George Eastman marketed the first mass-produced camera in 1888 — and sensationalist stories about “kodak fiends driving the world mad” quickly became a staple source of indignation for civic-minded readers of the New York Times and the Boston Daily Globe. It marked the beginning of a decidedly modern moral panic over “the right to privacy” that would provoke Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to pen their influential article for the Harvard Law Review, and which would see the first in a string of civil suits brought for the unauthorized distribution of an image.

Yet as Lowry Pressly explains in his thoughtful new book, The Right to Oblivion, this anxiety only partially mirrors contemporary concerns over online anonymity and the financial exploitation of our personal data. The camera lens offered no greater access to the private lives of the rich and famous than a good pair of binoculars, and the candid snapshot did little to fuel an already insatiable appetite for gossip-rags and scandal-sheets. It was rather the apparent objectivity of the photograph itself that was cause for concern: its ability to directly “capture” the individual without the interpretative distancing provided by the prying eye or the wagging tongue; and then “force” them to appear in public without their knowledge or consent.

In a case brought against the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1905 for the unlicensed use of a photograph in its advertising campaign, the Supreme Court of the State of Georgia unanimously agreed that the subject, Paolo Pavesich “can not be otherwise conscious of the fact that he is, for the time being, under the control of another, that he is no longer free, and that he is in reality a slave without hope of freedom, held to service by a merciless master.”

The problem was regarded not as one of anonymity as of agency; the threat to privacy posed by the fiendish kodakers less like having one’s secrets stolen than “being forced to divulge them.”

The episode discloses an important aspect of privacy that has become increasingly overlooked in our present age of industrial-scale data-harvesting. We have come to regard our privacy as just another commodity that can be freely bought and sold in exchange for a little more security or a better customer experience, and have therefore come to see the principal issues involved as simply those of transactional transparency and perhaps greater market regulation. Yet there remains the lingering sense that something has been lost through these continuous intrusions into the private domain, even in those case where we have willingly shared our information or can be confident that it will never reach the light of day; the same unease we feel at the all-too-familiar refrain that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

There have been a number of recent books on the dangers of our new information economy, perhaps most importantly Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. What is notably about Pressly’s book by contrast is his decidedly more ecumenical notions of information and privacy: he includes fascinating vignettes on a controversial art exhibition where photographer Arene Svenson displayed (teasingly obscured) images of his neighbors’ windows as shot from his lower Manhattan apartment; and the case of Gerald Foos who bought a motel just for the (purely private) pleasure of spying on his guests. The issues raised do not form part of the usual discourse over surveillance and consent, since if the subjects cannot be identified, or if their information is never made public, it is difficult to identify the actual harm they have suffered in the more familiar terms of reputation or financial exploitation.

There would then seem to be an intrinsic value to privacy and to the space it provides for us to be momentarily indeterminate both to ourselves and to others—what Emerson referred to as “the infinite potentiality of private man”—that goes beyond the mere pragmatic utility of controlling access to our information. It is also a value that risks becoming obsolete in the face of continuous surveillance, and through the ceaseless processing of search histories and heart-rates and everything else we feed the all-benevolent algorithm. Just like the candid snapshot, our online profiles threaten to reduce “the fluidity of everyday life into the fixity of information”, and thus to deprive us of that capacity for constant self-reinterpretation that is so essential to the Good Life. It is also why current legal debates over the control of our personal information will make little headway in addressing the issue, for the real value of privacy lies not in controlling our information, but in preventing it from being created in the first place. The question then is not whether we can choose to trade our personal information on the digital market, or whether we can freely consent to ever greater government surveillance, but whether we truly understand the cost.

The Right to Oblivion is an extended meditation upon this forgotten dimension to privacy, and the harms that result when it is neglected. It is admittedly an elusive concept and difficult to make precise; like Pressly, a reader finds herself reaching for the great poets and essayists who also failed to make the idea any clearer, but at least said it well. But we can begin to sketch its contours through its contrasts.

For a piece of information to be private is not the same for it to be secret, since while one can always lie to keep a secret, such subterfuge does little to prevent the sense of intrusion that comes simply from being asked a personal question. Likewise, for someone to be in private is not the same as for them to be in hiding. Just as the invasive question forces us to acknowledge some hitherto undisclosed truth about ourselves (no matter how hard we might dissemble in the face of our interrogator), so too does the imperative to evade our seeker paradoxically force us to see ourselves through their eyes with a kind of brutal clarity—to hide is to “experience individuality at its most exquisite, to feel the sharp edge of self-identity.”

In both cases, our desire for privacy points towards a state where we are not continuously being shoehorned into the interpretation of others. It also highlights an important dimension of the miseries and anxieties now associated with excess social media, not just from all the dopamine and the doom-scrolling, but also from the relentless stream of unsolicited attention mediated through our likes and retweets and comments. As Pressly puts it:

The dark side of the connected life bears a striking resemblance to the phenomenology of hiding. The hider’s sense that she could be discovered at any moment is repeated in the experience of “waiting to be interrupted” and “always on call.” Her compulsion to peek through a crack in the wall or a hole in the log mirrors the compulsion I feel to check my phone or email to see if anyone is trying to find me.

The reason why greater connectivity has only made us feel more alone is precisely because it deprives us of that space where we are not determined by the opinions of others. One remembers that Bentham’s Panopticon was not designed to provide a better record of any transgressions against the rules, but rather to encourage the internalization of those rules through a constant process of surveillance.

It is in contrast to all of this that Pressly is keen for us to recover our sense of oblivion, a state which he defines as neither concealing nor hiding our private information, but one which challenges the assumptions that there must be any such information in the first place. It is precisely this ambiguity which privacy is meant to protect—and one that is as a consequence denied to us by the candid snapshot that renders us forever determinate upon the photographic plate, as well as by the “privacy settings” on our devices that can only protect our information once it has been carefully catalogued and defined.

Moreover, as our surveillance economy entices us to generate ever more quantities of data about ourselves, so do we find ourselves increasingly identifying with the picture that is being painted; and it is through this gradual erosion of our ambiguity that we can chart the corresponding decline in both our public and private lives. “By its very impenetrability and resistance to knowledge,” Pressly writes, “oblivion lends individual agency and self-relation, as well as the collective life of sociality and politics, irreplaceable support for the sense that life, both individual and collective, has depth as well as the possibility for change and surprise.”

It is this sense of depth that Hannah Arendt had in mind when she spoke of the shallowness of a life lived entirely in public, now perhaps best reflected in those who mistake their enthusiasm to retweet the latest hashtag for some form of meaningful political engagement. It is also the sense of depth that underpins our trust in others—the willing vulnerability that comes from simply taking them at their word—and which provides an important element of social cohesion that is only further degraded through an increasing reliance on statistical trends and algorithmic prediction.

By his own admission, Pressly has relatively little to say about how we might go about rediscovering this lost sense of oblivion, nor how to better cultivate the “infinite potentiality” of human existence that it supposedly protects. It is difficult enough just to reorientate our attitudes towards the value of privacy when so much of the debate has already been conceded to the data-driven paradigm; even the recent decision by the EU Court of Justice to recognize “the right to be forgotten” on the internet will only end-up perpetuating the status quo, since it ultimately depends upon those who already control our information to decide on what is deemed “outdated”, “irrelevant” or “excessive.”

Perhaps the seeming intractability of the problem points to a deeper tension. Pressly traces the gradual decline in our understanding of privacy to that “ideology of information” that evolved alongside technical developments in measurement during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, and which slowly smoothed and refined the sharp edges of human life until it could fit neatly between the pages of a spreadsheet; yet the sense of oblivion that he wishes to recover—the underlying depth and ambiguities of the self—is itself just as much a product of this liberal enlightenment.

It is a very modern privilege indeed to be so emancipated from our rigid social hierarchies that we can worry about what we shall choose to be, a luxury even to be able to resent the sort of existential intrusion posed by the voyeur or the paparazzo or even the deep-learning algorithm. When Warren and Brandeis were sketching the contours of the right to privacy, they were also helping to articulate an image of man rendered almost perfectly fungible with his contemporaries through industrialization and the dislocation of urban life.

The irony may be then that oblivion only becomes important once society has advanced to the point where it is denied to us. At the least, it is something for us to contemplate in our quieter moments.