From Privacy to Social Legibility

Abstract

This paper draws upon James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) to argue that privacy law currently suffers from (at least) three defects: a focus on the legibility of individuals that is too narrow, a focus on collection and subsequent use of data that comes too late, and a focus on rights and harms that ignores the need to create new social structures that can empower more local forms of collective decision-making. What this outlines in broad brushstrokes is the need to enfold privacy concerns within a broader data governance framework concerned with the fair and just terms of social legibility.