ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some reasons for Privacy Fatalism in research and scholarship, including conceptual, empirical and technological challenges to privacy and its legal protection. It argues that important new legal, theoretical and empirical developments around privacy – and frameworks protecting internationally – may mean that this great tradition of Privacy Fatalism may soon itself come to a fatal end. Privacy Fatalism is a persistent contemporary phenomenon. As Neil Richards notes, the last twenty years has seen “innumerable books” with titles, in various ways, declaring privacy is “dead” or “dying”. Another central factor is that privacy has had enduring theoretical, conceptual, and definitional complications and problems. Despite historical scepticism, courts in both Europe and the US appear increasingly open to legal claims based on privacy and surveillance-related harms. Privacy Fatalism has been one of privacy’s great traditions in modern times, with “innumerable books” in the last decades declaring privacy is “dead” or “dying”.
