Baseline privacy is the minimum level of privacy a person should be able to expect simply by participating in modern life. It should not require constant vigilance, specialized knowledge, or continuous defensive effort.
It is not anonymity or secrecy, and it is not the absence of accountability. It is not a lifestyle, a product category, or a technical achievement. Baseline privacy is the idea that systems should begin from restraint rather than extraction.
A baseline is not an ideal; it is a floor. When privacy is treated as optional — something users must actively configure, negotiate, or purchase — it stops being a right and becomes a tax on attention and competence. Those who can afford that tax retain dignity by default. Those who cannot are exposed by default.
Privacy is often framed as a personal preference. This framing is convenient, and misleading. Privacy is a structural condition that makes other freedoms usable: speech without fear, association without profiling, exploration without permanent records, dissent without retaliation. When privacy erodes, these freedoms rarely disappear outright; they narrow quietly and unevenly.
Most privacy failures are not driven by malice, but by incentives. Data collected “just in case.” Consent obtained through exhaustion rather than understanding. Purposes that expand faster than oversight. Records that persist long after their justification expires.
Each decision appears reasonable in isolation. Together, they produce environments where surveillance is ambient, refusal is costly, and accountability is diffuse. Baseline privacy is what resists that drift.
It does not demand perfection. It asks for proportionality: that systems collect less by default, that consent be meaningful rather than theatrical, that refusal not come with punishment, and that power be constrained even when trust exists.
The ideas discussed here are defended in practice by institutions that focus on rights, governance, accountability, and structural limits on power. Strong examples include:
Baseline privacy is not about withdrawing from the modern world. It is about shaping it so participation does not require surrender.
When privacy works, it is quiet. When it fails, it is everyone’s problem.