negativeprivacy

Negative privacy is a term used in privacy discourse to describe the protection against intrusions into an individual’s personal life through the collection, processing, and sharing of data. It treats privacy primarily as a boundary that prevents unwanted observation and data exploitation, emphasizing what should not be allowed to happen to a person’s information rather than concentrating on the creation of private spaces or proactive privacy capabilities.

The concept is often contrasted with notions of positive privacy or privacy as a proactive capability, which focus on individuals’ ability to control contexts, shape information flows, or create private environments. In practice, negative privacy underpins debates about surveillance by states and corporations, data mining, profiling, location tracking, and biometric identification. It thus centers on limits, prohibitions, and risk reduction rather than on opportunities to enjoy privacy-enhancing resources.

Protections for negative privacy include data minimization, purpose limitation, consent regimes, access controls, and strong security measures such as encryption. Regulatory frameworks description often reference negative privacy indirectly by prescribing what data processors may not do, and by granting individuals remedies for improper data handling. Enforcement, transparency, and accountability mechanisms are commonly discussed as means to uphold negative privacy.

Critics note that the term can be imprecise and that privacy is increasingly a function of context and governance, not only prohibitions. Some scholars prefer broader concepts like privacy as informational self-determination or privacy by design, arguing for a more integrated view of privacy that includes both negative protections and positive privacy capabilities.