Ask yourself: How private is your life, really, if at any point in time your best friend, your grandma and three people you met in a class last year can pinpoint your exact location whenever they please? Most people I know agree that the extent to which individuals surrender their data to large corporations and sometimes to the government is troubling, and yet, we continue to do it. At the same time, there are other parts of our lives in which I think we should adopt a far more fierce rejection of its exposure. Privacy rarely surfaces in casual conversation, and those who care about it are usually made out to be conspiratorial nut jobs in the media. Still, we have passively forfeited a great deal of control over our lives, and I argue that this forfeiture is ultimately to our detriment.
The framework with which I suggest we think about the role of privacy in our lives comes from a widely accepted legal definition crafted by William Prosser, a major figure in modern tort law. Per the Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, privacy, “as a tort concept, embraces at least four branches of protected interests: protection from unreasonable intrusion upon one’s seclusion, from appropriation of one’s name or likeness, from unreasonable publicity given to one’s private life, and from publicity which unreasonably places one in a false light before the public.”
The first clause — unreasonable intrusion upon one’s seclusion — is perhaps the most relevant to our day-to-day lives. Consider, for instance, the widespread use of location-sharing applications. While these features technically disclose only your phone’s location, I can’t remember the last time I met someone my age (myself included) whose phone was not practically glued to their body. Many often justify location sharing with friends and family with safety, which I will not dismiss, especially as a woman. Yet location sharing has also become a subtle social expectation, a litmus of how close you are to certain friends and a casual way to see what others are up to when you might be bored. I won’t deny my own casual usage of “Find My” to check if a friend is likely to be available before giving them a call, but recently I’ve grown slightly uncomfortable with the whole thing. Why should people know where I am at all times? Why should I have a right to know where others are? It's strange, that I can’t really just disappear for a bit. It also ruins some small little mystery of life. Additionally, a tool that many claim to increase safety might just have the opposite effect. As reported by Cornell’s Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct Survey, there has been a notable increase in stalking in the past five years — from 5 percent reported in 2021 to 17 percent in 2025 — a trend that correlates with increased reliance on location-tracking tools. It seems reasonable to suspect a relationship between the two.
The second branch — unreasonable publicity — is related to our extensive use of social media. My roommate likes to ask, often exasperated, “Do people know that they can keep things to themselves?” We live in an age in which we have all inadvertently become our own paparazzi. Even if curated and aspirational, social media ultimately has the ability to provide strangers with a reasonable outline of your entire life — not just your friends. Although this privacy clause is usually only used in relation to front-page defamation cases, many of us are unwitting victims of being placed in a false light before the public, as well as doing it to others. We all record our lives excessively, especially while participating in particular nighttime festivities. Have you ever gotten inebriated and done something regretful? Well, chances are you will never be able to forget it because someone has that moment on tape. At Cornell, a graduate student in former Professor Cheyfitz’s class was creating audio recordings in class, which the students and the professor worried would be used to dox them later for what they said in class. If the recordings were to be published and publicly circulated, I would bet that they would be cut and spliced in ways that distort context, producing a false impression of what was said and paint the students and the professor in a false light. The existence of these recordings raises serious ethical concerns and violates the Student Code of Conduct’s privacy clause, which defines an “invasion of privacy and appropriation of identity” as “[t]o intentionally invade privacy or misappropriate property rights, by means of videotaping, photographing, audiotaping, or otherwise making any video, picture, or sound recording, or to appropriate, distribute, share, or use someone’s likeness, identifying personal data, or documents without permission.”
The final clause is the appropriation of one’s likeness. This is where artificial intelligence enters the conversation, as well as my concern with deepfakes. Deepfakes generate fabricated images or videos of individuals, often indistinguishable from authentic ones. While I haven’t personally heard of many incidents, the pace of technology improvement suggests that misuse is not a hypothetical concern but an imminent one. The possibility of any one of our images being used without our consent for purposes ranging from petty harassment to severe reputational harm should deeply trouble every single one of us. Denmark has even introduced a bill to grant individuals copyright protection over their own image in an attempt to prevent such intrusions. I suggest that the U.S. consider doing the same. At the very least, we should combat this threat locally — institutions like Cornell could adopt policies that prevent disciplinary or legal action based on video or audio evidence until its authenticity is verified. Having outlined all the ways in which we are each living the most public life in all of human history, I have to convince you that preserving privacy is worth fighting for. At a societal level, aggregated data, from spending habits to biometric patterns, can be used to control and manipulate on large scales. But on a smaller scale, why should we keep anything private? For the individual, privacy protects our individuality, experimentation and the ability to exist without constant self-surveillance. Research has documented an observable increase in neuroticism and a decrease in extroversion and agreeableness among young adults. I suspect that, consciously or not, many of us live in collective paranoia of being recorded and put on the internet in an unflattering light, and an increasing obsession with the perception of our public persona.
It is psychologically debilitating to feel as though one is always being watched, even if subconsciously so, Feeling constantly watched — even metaphorically — is exhausting and corrosive to our sense of autonomy.
So why protect our privacy? Because it preserves the conditions of genuine freedom, our freedom to make mistakes, to change, to contradict ourselves, to grow without fearing that every moment could be held against you. Privacy is not a relic of a pre-digital world, it is a prerequisite for remaining human in a digital one. Therefore, it is absolutely imperative that we take our privacy seriously and exercise our right to it before it really is too late.
Sophie Gross '27 is an opinion columnist and a Comparative Literature student in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her fortnightly column Observing aims to analyze popular and academic culture at Cornell in an attempt to understand current social and political trends sweeping the country. She can be reached at sgross@cornellsun.com
