Law professor Danielle Citron: ‘Privacy is essential to human flourishing’

The American professor of law talks about her new book on the fight for data privacy, the personal dossiers brokers build on us and how, post-Roe v Wade, women's data in the US may be weaponised

Danielle Citron is a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she specialises in privacy and civil rights. Her new book, The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity and Love in Our Digital Age, outlines the 21st-century assault on privacy from Spying Inc", the companies, governments and individuals that seek to exploit and profit from our most sensitive data. She argues that intimate privacy should be enshrined as a civil right in the US.

We hear a lot about companies collecting our data, yet your book still manages to shock when revealing the extent of these practices. You highlight, for example, that our internet search history is essentially in the public realm and could be purchased by any motivated party. Also that the dating app Grindr was sharing information about users' HIV statuses to third party data brokers before it got caught.
We don't viscerally appreciate the ways in which companies and governments surveil our lives by amassing intimate information about our bodies, our health, our closest relationships, our sexual activities and our innermost thoughts. Companies are selling this information to data brokers, who are compiling dossiers with about 3,000 data points on each of us, including if we have been rape victims, use sex toys or have had abortions or miscarriages.