On privacy

Privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's about who gets to know you, decide about you, and shape you — and right now, the answer is: not you.

The inferred self

The data economy's real product isn't the data you knowingly hand over — it's the inferences drawn from it. A second self, assembled from a thousand signals, that predicts and categorizes and prices you, is traded between companies you've never heard of and used to make decisions about you that you never see. You don't control this self, can't see it, and can't correct it. That's the privacy problem that matters, and almost no one is talking about it.

“Nothing to hide” misses the point

The comeback to privacy concerns — “why worry if you've done nothing wrong?” — misunderstands what privacy protects. Privacy isn't secrecy; it's the right to context, to be different people in different settings, to not have every version of yourself collapsed into one permanent, searchable record used by anyone with access. Everyone has something to protect: not guilt, but the ordinary human need for boundaries.

Privacy is power

Strip away the abstractions and privacy is fundamentally about power — the asymmetry between those who can see and those who can be seen. When institutions know everything about you and you know nothing about them, the relationship isn't a fair exchange; it's a hierarchy. Framing privacy as a personal preference (“I don't mind ads”) obscures that it's really a structural question about who holds power in a datafied society.