With the infrastructure for ubiquitous surveillance being deployed at scale, we have lost “ambient privacy”: everyday interactions that should stay unremembered
The need to regulate online privacy is a truth so universally acknowledged that even Facebook and Google have joined the chorus of voices crying for change. Tweets: @michaelbd , @danfostertype , @thomasbibby , @violetblue , @tweetbrettmac , @andrewmaier , @russellbrandom , @phil_lange , @russellbrandom , @rivco , @jrk , @max_read , @marypcbuk , @caseynewton , and @pinboard Tweets: Michael Brendan Dougherty / @michaelbd : I agree with every word of this. https://idlewords.com/... https://twitter.com/... Daniel Foster / @danfostertype : My thesis advisor wrote books in the 90s/early 00s premised on the idea that globalization/digitization were set to be huge democratizing forces. Just about the only thing I thought he was wrong about. “Every technology of liberation is also a technology of control,” I wrote him. https://twitter.com/... Thomas Bibby / @thomasbibby : Important questions: “To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database?” https://idlewords.com/... Violet Blue / @violetblue : “We are now twenty years into an uncontrolled social experiment, run by Silicon Valley, that has broken a great deal for the benefit of a few.” https://idlewords.com/... Brett MacDonald / @tweetbrettmac : “What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database?” Man those last two questions really hit home. https://twitter.com/... Andrew Maier / @andrewmaier : “Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it. That is not consent.” https://idlewords.com/... Russell Brandom / @russellbrandom : “The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting.” https://idlewords.com/... Phil Lange / @phil_lange : Again, @Pinboard nails it. “The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don't really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library.” https://idlewords.com/... Russell Brandom / @russellbrandom : This is why “surveillance” often makes more sense than “privacy” as a framework for thinking about tech data issues. Donald Rivers / @rivco : The language we use to talk about privacy, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance. The New Wilderness (Idle Words) https://idlewords.com/... @jrk : “The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.” https://idlewords.com/... Max Read / @max_read : a good piece and a good reminder that antitrust intervention alone won't fix the deeper-rooted problems of global economies built on ambient surveillance. we need thoughtful, complex, and democratic *regulation* https://idlewords.com/... pic.twitter.com/OdLOxum8NG Mary Branscombe / @marypcbuk : the question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite https://idlewords.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Loved this @pinboard piece on ‘ambient privacy’ — “the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered.” https://idlewords.com/... https://twitter.com/... @pinboard : I wrote a blog thingo about ambient privacy called “The New Wilderness”. Ambient privacy is my term for the desire to yell “get off my lawn” at actual children, and not into a VR headset. https://idlewords.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Pinboard's 'The New Wilderness' arrives just as OneZero documents Amazon quietly building surveillance-state infrastructure, giving the essay's argument a concrete corporate face beyond the usual ad-tech suspects. The timing also cuts against the platform line: Facebook and Google have joined calls for privacy regulation even though, as The Atlantic traced, businesses had been collecting and reselling personal data for decades before better ad targeting made the process visible.
The essay matters because it names what is actually being lost — not data points but the ability of everyday interactions to go unremembered — at the moment surveillance hardware moves from browsers into streets, doorbells, and campuses like the California college later found tracking students' daily movements with e-proctoring and license plate readers.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Google now lobby for the very regulation that would formalize rules around data practices they dominate, positioning themselves as co-authors of their own constraints.
- Individuals lose the default of unrecorded interaction: once cameras, sensors, and trackers are deployed at scale, opting out requires active effort rather than being the baseline.
Second-order effects
- Regulators drafting responses run into the trap Benedict Evans identifies: many circulating privacy proposals would raise compliance costs in ways that further entrench the big platforms against smaller rivals.
- Since total digital privacy is impossible, the practical market shifts toward compromises like obfuscation — deliberately shrouding identity in useless information — as individuals and firms seek workarounds the infrastructure permits.
Third-order effects
- If deployment continues along the Amazon and campus-tracking pattern, ambient privacy becomes a physical-infrastructure question rather than an internet-policy one, pulling surveillance debates out of ad tech and into zoning, procurement, and local governance.
- The Stratechery critique of privacy fundamentalism frames the structural fight: policy will hinge on whether lawmakers treat trade-offs as inherent to networked systems or as failures to be legislated away — a framing contest the platforms are actively joining.
The trend: Surveillance capability is migrating from ad-targeting platforms into physical infrastructure, forcing privacy policy to be written with — and often by — the companies it is meant to constrain.