Neil Richards > Quotes

“Without privacy—without a space between our political selves and the always-on notification pings of surveillance-based media—we may never have the time or capacity to think critically about the direction in which our world is heading. What we do read is likely to be shaped by what advertisers desire rather than what advances thoughtful, rational, and ethical democratic decision-making. Paradoxically, we may be nudged and herded into increasingly polarized but profitable “filter bubbles” while being deprived of the social and intellectual habits of mind to look at the big picture and think for ourselves.”
― Neil Richards, Why Privacy Matters

“Instead, it is that innovation rhetoric frequently deploys “innovation” as if it were a fundamental right, using the same argumentative structure as First Amendment or other civil liberties claims. (To be clear, “innovation” is not such a fundamental right.) This is particularly ironic in the privacy context, where fears of “stifling innovation” are commonly and frequently used to resist any attempts to protect privacy, an actual fundamental right protected not just by European law but by American law as well.”
― Neil Richards, Why Privacy Matters

“[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.15”
― Neil Richards, Why Privacy Matters

“Without intellectual privacy, then, we risk a world in which new political ideas are hard to come by, and in which we and our fellow citizens are less able to come to terms with what we believe. Without intellectual privacy, meaningful democratic self-government itself is at risk.”
― Neil Richards, Why Privacy Matters

“As we saw in the introduction, the evangelists of big data and other human information technologies (whether corporate, scientific, or governmental) are fond of suggesting that “data is the new oil.”9 This is a conscious choice of words to frame the debates over our human information policy in ways that benefit the companies, scientists, and governments who would collect it. It was popularized by a cover story in the Economist magazine in 2017 titled “The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, but Data.”10 Data is the new oil, the analogy goes, because the industrial age’s cars, trucks, planes, ships, and power plants were fueled by oil, but the electronic engines of the information age will be fueled by human data.”
― Neil Richards, Why Privacy Matters