Book Review: The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. By Lowry Pressly. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2024. ix, 228 p. Includes illustrations, notes, and index. ISBN 9780674260528 (hardcover) $47.00; ISBN 9780674298262 (eBook) $44.65.

Reviewed by Laura Reid
Student Learning & Engagement Librarian
University of Calgary

Many of us are currently grappling with our technologically enmeshed culture and the seemingly impossible tightrope walk of meaningful self-expression, knowledge sharing, and community building, alongside threats to safety, autonomy, and privacy. On the bright side, there are relationships maintained through digital communication, increased information sharing, and the magical promise of AI. On the dark side, there are the impacts of social media on mental health, the environmental toll wrought by digital infrastructure, questions of ethics and law pertaining to data mining, and claims of copyright infringement. Pulling a thread on just one of these knots results in considerable debate and confusion.

Lowry Pressly’s The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life balances these wide-ranging aspects of privacy with a focus on articulating the deep value of privacy as oblivion and the need for cherishing spaces of untethered exploration. The book offers a reframing of the meaning of privacy through a unique lens that combines philosophical, legal, and historical considerations. By presenting these interconnected perspectives, Pressly offers options for broader thinking on human experience that can create a framework for informing personal choices and collective protections.

Through case studies, philosophical formulae, and academic argument, Pressly encourages the reader to consider the meaning of private experience and acceptance of the unknown. Acknowledging this murky space is essential to human development and to feeling fully alive. Treasured human experiences, like the mystery of sleep and the joys of discovery, counter the goal of total understanding that is implied by seemingly endless access to information. An argument that places value on limiting information and resisting thorough documentation may seem anathema to librarians, but the book’s radical contrast to conventional approaches of knowledge sharing and translation raises essential questions for our field.

Defining privacy is a challenge present in all discourse on the topic, as the word “privacy” is applied to a variety of meanings: a legal term, a philosophical concept, a word denoting economic value or sacred space. This is partly why the topic carries an increasing sense of controversy, particularly around clarifying what privacy means in digital spaces. In the title of this book, the terms “oblivion” and “privacy” are both used, but also explored in the text are related terms: “secrecy,” “unaccountability,” “hiding,” “solitude,” and “autonomy.” Pressly avoids a semantic tangle by focusing on the experiential process and human impacts implicated by these terms and concepts. Each chapter explores a different facet of the experience of the private: photography and technological representations of human identity, the culture of the voyeur, contemporary blurring of public and private, memory and the need to forget, human creative process, and spiritual depth. Although much of Pressly’s writing explores the more abstract sides of privacy, these conceptual considerations can inform larger understandings that can move us toward, as the book’s subtitle states, a “good life.”

Contemporary explorations of data control often present technological tracking and data translations of human behaviour as accurate and unproblematic, with greater focus on what is done with our personal data rather than on why we engage with statistical mirrors of ourselves. Not only does this acceptance of a “data double” (p. 44) ignore the messy inconsistencies of perception and emotion that we all experience, but this also reduces ourselves to data points and tidy representations. Pressly returns the spotlight to the power of a space of one’s own, and thus the psychological and social impacts of losing this oblivion: “privacy supports human flourishing by creating domains of life opposed to the production of information” (p. 53). Pressly’s focus on human experience and the mysterious unknown is essential to understanding ourselves (and each other) and is a grounding and refreshing reminder of the ineffable.

Although it may seem that this book is a heady read, the variety of examples and the influence from multiple areas of thought makes for an agile exploration of the central topic of privacy. Examples are drawn from film, fine art, legal practice and study, philosophy, and literature, making the work appropriate for a variety of readers and researchers, from those with a general interest in privacy studies to more specialized privacy rights scholars and practitioners. This book would add a unique perspective to legal studies collections, providing breadth and context to our current understandings of privacy. In The Right to Oblivion, Pressly has taken an engaging and provocative look at how distinct spaces for unaccountability offer potential for depth, meaning, and interconnectivity.