Privacy is the power to control what others can come to know about you. Imagine a life in which this power is diminished; that more of your life is monitored and searched. Monitoring can be exhaustive and searching can be effective. Your e-mails, voice talks, videos, cell phone locations can be tracked down; is that reasonable? This depends on the conception of privacy. It may be the utility conception which minimizes intrusion, the dignity conception which holds that a search without a good reason harms your dignity, and the substantive conception which claims that privacy is a limit on government's power; what you do in your bedroom cannot be a crime.
In the past people were monitored in an imperfect way. Technology makes greater monitoring possible; it can perfect monitoring and search abilities. While this may be useful for some commercial activities, it may disrupt values protected by that imperfection. Facts about you can appear guilty, and you carry the burden to disprove the guilt. Secondly, we normally engage in multiple communities. When data about you is perfect there can be no such thing: one dominant community rules above others. In a third way, data is used to profile. A ``panoptic sort'' collects data and discriminates on the basis of that data. This discrimination is worrisome because of two results that follow. One is about manipulation, the profiles will normalize the population. The other is equality; social hierarchies require information to discriminate. This information was destroyed by mobility but an efficient monitoring system brings back to life the ability to make subtle distinctions of rank therefore to damage equality.
Lessig suggests that we have choices concerning efficient invasions a la the hypothetical worm and constant monitoring. Encryption aids people in preventing invasive searches but government can demand keys anyway. The search technology should be deployed only when adequate and strong procedural limits have been reached. For preventing constant and silent monitoring the author proposes a system that treats personal information as property so that the power to control information about oneself is revived. 8 In this way, the individual can choose which facts about him can be known by others.