My daughter got there before I had an answer. She leaned over my shoulder one evening, watched her own dot pulsing on the landing, the floor at the top of our stairs, and asked who else could see it. My phone keeps a running map of exactly where my family is; each of us is a small named dot, and the app calls this peace of mind, which mostly it is. I have spent much of my career helping build the kind of large data platforms this essay is partly about, and even I could not answer her. Somewhere, at some point, on some screen, I had agreed to a list of who could, and I could not name a single entry on it.
She is in good company: researchers reading app-store reviews of family tracking apps found children leaving one-star reviews, their only control, and the sharpest privacy commentary going.
Teenagers have found the workaround: leave the phone charging on a friend's windowsill and the family map will swear, all evening, that you are safely home in your room. It is the least sophisticated hack in the history of surveillance, and it works every time, because nobody in the house wanted the whole truth. They wanted the dot.
Meanwhile the grown-ups have news for her: privacy is dead. It died this summer. It died in 1999, at a press conference. It has been dying, on the record, since 1969.
"Privacy is dead" is not a finding. It is a tradition, always wrong.
Daniel J. Solove, an American law professor, has pointed at this for twenty years. His catalogue of privacy's obituaries runs back to 1969. His rebuttal is the right one: privacy was never a possession, so it cannot be lost. But his proof never leaves the courtroom or an American plaintiff.
The tradition cannot even keep its own scripture straight. The flat declaration, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it", is routinely pinned on Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. It belongs to Scott McNealy in 1999, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, then one of the world's biggest computer makers, delivered at a product launch, by a man whose company sold the machines that would do the watching. As analysis, "get over it" is prattle. As a business model, it has proved remarkably durable.
And the tradition is old. In 1844 Britain discovered that the Home Secretary, Britain's law-and-order minister, Sir James Graham, had been opening the post of the Italian exile Giuseppe Mazzini, lawfully, under warrant. The country was scandalised anyway, Parliament rowed about it, and by August the Post Office's Secret Office, its mail-opening unit, had been abolished. Each generation's obituary names its own anxiety: the sealed letter in 1844, the database in 1999, the phone that never stops confiding in strangers today. The obituary measures the anxiety. It has never once measured the corpse.
The thing that was never yours to lose
The tradition misses this distinction: to lose something you must first have held it, and privacy was never held. Every society anyone has studied manages who may come close and who may know what, with whatever machinery is to hand. Japanese has no native word for privacy, it borrowed one, puraibashii, yet disclosure there is governed as firmly as anywhere through seken, the ever-present judging eyes of others, as scholars Chieko Nakada and Takanori Tamura note. The psychologist Irwin Altman made the general case in the 1970s: it shows up everywhere, the machinery stays local. The definition risks being unfalsifiable, and even Altman's sympathetic reviewers concede as much, but nobody has ever produced the society with no machinery at all.
The RIGHT, what you could sue a stranger over, is younger than it feels: until 1890 every protection needed you to already own the thing, or have a relationship with whoever you sued. Then two American lawyers, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, proposed rights "as against the world" in the Harvard Law Review. Named and generalised in 1890, not born with the species. A century later English law was still recognising no right to privacy at all: the obituaries were running before the birth certificate had been issued.
You are not back in the village
When the obituary writers reach for history, they reach for the village. We have returned, they say, to a world where everybody knew everybody's business, only now sized to the planet.
They are right about the watching. They are wrong about the village.
Picture the most respectable person on your street. Now give them a sworn duty to report you to a court, by name, twice a year, against a defined list of offences, with the penalty for staying quiet about a known offence named in law as "the horrible crime of perjury". That was the English village, for centuries. Under the Canons of 1604, the Church's own rulebook, churchwardens, elected officers of the church, were exactly this: neighbours compelled on oath to present their neighbours to the archdeacon's court, its local tribunal, known to contemporaries without a flicker of irony as the bawdy court, for how much of its business was about sex. The duty itself was older still, medieval in origin, tightened repeatedly before 1604 and suspended only during the Interregnum, before resuming after 1660; the Canons are its best-preserved codification, not its origin. Not gossip. Infrastructure. One archive at the University of Nottingham catalogues 2,026 surviving presentment bills, written reports from those oaths, for the single offence of not turning up to church, the largest category in the record, from one archdeaconry, a cluster of local parishes, across nearly two centuries. And that is just the paperwork that survived.
Beside that sworn channel ran a second one nobody was compelled onto, and it was no more mutual than the first: parishioners sued one another for defamation, and there was rough music, neighbours assembling by night with pots, pans and mockery outside the transgressor's house. Nobody presented the archdeacon. A churchwarden swearing a neighbour into a court ledger is person-scoring with four centuries of dust on it: building a record against a named person, not sizing up how risky a situation is. I have called that distinction risk-sizing, not person-scoring before; an oath that names you without asking is the second, not the first.
What BOUNDED the village is the part the analogy quietly deletes. The churchwarden could watch one parish; his sight stopped at the lane's end, his memory faded, and the presentment bill sat locked in a diocesan chest. The watching was asymmetric, small, slow and forgetful: twice a year, one street's worth of eyes, a record that mostly rotted. Remove the radius and the forgetting, and you have not returned to the village. You have built something no villager would recognise.
That boundary mattered beyond keeping the parish small: it is why the 1890 right needed a boundary like it too. A claim good "as against the world" only works in a world still stocked with strangers, people who owe you nothing, addressable because neither of you yet knows the other. Remove the stranger and you remove the only party the claim could be filed against.
The village kept that figure alive at its edge and charged for the privilege. The churchwarden's oath ran only to the parish boundary; walk to the next town and become nobody, and you had just bought the cheapest privacy technology any society has built. The poor paid in land, kin and standing left at the gate, a brutal price. What the last two centuries have taken away is not the watching. It is that edge: the plain possibility of becoming, credibly, a stranger to somebody.
Who benefits from the obituary
Before the strongest fact against this argument, a less dramatic question: who gains every time the obituary runs? McNealy already gave the answer: the vendor owes you nothing.
Now the fact, owed to you at full strength. On 5 April 2016, WhatsApp finished switching on end-to-end encryption, built on the Signal Protocol, for over a billion people. In plain English: each message is scrambled on your phone and can be unscrambled only on the phone it was sent to, so nobody in between can read it, not the company carrying it, not anybody who burgles the company carrying it. It was free. It was on by default. Nobody filled in a form. A billion people woke up with stronger protection for their conversations than heads of state enjoyed a generation ago, and most of them never noticed.
Draw the line honestly. The scrambling covers the message, not who messaged whom, when, or how often, the metadata it was never built to touch and precisely what the company still sells against. The gift was free: it gave away the unpriced part and kept the rest. Nobody profited from the encryption itself the way McNealy profited from its absence. The laws point the same direction: the share of countries with no privacy law fell from 24 to 16.9 per cent between 2020 and 2026, according to UNCTAD, the United Nations' trade body.
Concede every word of that, then ask again who benefits. The trackers count laws enacted, one tick per country; nobody asks whether an individual can use what got ticked. On that harder question: noyb, short for "none of your business", a European organisation built to exercise data rights, people's legal claims over their own information, found 83.5 per cent of its own requests mishandled, and one major ad exchange published its own response rate: zero per cent. That is the specialists' hit rate.
That figure measures something other than a shortage of names. A parishioner in 1620 knew a name and a forum. You can usually name the vendor who put the dot on the map; you cannot name everyone who has since held a copy of it. Eighty-three and a half per cent mishandled is not a filing backlog. It is the sound of a chain with no terminus.
The map of who has a law splits the way you'd guess: no gap among developed countries, 40.9 per cent of the least-developed have none. The tally of laws is converging. Nobody tallies whether enforcement follows.
Which turns the 2016 switch from rebuttal into lesson. The largest single delivery of privacy arrived not because a billion people exercised a right, but because a handful of engineers set a default covering the one layer nobody had yet priced. Defaults and rights are not opposites; they are the same fight on two fronts, and a default like that arrives once the cost of a bad one climbs high enough to make giving it away cheaper. Rights are part of what drives that cost up. So the question worth asking is not whether privacy is dead; it was never alive in the way the obituary requires. The question is who sets the switch, which way it faces before you have touched it, and who was hoping you would not ask.
The next obituary
Here's the fork: a decision, not a weather forecast. Protection can keep arriving the way the 2016 switch arrived: built in, on for everybody, nobody billed, nobody profiting from your not having it yet. Or it can remain a certificate on the wall, admired in treaties, usable mainly by institutions that can afford it, an arrangement that suits somebody.
"Built in" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, because a default is only the first of three things a readable protection requires. The default has to reach you before you ask for anything, which is the whole trick the 2016 switch pulled off. The second is a right you can exercise yourself, without hiring somebody to exercise it on your behalf. The third is the term shown where the trade is struck, the way an encryption notice sits inside the very conversation it protects rather than in a policy nobody reads. Miss any one of the three and you are back to a certificate on the wall: real on paper, unreachable in the hand.
None of this drifts by itself, so name who is glad. The exchange behind that zero per cent figure is not anonymous: noyb names it directly as Xandr, which auctions ad space. An unread term is not a flaw in that arrangement, it is a working part of it: naming Xandr costs nothing, answering costs something. That is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive, stated in one public figure, explaining more than any mysterious-forces account would.
I still owe my daughter the list she asked for, the evening she watched her dot pulse on the landing. I cannot give her the whole thing yet. I can give her more than I had that evening: I can name the company whose name is on her dot, the same way noyb could name Xandr's. What neither of us can do is name everyone who has held a copy of it since, or which one we would have to write to. That gap is not bad luck. It is a design a handful of people benefit from, and one of them has just told us the number out loud.
I might be wrong about how the next stretch goes; the timing of these things embarrasses everyone who calls it. But the obituary's own pattern is not hard to read once you go looking for who it serves. Privacy has been declared dead since before English law admitted it was alive, and each time, somebody was glad you believed it. So when the next one runs, sincere as the last, ask it one question: who is relieved that you believe it?
(Views in this article are my own.)