Abolish privacy

This is a manifesto to reject calls to “online privacy.” Privacy is an inherently exclusionary liberal entitlement inextricably linked to property, racial oppression, sexual control and class segregation. However online privacy is uncritically promoted by academics, activists and media discourse as a civil right and even a form of social justice. We build on the arguments of feminist, queer, Black Radical traditions and GDPR legal scholars to make three arguments to the contrary. First, privacy is not social justice, but reproduces the ideologies of colonial rankings, policing and norms (racial, sexual, able-bodied and more). Second, online privacy is inextricable from private property as the exclusive legal protection of home-owners from state oversight; a liberal privilege that is easily appropriated into corporate affordances. Third, online privacy is a myth: the Internet works because its infrastructures share knowledge inferred from data, in other words there is no actual possibility of privacy, nor any real corporate incentive to privacy, except as an optic tactic to avoid accountability. Grounded in anti-capitalist social justice, our argument exceeds current liberal civil definitions of safety, such as the Human Rights based approach to Smart Cities inspired by the United Nations, the GDPR, municipal policies and environmental law. Instead we call for public, collectivized data and the complete rejection of liberal property entitlement, gatekeeping and policing known as “privacy.”