As Americans increasingly depend upon their phones, computers, and internet resources, their actions are less private than they believe. Data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell something, political actors who want to analyze behavior, and law enforcement who seek to monitor and limit actions.

In The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), law professor Ray Brescia explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect people’s online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. Surveillance, he suggests, will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.

Brescia writes that “The search for identity and communion with others who share it has never been easier in all of human history. At the same time, our individual and collective identity is also under threat by a surveillance state like none that has ever existed before. This surveillance can be weaponized, not just for profit but also to promote political ends, and undermine efforts to achieve individual and collective self-determination”

The book identifies the harms to individuals from privacy violations, provides an expansive definition of political privacy, and identifies the ‘integrity of identity’ as a central feature of democracy. The Private is Political lays out the features of Surveillance Capitalism and provides a roadmap for “muscular disclosure”: a comprehensive privacy regime to empower consumers to collectively safeguard privacy rights.

Professor Ray Brescia is the Associate Dean for Research & Intellectual Life and the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Professor in Law & Technology at Albany Law School. He is the author of many scholarly works including Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession (from NYU Press) and The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions (from Cornell UP). He is also the author of public facing work, most recently “Elon Musk’s DOGE is executing a historically dangerous data breach” on MSNBC. He started his legal career at the Legal Aid Society of New York where he was a Skadden Fellow, and then served as the Associate Director at the Urban Justice Center, also in New York City, where he represented grassroots groups like tenant associations and low-wage worker groups. Ray’s blog is “The Future of Change” and you can find him on LinkedIn.

Mentioned:

Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism
Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, Amy Howe, SCOTUSBLOG
Kevin Peter He on “data voodoo dolls”

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