School Reopening and the Allure of Surveillance
What is your privacy worth? That’s a broad, general question that underpins the heartbeat of this newsletter. Worth, in that sense can be answered through the traditional capitalist lens (how much are you willing to spend on “privacy’), and it can also be answered on moral grounds, of how much should you care when the concept of privacy comes under attack.Then again, if you’re to believe the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, the questions isn’t a question at all. Privacy, after all, according to them, is dead.
But there’s another way the “worth” of privacy is measured; not as a single value of itself, but rather of its value in relationship to something else. If you’ve read this newsletter before, this type of of value will sound familiar. Time and time again, governments around the world have sold the idea of privacy as sitting on one end of a weighted scale with “national security” staring it down across the seesaw.
More recently though, there’s another figure seemingly sitting across from, and at odds with privacy, and that’s public health. In the age of the coronavirus…
