than it did 50 years ago.
MS: Yes, privacy is not a single unitary concept. There are different strands. There’s bodily privacy and decisional privacy – the right to make important decisions about one’s life, like whether to have a child or not, without governmental interference. Within the bucket of decisional privacy would also be marriage, contraception, and things of that nature. There’s intellectual privacy (such as what one reads, watches, or thinks) and associational privacy (such as the freedom to choose with whom one associates).
— source scheerpost.com | Lynn Parramore | Jul 19, 2022