The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life

by Lowry Pressly

A visionary reexamination of the value of privacy in today’s hypermediated world—not just as a political right but as the key to a life worth living.

The parts of our lives that are not being surveilled and turned into data diminish each day. We are able to configure privacy settings on our devices and social media platforms, but we know our efforts pale in comparison to the scale of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic manipulation. In our hyperconnected era, many have begun to wonder whether it is still possible to live a private life, or whether it is no longer worth fighting for.

The Right to Oblivion argues incisively and persuasively that we still can and should strive for privacy, though for different reasons than we might think. Recent years have seen heated debate in the realm of law and technology about why privacy matters, often focusing on how personal data breaches amount to violations of individual freedom. Yet as Lowry Pressly shows, the very terms of this debate have undermined our understanding of privacy’s real value. In a novel philosophical account, Pressly insists that privacy isn’t simply a right to be protected but a tool for making life meaningful.

Privacy deepens our relationships with others as well as ourselves, reinforcing our capacities for agency, trust, play, self-discovery, and growth. Without privacy, the world would grow shallow, lonely, and inhospitable. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borges, and a range of contemporary artists, Pressly shows why we all need a refuge from the not a place to hide, but a psychic space beyond the confines of a digital world in which the individual is treated as mere data.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Technology, Sociology, Politics, Audiobook, Cultural

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 8, 2024

Reviews

[Willsy Waites · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will not be writing a review or sharing my favorite parts. This is not a 5 star review.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished reading this book and I already know I need to re-read it when I get my physical copy.

The concept of privacy is somewhat universal in Western culture, but there is a lot of room for individual nuance. If you're someone who doesn't get noticed a lot in public and generally flies under the radar, you'll have a wildly different idea of what privacy is than a public figure who gets followed at the supermarket by people taking photos of them. While this is not even addressed in this book, it was my reason for wanting to read it. What it means, in essence, to protect your privacy, what this privacy is. I find Pressly's definition of privacy as "a lack of information" rather than a concealment or an obfuscation of it to be exactly right. This right to oblivion refers to an absence of a concept of you in other people's minds, about a specific facet of your life. I'm enchanted by this concept and I will keep thinking about this book for some time.

[Laurie B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book turns the idea of privacy on its head, suggesting that it’s more than just protecting one’s own personal privacy. Privacy — and specifically ‘oblivion’ — is necessary for the flourishing of humans. The author makes a very convincing argument, particularly in light of other notoriously famous authors (e.g., Arendt, Emerson) who have touched only lightly on the subject. Mr. Pressly’s deep dive is engaging and enlightening, and could be life-changing for readers who have gotten swept-up in the cultural phenomenon of incessantly documenting one's life in the public sphere.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a delight to really use my brain again!

[Anna Grace Holloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved how literary and philosophical it was, not solutions oriented. Really thoughtful notes. Everything was carefully crafted and tied together well. Would recommend.

[Fraser Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not to my taste or what I'd hoped for and leans much more into the Philosophy tag than I would want. Not my sort of thing at all but will appeal to folk who enjoy similar exercises in semantics, etymology and philosophy.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relatively limited in its scope but more valuable for it. An excellent examination of the concept of privacy as distinct from secrecy and the role it plays in modern existence. A small but valuable seed of truth that I suspect would have tremendous value to most modern readers who exist in our increasingly public world.

[bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

got kind of repetitive and pedantic but that may or may not be philosophers for you. a lot of terrific privacy conversation reframing stuff and a lovely overall focus on the necessity of privacy-- and of unresolved curiosity, of being various shapes underwater even to oneself-- for a deepening/dignifying appreciation of a person's interiority and value. the questioning of things we largely don't question is precise enough that i do think it would benefit most people in Our Modern Era to read a few chapters. this would also better enable me to easily and widely refer to the RECORD PRISON. a weird aside at one point that we don't see touch-based violations as violations of privacy.... sir, yes we do.

[Yuyu Cheese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literally captured why I don’t want to be perceived or described

[Alexandria Avona · Rating 4 out of 5]

TW: Rape
Really disturbing the content from China and the man who was crawling through the vents, purposefully buying a hotel to be able to voyeur tenants from the vent. Extremely mentally disturbed. Claiming it did no damage. Just knowing that's happening without knowledge or consent is rapey, and then it's turned into hacker culture which has started to intersect with content on technologically facilitated sexual violence and cyberrape from academic research and magically Zuckerberg is suddenly backing out of academically backed fact checking. Just magically after doing that much damage from autistic The Office type "inaccurate" moments. All that damage and then just backing out because he is not going to win that one and he knows it. They literally call it "penetration testing". They're not going to win and they know it. I mean saying complete violation, to the level it arises to the sphere of rape is saying "someone is just this good". Horrifying f*ck. People are afraid to use Google Docs, they're afraid to use Google Maps, for someone essentially just jacking their content. This book doesn't do due diligence to how damaging that actually is. They often hide like cowards behind an AI narrative, but it starts with these "just looking in through the vent, no damage done" narratives. They do profound damage. People unwilling to write anymore due to their writing essentially being raped out from under them, people unwilling to show their face because they're trying to take anti-Zionist people's faces and find a pro-Zionist so they can "bridge the gap" and "see themselves in them" when it was allegedly for autistic facial emotion training. Complete lie. Just having your face violated off of you. Makes people even more anti-Israeli. Pure autism plus psychopathy, there's tons of these new narcissism, autism and psychopathy hybrids being pumped out of Zionism like Zuckerberg and Musk. Overall it's a good book. Still rereading the last few chapters, they're just not sticking outside of that. But we do have a right to privacy and to be free from people who we don't want to interact with like this Zuckerberg person literally trying to claim and take credit for the Arab Spring and horrifying predators going through someone's whole Facebook network and reaching out to them after someone came to them about what a predator did. They took it was a "how to". Targetting people in the victim's network and trying to not only isolate them and take the network out from under them but use them, create false connections, isolate them as well so they are increasingly dependent on the connection, and then hurt or even kill them if they're not useful for these horrifying psychopathic, narcissistic and autistic hybrids mainly coming out of Zionism. Truly. Disgusting. Horrifying f*cks. This is why we need the right to oblivion. So they have nothing to monetize and rape people on. They're actually trying to prevent the women and general victims they extract the most from from learning to code. They're specifically and individually trying to attack their ability to learn to code so they can't just destroy these predators from a cybersecurity perspective. Essentially what pedophiles do picking bodies that much smaller than them and trying to keep them small and weak through starvation and lack of exercise and lack of weapons as they grow up on purpose. Horrifying. F*cks. It's insane they're actually targetting people working out and learning to code and even carrying pepper spray so they can't defend themselves. Those are the textbook descriptions of remorseless pedophiles. These are real and remorseless predators. They actually congratulate each other for cyberraping their victims saying "they're just that good" and they're all these repulsive, horrifying f*cks. There's nothing to be proud of. There's everything to be ashamed of. Permanently.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

For too long, we have been influenced by governments and big tech into subtly redefining privacy. Repeatedly we have become used to
(1) hearing sentences like "if you have nothing to hide there is nothing to worry about",
or (2)the tendency to accept that if you are not paying for a product you are the product,
or (3) the way we accept that data is collected about our web and app activities unless we turn such data collection off.
We now live in a world where there are legitimate business dealing in the buying and selling of personal data.

What all these things have done is to reshape our understanding of privacy. Both opponents and supporters of this new data regime have unwittingly adopted the view of privacy as synonymous with personal information, as something that belongs to us and which big tech and big brother should not touch without our permission. By defining privacy this way, we make our resistance to data collection merely a matter of secrecy.

What this book does is to make the case that privacy is distinct from secrecy. The author argues that privacy is not personal information; it is the aspect of our lives that is supposed to be obscure.

The core claim is that privacy is valuable because it "protects against the creation of such collectable information in the first place" and produces "oblivion". By oblivion, the author means a form of the unknown that is "essentially resistant to articulation and discovery," marking limits not on who knows what, but on what can be known.

The strength of the book is that it is reminding us that when we fight with big tech or big brother about data collection, most of the time we are fighting about the storing of data which they collect in the course of our internet activities and selling them to 3rd parties or using them as tools of surveillance, prediction and/or control, but we forget that certain things should not even exist as data in the first place.

The book, in my opinion, falls short in only one aspect. While it makes a good case that privacy is different from secrecy, it fails in not clearly pointing out that privacy also includes secrecy. In other words, the author missed an opportunity to expand the definition of privacy meaningfully.

The author limits privacy to the aspects of our lives we do not even wish to convert to information rather than expanding it to also include the aspects that exist as information but which we do not wish to share with others outside our circle of trust.

If you put a camera in my home you are invading my privacy in two ways: (1) you are converting into data aspects of my private life which I do not wish to turn to data. This will be things such as intimate activities with a spouse. (2) you are taking aspects of my life which exist as information but which I do not wish to share with you (such as confidential work files).


This shortcoming notwithstanding, the author does a fine job of reminding us what we really should be defending.


Highly recommended.

[Pepita]

un trocito del ensayo que he escrito para clase con este libro como fuente bibliográfica principal:

Funes es «menos un ser humano que un espejo lleno por completo del mundo, alguien que solo disponía de unos pocos rincones oscuros y puntos ciegos para albergar un yo que fuera suyo» (Pressley, 2025, p. 311). De esta manera, busca consuelo en la única forma de olvido a la que aún puede acceder, en un intento por preservar el único elemento de ambigüedad y potencialidad que le queda.
Como bien establece Pressley (2025) en su comparación final, tanto Funes el memorioso como el hombre alemán perdieron la fe en su propia vida. El primero perdió su individualidad al tener un control pleno sobre un autoconocimiento siempre exacto y ser idéntico a sí mismo en cada instante de su vida. El segundo, al encontrarse atado a un pasado fijo accesible para todos, perdió la confianza en que su vida dependía de él. Del mismo modo, ambos recurrieron a distintas formas del olvido para mitigar o solucionar el exceso de conocimiento sobre ellos mismos y el mundo, Funes a sus casas indeterminadas construidas con tinieblas y el alemán a su derecho de supresión.
El recuerdo y el olvido son inherentes a la condición humana, su capacidad para destruir lo dañino y conservar lo fundamental nos permiten avanzar y poder disfrutar tanto del presente como del futuro (Martínez López-Sáez, 2022). Por ello, el derecho al olvido y toda su dimensión expresiva son esenciales en la actualidad, para construir una sociedad formada por individuos sanos y libres, capaces del cambio y la sorpresa, necesitamos cierto equilibrio entre el olvido y la información (Pressley, 2025). Una de las afirmaciones más conocidas del Oráculo de Delfos es «conócete a ti mismo», pero también «nada en exceso», o como bien dice el antiguo y eterno refranero español «ni tanto que queme al santo, ni tanto que no lo alumbre». Es necesaria una estabilidad que nos permita mantener la idea de que el mundo de la actividad humana es libre y abierto, que existen zonas de la existencia que escapan a la superficialidad de la información y hacen que merezca la pena vivir. Nada de reflejos perfectos llenos de mundo, sino los quiméricos museos de los que hablaba Borges, repletos de formas inconstantes y espejos rotos.

[Rob M · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was hard going, and I often thought this book would have suited a lighter, more free flowing essay format than hardcore analytic philosophy.

However, the core idea was simple and thought provoking. What if, when we argue about how much of our data we should share, and what level of control we should have over it, we are having the wrong argument entirely? Instead, we should be asking - how can we defend our right not to be turned into data at all?

From this starting point, challenging the basic assumptions of privacy law and advocacy, Pressly goes on to make an altogether more metaphysical argument. He argues that Oblivion - whether the oblivion of unknowing, unconscious, or uncaring - is vital for the formation of our conscious, present selves. Our thoughts, ideas, and personality arise from an undefinable and unquantifiable mysterious inner world of oblivion, which not only shouldn't be rendered as data, but can't be.

Where this book fell down for me, other than being plain hard to read, is that it was too disciplined with itself. It was too interested in establishing proof of concept with thought experiments, and not interested enough in following its own ideas along the garden path to the existential or even religious conclusions they suggest.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book's argument to a "right to be forgotten" did not thoroughly convince me of its importance. The argument is not in a vacuum, as Europe's "right to be forgotten" has led to a lot of digital infrastructure to handle it. In one sense, the ability to start fresh and cast off past mistakes seems compelling. Yet the author never seems to decide on where to draw the line.

They spend most of the book in heady philosophy and very little time on examples. When they do, they point to only a handful of sympathetic cases. They never really interrogate public interest in knowing key things about a person, about some things that perhaps shouldn't be forgotten.

You could've argued in the past that a person should be able to move out-of-state and cast off their bad reputation. However, we're in a new era where it's easy to move around and we probably should be more worried about how past bad actions might affect someone's present behavior.

And maybe we shouldn't? The right to oblivion is to say some things are not my business at all. But some things are. The author's lack of interest in threading this needle makes the whole argument uncompelling.

[Kyle Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected this to be a general treatise on human privacy in the digital age, and it is definitely that, but the central idea is actually much grander: this book is a defense of "a conception of human flourishing that is [...] fundamentally opposed to the reduction of human life to information." The case is not merely that we should have more say over how our personal information is presented to the world, but also that the very idea that personal life is composed of tidbits of observable information belittles the self and human condition. Pressly argues that humans deserve the opportunity to go through substantial portions of their lives as a kind of uncollapsed wavefunction, where more useful and amorphous attributes of life take shape in the shadows behind the observable. There's a ton of Arendt, Foucault, and Borges in these pages, but I think the synthesis is new and interesting. As someone who incessantly self-observes, particularly through the lens of quantifiable measures, the idea of existing in oblivion beyond transient moments feels quite foreign to me, though. Maybe it shouldn't.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

😬 OMGoodness, this book game me a lot to think about. When websites give me a choice not to track my movements across the web, I choose for them not to, but how many are currently tracking, then making money off of my searches and rabbit holes and other places I go. Do I have anything to hide? NO, but why should companies track me except for their bottom line. What is more important? I think my privacy is!

I will admit, the beginning of the book made me so glad I didn't go (not that I ever would have) to law school. All that (cases, lawsuits, theoretical stuff, SCOTUS rulings, etc.) makes my head spin but in the end, it was worth reading about and remembering.

[Leila · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read philosophy often but I found this book super approachable. Redundant at times but it introduced me to a very new and complleing way of thinking about privacy

[Elizabeth]

answer in progress rec
maybe. a very unsure "maybe".

[Relstuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking in a good way.

A bit dense and I read this in small amounts often pausing the read and setting this aside to have time to think about the content.

[anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

white man discovers being objectified and having your identity violated…..writes a book where he equates the experience of Blackness with having your photo taken……

[Karan Thukral · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5. I think this would have been a better book to read instead of listening to the audiobook.

[Omar]

must do a re-read soon

[Helen Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

greatly detailed definition of 'privacy' and how the definition has changed.
I appreciated the examples the author used to make his points

[Gaby]

Porque hay que publicar que he leído algo sobre la privacidad.