Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I have received a digital copy of this book from the author via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I thank the authors and those who facilitated this exchange.
Firmin DeBrabander is a PhD that specializes in Political Philosophy. He teaches courses in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, Aesthetics, Moral Philosophy, Environmental Ethics and Economic Theory. I couldn't find a lot of information about him online at first glance (go figure; see the title of the book). However, I do have the habit of researching whoever's book I am reading as it provides the start of trust between reader and author.
Life after Privacy is a well intended book on the popular and modern topic of discussion that is privacy. Although I enjoyed a lot of its content, I struggled to go through it as the structure is in a zig zag. In his eagerness to provide insight, the author's writing style bundles up together too much information from too many areas which messes with the fluidity through which the points are being transmitted and understood.
Other than that, it's a pretty great read, relevant to educate the modern man. The first half was a bit gloomy and discouraging. It made me wonder if this was going to be a book that whines just like any other book on privacy. To my surprise it didn't stop at that. It continued with some optimism (although not enough of it) and with explaining the origin of privacy as a value that we are not trying to protect and create regulations for. It's origins seem to be in stoicism philosophy and in the manifest of Christianity, which was unexpected to a reader such as myself. Afterwards the book became increasingly clogged and zigzagged with information in a disorienting way that caused me to read several paragraphs more than once in order to process the message.
Privacy is a rather new and complicated topic, which until recently after its emergence was considered to be solely a privilege meant for the rich. As the quality of life is increasing globally, the once small-scale realities now are creating larger scale problems which requires debate, decision making and regulation.
Expect this book to be a challenging read that will demand knowledge of other areas in order to critique it. I hope that in the future the author will consider to write in a more fluid and clean manner.

Hi, I lost the eARC of this book so I won't be able to review this book. I hope you understand. I really wanted to read it but unfortunately my phone got formatted and I lost the copy.

This text was so informative but was thankfully not dry like most educational pieces are. I didn't feel dumb while reading it. The author explained everything very clearly. I like how different cultures and time periods were brought in to explain the life of privacy.

Life after Privacy wasn't the book I was going for, the book talked in depth detail about the constitution of the The United States of America and privacy.

The author also seemed to be quite angry about the human behaviour of giving away their data as if it's no big deal at all without understanding the impending doom it brings with it.

I might have enjoyed the book more if it wasn't like a long essay.

Life After Privacy, by philosophy professor Firmin Debrabander, begins with a provocative premise: do we even need privacy? Despite increasingly urgent warnings from privacy activists and academics, consumers are still posting on social media, consenting to tracking, allowing corporations to 'personalize' our experiences and collect vast troves of data about us. Why don't people care more about their privacy? Should they? And does this lack of privacy pose a danger to our own autonomy and to our democracies?

Debrabander is, thankfully, not going to scold you about quitting Facebook. He notes, accurately and compassionately, that as technological surveillance has ramped up, we as consumers and citizens are increasingly undefended—with landmark laws like GDPR still reliant on the idea that a single individual can make autonomous decisions about their privacy when faced with the overwhelming power of a multinational corporation's economic incentives. He's a bit defeatist about our ability to protect and preserve privacy—but I can't say he's entirely wrong. It is a grim time for privacy rights. But where Debrabander is optimistic is when he argues—provocatively and compellingly—that privacy may not be necessary for sustaining democracy and a vibrant political sphere. He argues that the concept of privacy emphasizes the role of the individual on politics—and not the role of individuals acting collectively, through community organizations and collective action.

I'd summarize the book as having 3 major themes (I should note that the book is quite succinct and readable even if my review is not):

1 — A survey of contemporary privacy issues and debates (in the chapters 'Confessional Culture', Big Plans for Big Data', and 'The Surveillance Economy'). Debrabander's overarching argument is: privacy seems to be a losing game, with increasing corporate and governmental incentives to surveil—surveil—surveil, and with consumers increasingly unable to defend their individual right to privacy.

If you've been following privacy debates for some time, many of the stories and scholars will be familiar: when Target predicted a teenage girl's pregnancy before her parents knew, China's burgeoning social credit system and ambitious 'Sharp Eyes' surveillance project to combine public and private camera footage; America's own history of surveillance, thanks to Google, Facebook, and the NSA. Debrabander gently challenges the idea that consumers don't care about privacy (given our increasingly confessional culture on Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere), citing research that suggests people feel a sense of despair and helplessness instead. He notes, too, that corporations are increasingly economically incentivized to collect data on people—especially as Moore's law makes it cheaper and easier than ever to collect and analyze data. He echoes Zuboff's conclusion in her book, Surveillance Capitalism, as well as research by Gordon Hull, to note that privacy cannot be guaranteed by individuals consenting or objecting to the 'privacy policies' that corporations give us:

'There is an illusion of autonomy at the heart of "privacy self-management," a misleading belief that "privacy can only be treated in terms of individual economic choices to disclose information; [occluding] the fact that these choices are demonstrably impossible to make in the manner imagined"—or proposed by corporations. Just as panoptic surveillance sustains the illusion of self-determination on the part of the watched, so consent sustains the notion that we have some control and choice over data collection. This illusion of autonomy permits consumers to sink deeper into asymmetrical power relationships with their corporate spies. The data mining that now delivers our personal information makes "consent meaningless because the uses to which data will be put are not knowable to the user."'

2 — An investigation into the philosophical and legal origins of privacy, and why we value it in contemporary society (in the chapters 'Defending Privacy', 'Privacy Past and Present', 'The Borderless, Vanishing Self'). In summary: the right to privacy is a relatively novel concept, and hasn't always been necessary to ensure democracy and civic participation (which Debrabander identifies as one of the most significant arguments for defending privacy).

As a technologist with (unfortunately!) a very limited background in philosophy, I found this section especially fascinating. Debrabander investigates various arguments for why privacy is crucial, especially the argument that privacy is essential to a functioning democracy. He discusses the legal history of privacy in the US and England, as well as a much older history in the Gospels and in Stoic philosophy. The most thought-provoking bits: a discussion on physical privacy as a status/wealth signifier in medieval London; how privacy was built and sustained by an increasingly powerful state; and how Stoicism influenced the notion of privacy in early modern Europe. Stoicism is tremendously popular right now, and it's fascinating to see Debrabander explicitly challenge how Stoicism justifies separatist individualism (which I'd argue is prominent in how people like Cal Newport and the Center for Humane Technology approach privacy)—Debrabander instead argues that the Stoics focused their philosophy on a sense of greater duty and community engagement:

'Stoicism has always been misunderstood in significant ways, by admirers and critics alike. For example, its social aspect is often ignored or downplayed, and Stoicism is instead deemed a highly or even exclusively individualistic form of morality, which recommends retreating within oneself, and casting scorn on the outside world, or at least, the things that men commonly value. As the Stoics conceive it, how you interact with your surroundings is instrumental to how you transform your mind and behavior. Duty is essential to achieving Stoic detachment.'

3 — Abandoning the individualism of privacy in favor of collective, community engagement with politics (the chapters 'The Borderless, Vanishing Self', 'Autonomy and Political Freedom', 'Powerful Publics'). Debrabander slowly dismantles the idea that privacy is necessary for true political engagement, that we can only be political thinkers and actors when we are 'simple, self-reliant, and self-contained'. Instead, he argues that that political beliefs and engagement do not happen privately—they happen through public participation, and building political power and engagement through community organisations. He connects our physical spaces in America—where public squares are few, and community spaces are largely privatized, sanitized shopping malls—to a political sphere with declining civic engagement.

Debrabander argues that we've reached the pinnacle of physical privacy, living and working far away from the Other—and that this is not politically consequential or powerful at all. In fact, it may be actively detrimental to democracy: "It is not necessarily a sign of freedom—potent, consequential political freedom—that people are accorded zones of noninterference, where they may hoard possessions, or contemplate outrageous ideas…this is just as easily the condition of successful autocracy…Noninterference offers little in the way of potent political training for the people."

DeBrabander leans on Dewey to assert that "Democratic citizens are made and formed in associations, where they learn to be a part of a community of others with similar natures, desires, and interests…Democratic instincts can be sown by debates over the political landscape, for example, which enlighten and inspire potential or future voters, and impart appreciation for civic values". He critiques the liberal democratic tendency to assume people are autonomous individuals who pursue only their personal interest, and not people who may identify as a group and seek group political engagement and interests. Debrabander believes that we must acknowledge the impact of group identification, and see it as a vital aspect of democratic engagement.

Overall—a very thought-provoking and enjoyable book. I'd recommend it both to people who need a primer on contemporary privacy issues, as well as people fairly familiar with them but seeking to contextualize these issues in older philosophical traditions and thoughts on freedom of speech, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and democracy. There's a nice bit at the end that goes into the labor and union movement in the US as well.

Writers cited include: Shoshana Zuboff; Zeynep Tufekçi; Dewey on democracy, Stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius; Spinoza; Chantal Mouffe's critique of liberal democracy. It seems like no book about politics and technology in 2020 is complete without citing Foucault and Arendt.

Thank you Cambridge University Press & Netgalley for the advance copy!

A very thorough and well researched study that collects a variety of examples that appear elsewhere, but contextualises these within a wide-ranging philosophical exploration of the concept of privacy.

Thanks to Netgalley, the author Firmin Debrabander, and Cambridge University Press for the advanced review copy. Life After Privacy is expected September 8th 2020.


This is absolutely and important and topical argument in today’s hyper connected world. We should all be talking about this subject more. At 200 pages, the book isn’t huge, but it does have some fancy writing, talking about panopticons and political notions of the "public space." Perhaps it may be a bit much for some.

The argument that “nothing less than personhood is at stake” when privacy is violated holds significant weight, but as the author repeats often, too many act as if this is inconsequential.

The grim thought that we may face a society that expects perfection and without it would cast off those members. Recent events that unfolded in Minnesota with the U.S. Government using an unmanned drone to several protesters bears out some of this. The power to watch in the hands of govt. is some we should expect will be used. Clearly “individual citizens and consumers seem especially ill equipped to muster much of a defense against the forces of surveillance.”

Privacy, of course, could not be interrogated well if we didn't look at the self. What makes a person autonomous, thinking and then that thinking private (and of some use, for, say voting). The privacy of our thoughts my well be the very last thing we could lose. This book seems to think this is valid, but all very inward-looking.

The central ideas in this book might be a surprise to you (it was to me). I'm not sure I agreed with it to begin with, but it's growing on me. One thing is for sure, we need a new way of looking at privacy and surveillance in this digital era.

#LifeafterPrivacy #NetGalley #Privacy #Internet