While the language in the judgment seems a bit overwrought, the notion that the camera could violate a person’s privacy has its echoes in today’s notion of the data double. Pressly, in presenting us with these two cases, wants to recover the way that privacy was conceived at the dawn of the modern era: as something that protected human agency by protecting the many possibilities of the self.

Being compelled to exist in a particular way, whether in a photograph or in the accumulation of digital fingerprints, is determinate; it extinguishes potential. For Warren and Brandeis, steeped in the Romantic tradition, potentiality was a core facet of human agency—the sense that an individual always contains multitudes, and unknown ones at that. (This isn’t, Pressly insists, just a Romantic notion but a romantic one: Roland Barthes, for instance, contrasts the “heavy, motionless, stubborn” image with his own “light, divided, dispersed” self.) The appeal of this idea today is intuitive: Think about how we resent and resist the insistence that our data knows us best—that an AI algorithm is a better judge of our suitability for a job than a human interviewer, that a period tracker should serve us ads for ice cream, that Spotify knows we actually want to listen to the same-sounding songs. The commonly expressed fatigue with online culture has a lot to do with everything feeling overdetermined and our individual complexity being diminished.

It’s a pleasant irony of Pressly’s book that his somewhat pedantic insistence on a particular meaning of privacy—expressed in exhaustive thought experiments and close readings—actually might make the concept more capacious and useful. Writing in The New Yorker, Ben Tarnoff lauded Pressly for taking privacy back from the lawyers and restoring its moral dimensions. Indeed, privacy debates do seem to have devolved into a stalemate between user agreements and opt-out buttons, between the First and Fourth amendments—the stuff of amicus briefs, the FCC, and congressional hearings. Making a moral case for privacy—and why it is necessary for human flourishing—also helps us avoid some of the logical traps that privacy’s defenders commonly run into.

Take the idea that privacy, or the need for it, vanishes when we’re talking about public or semi-public settings. Manola didn’t accept that; nor did, more recently, the neighbors of the photographer Arne Svenson, who for years took pictures of them, Rear Window–style, from his Manhattan apartment. Using a telephoto lens, Svenson photographed a woman in a rocking chair in her bedroom, holding a stuffed bear; someone assembling furniture; someone turning on a lamp; a pair of legs draped over an ottoman. After his photos were exhibited in 2013, several of the subjects sued. Even though Svenson won on First Amendment grounds, the court agreed that the subjects had had their privacy invaded. It felt wrong. A similar dynamic is at play when we think about facial recognition software being deployed via closed-circuit cameras on city streets, or about a stranger “stalking” us online: All that occurs in the public realm, but we can still feel that something important has been violated, that our personal boundaries are not in our own control.

Pressly doesn’t mention it, but we could also stop thinking about privacy as a matter of jurisdiction, of being different in various ways for citizens and noncitizens. The most damning revelations from the documents that Edward Snowden leaked, in retrospect, were about the extent of the United States’ control of the communications systems of other countries. The documents Snowden shared with the press revealed that, as of 2012, the National Security Agency was recording and storing every single phone call made in Afghanistan and the Bahamas, and probably elsewhere. But in the public reaction, the emphasis was overwhelmingly on the constitutional rights of US persons. If you were a foreigner overseas, you were pretty much fair game, and almost everyone in the commentariat seemed to accept that: “Spies are gonna spy,” the argument went. Foreign surveillance, of course, aims to curtail the agency of other countries, to limit the potential that they might develop in ways counter to the interests of the United States. But a less legalistic view of privacy could point the way to a more fulsome international solidarity in this regard, a new kind of politics premised on a global sense of self-determination beyond American empire.

Moving privacy from the realm of the juridical to the moral makes its violations on an intimate and personal scale more obvious as well. Pressly contemplates the famous Gay Talese story about a man who built a motel with secret peepholes through which he spied on his guests and kept a meticulous record of what he saw. None of them ever learned about it, and the man never disclosed anything to anyone (until he wrote to Talese). But it is, on a commonsense level, disturbing, in the same way it was disturbing to learn of the NSA’s mass surveillance, even if it seemed to have little effect on most Americans, or in the same way it would be for a lover to insist on reading your texts, even if they were completely innocuous.

To be effective, privacy needs, in a way, to be taken for granted: It “involves not being too fixated on the world beyond privacy’s interior,” Pressly writes. Here again, he reaches back to the 19th century, when Warren and Brandeis and Henry James alike bemoaned the newspaper’s invasion of the domestic sphere, and the 20th, when Wallace Stevens complained of the radio (“we are intimate with people we have never seen”). Nowadays, we don’t often think of the consumption of information or where we place our attention as having much to do with privacy, but Pressly thinks we should. It helps to explain why being always reachable, always online, always in touch with the world, can paradoxically lead to feelings of alienation and isolation. Because we are always “tethered” (Pressly borrows Sherry Turkle’s concept of the “tethered self”), even situations of ostensible privacy can start to feel like we are being besieged. Of course we want to think about others, and to be accountable to them, but to never have a reprieve from it may cause people to “begin to feel as though they do not have moral ownership over their lives.”

It might seem paradoxical to say that information undermines trust, but this is another truth of contemporary life illuminated in The Right to Oblivion. Pressly describes the case of a German man convicted of murdering two people on board a yacht in the early 1980s. Four decades later, making use of the European Union’s Data Protection Directive, the man sued Der Spiegel, asking to have articles about his conviction removed from the public Internet. He had served his sentence, he argued, and a court agreed that easy access to the fact of his murder conviction fundamentally affected his interest in self-determination. The Internet had changed the terms of his interaction with society in a way that diminished his agency. One might counter that notoriety might be part of the accountability for certain offenses, but Pressly uses this limit case to advocate against fixity and, again, for potentiality. His final chapter makes the strongest case for why this is absolutely fundamental: “We need the belief that we can be different going forward, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.” This is true not only for the individual but for society: We also need such confidence as a collective. To accept that you don’t have to know everything about someone is to trust them (not to look through a partner’s phone, not to install a Ring camera as a doorbell, not to stake an FBI agent outside a Muslim immigrant’s house), and here Pressly’s argument slides between the deeply personal—how can a person be?—and the sociopolitical: How are they allowed to be?

It has been over a decade since the Snowden leaks, in June 2013. By that point, I’d only had a smartphone for a couple of years. That summer, I reported on the leaks and also started to post photos: of a fat watermelon on the couch, of flamboyant hibiscus, of a friend and I sitting on a fire escape, all filtered and framed in accordance with the early Instagram aesthetic. My unease with one (NSA surveillance) had everything to do with the other (posting on social media), but the connection could, for one privileged by citizenship and skin color, feel tenuous. The idea of always being monitored—by the government (more or less likely, depending on who you were), by invisible advertisers, and by friends, acquaintances, or strangers—was only the first part. What that loss of privacy actually entailed is becoming clearer now, and I think Pressly is right: It is about agency, about possibility. Our swelling discomfort with our digitally enabled existence has to do with the increasing sense that our lives are not our own.

Friends often assume that my Luddite-lite tendencies, my habit of going out without my phone and my arm’s-length relationship to social media, have to do with residual paranoia from working the national security beat. Surely that’s true, but if I’m honest, it is more a matter of temperament than tradecraft, more a kind of yearning for that “artist’s sense” of privacy. It’s somewhat facile to say, “Just disconnect—just be in-person as much as you can.” That’s not possible in many circumstances, and it has plenty of limits as a defense (and there I go, thinking about the opposition again). But it is a place to start, to regain agency and, as Pressly’s subtitle promises, the good life.

One of my favorite analogies in Pressly’s book comes from the literary scholar Kevin Quashie, who makes a distinction between quiet and silence. Silence “often denotes something that is suppressed or repressed, and is an interiority that is about withholding, absence, and stillness.” Silence can be expressive, even defiant, but it always calls to mind the watcher or listener enforcing the condition. Quiet, by contrast, is not “calibrated and sensitive to the external world”; it is about the “wild vagary of the inner life” and the “reservoir of human complexity.”

The idea that privacy protects something like quiet—an ineffable idea of the self, a slippery sense of possibility essential for creativity and love, for community and solidarity—is a moving one. It is a concept that I and many others have needed, something I have tried to defend, even without knowing what it was.