Privacy represents more than just wanting to keep personal information secret or hidden from others. It epitomizes a fundamental human right that is essential for individual liberty in any free society. When privacy erodes, it threatens people’s intrinsic abilities to freely think, develop ideas, and determine how they want to live their own lives. In that sense, privacy forms a key foundation for self-determination that is inherent to human dignity—not a privilege granted by the state.
Humans are born free, autonomous beings entitled to a personal sphere of thought and development. The ability to make independent decisions, form opinions and identities, and exercise rights like free speech stems from their nature as reasoning individuals, not from the state. To actualize those intrinsic rights, people require a degree of control over how their information gets used, who accesses it and for what purposes. They need assurance that they can explore ideas or hold beliefs without unnecessary scrutiny or judgment from others, including governments or companies who may wish to unfairly influence, censor or manipulate them. Infringing on or disregarding privacy severely undercuts independence rooted in human nature.
When institutions like governments or corporations intrude on privacy, they attack liberty itself by treating people as state subjects rather than free citizens. It signals a lack of regard for innate freedoms that exist outside the purview of state control. By exposing people’s private beliefs to scrutiny and judgment, it has a chilling effect on free thought and expression. People guard their voices to avoid persecution, rather than speaking openly which is their birthright. Such repression is dehumanizing.
Equally important, privacy grants people autonomy in determining when, how, and to what extent they share their own stories. It prevents personal information being forcibly taken from individuals without consent to tell particular narratives that may not accurately represent their truths. Unwarranted access fundamentally dismisses an individual’s agency over their experiences and right to control personal representations of identity. When others are empowered to hijack people’s identities and experiences without permission, it severely compromises liberty rooted in human dignity.
At the end of the day, privacy allows room for individuals to make self-directed choices regarding their lives and how their persona is relayed to the wider world. As long as people do no serious harm to others with that freedom, the liberty to determine one’s destiny should be staunchly guarded as an inalienable right, not a privilege conditionally allowed by state authorities. For these reasons, privacy stands as a non-negotiable prerequisite for any just society seeking to uphold human potential for independence. Its erosion should never be taken lightly or tolerated.
Protecting confidentiality of information and anonymity of action thus protects liberty itself. Privacy lets people reserve spaces to cultivate self-knowledge, creativity, reflection and growth dictated by their own reason and conscience instead of external forces. That cultivation enables the fulfillment of each person’s humanity. When privacy is violated, it cuts off opportunities for such fulfillment—treating humans as objects to be transparently monitored and controlled rather than reasoning subjects who can fruitfully chart their own course in line with internal truth.
Humans have always sought out private spaces to foster unconstrained exploration – hiding spaces as children to imagine and wonder freely, diaries to process emotions privately, confidential exchanges to share vulnerabilities without judgment. As necessary forums for individual development without arbitrary limitations set by others, these private spheres should not be infringed by institutions purporting to represent collective interests. Governments and corporations are not entitled to unrestricted knowledge of citizens’/consumers’ activities, beliefs or communications by default simply because they provide public services or platforms. They need to respect the sanctity of individual inner lives as sacrosanct spaces essential for self-realization—not visible properties for them to monitor and utilize as they see fit.
The threat to privacy today thus represents a broader erosion of respect for individual sovereignty as an inherent human attribute. New technologies have enabled mass surveillance and data collection that gives external entities unprecedented access to people’s inner realms without regard for the boundary violations inherent. But technology should enhance human freedom, not constrain it through authoritarian intrusions into mental, informational, and behavioral autonomy. By recalling that liberty emerges from innate human dignity rather than state allowance, privacy can be rightfully understood as an irreducible requirement for people’s full self-determination. Its erosion undercuts our humanity itself. Any actions infringing on privacy should face the highest level of skepticism and scrutiny as undermining the natural rights at the core of human identity and potential.