Freedom
Privacy can nurture our ability to develop political beliefs, identities, and expression, and is thus an essential source of political power for citizens against the state. Privacy enables political freedom, letting us act as self-governing citizens, and it is hard to envision a functioning democracy without privacy. Many discussions of privacy and political freedom rely on Orwell’s metaphor of Big Brother, but that image is incomplete because it fails to include private-party surveillance. Surveillance of any kind, whether government or private, raises two particular dangers. First, surveillance threatens the intellectual privacy we need to make up our minds about political and social issues; being watched when we think, read, and communicate can cause us not to experiment with new, controversial, or deviant ideas. Second, surveillance changes the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched; the power surveillance gives to watchers creates risks of blackmail, discrimination, and coercive persuasion.