Introduction

Summary

How can privacy law and corporate commitments to privacy be on the rise without it having a significant effect on the designs of new technologies? Tech companies use the tools of coercive bureaucracies to routinize antiprivacy norms and practices in privacy discourse, compliance, and design. Those bureaucracies constrain workers directly by focusing their work on corporate-friendly approaches to privacy. As information industry workers perform these antiprivacy routines and practices, those practices become habituated, inuring employees to corporate surveillance even as they earnestly profess to be privacy advocates. The result is a system in which the rank and file have been conscripted into serving the information industry’s surveillant interests, and in which the meaning of privacy has been subtly changed, often without them even realizing what’s going on.