As I’ve intimated to at several turns but now fully confront, government surveillance is not the only threat to the privacy of marginalized communities. Privatized surveillance – by corporations and by other individuals – also exacts a heavy toll. Privatized surveillance has many lenses focused on many targets: employers at their employees, surveillance capitalists at consumers, and individuals at one another.1 Each instantiation of privatized surveillance renders us less legally protected from additional surveillance, both because it erodes the degree to which we have kept information “secret” ex ante (a precondition for legal privacy rights, as discussed in Chapter 1), and because the surveillance data itself is often used by other surveillers – the government and corporations.

Broadly speaking, both privacy doctrine and public discourse suggest that the right to privacy is significantly diminished once one enters the public realm or once one’s information is shared with others.1 In fact, certain doctrines provide that the right to privacy while in public is nearly nonexistent, that privacy is more or less “dead” once you walk out your front door or expose your activities to anyone else – even if you are fortunate enough to have your own property and still be on it.2 Pursuant to this conception of the right to privacy, privacy is synonymous with secrecy – and, as described by Daniel Solove, this “secrecy paradigm” greatly limits legal protection for privacy.