ABSTRACT
The long-established individual control conception of informational privacy is that informational privacy requires individual control over what others do with information about one. Leading privacy law scholars have recently inveighed against this conception. They urge us to see informational privacy as a matter of the degree to which information about one is neither known nor used. The control that determines what information is known and used comes, not from individuals, but from legal requirements that constrain the collection, use, and distribution of information without relying on individual control. Call this the legal control conception of informational privacy. Which conception of informational privacy should guide privacy law? That is a question we should reject. Adequate privacy requires both legal and individual control. Current legal constraints on information processing fall far short of ensuring sufficient individual control. The critical question is how to do so. An adequate answer requires seeing in some detail why pervasive surveillance undermines privacy. The elements of the answer exist, but they are spread across multiple works in multiple disciplines. No one has yet combined them into a unified account. I offer such an account.
Warner, Richard, Adequate Privacy: The Place and Importance of Individual Control (September 26, 2025).
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