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JACQUELINE D. LIPTON, 2022, Our Data, Ourselves: A Personal Guide to Digital Privacy, 
Oakland: University of California Press, 224 pp., ISBN 9780520390508 

Keywords: digital privacy, privacy law, US, digital marketplace, individualism 

In Our Data, Ourselves, Lipton provides a thorough overview of digital privacy in nine domains 

of American life: home, work, social media, children’s data, school, the digital marketplace, 

health, money, and the government. The book also has a chapter dedicated to digital privacy laws 

in the EU and a concluding chapter where Lipton ruminates on the future of digital privacy given 

present legal challenges. The biggest challenge is that the US has “never had – and likely will 

never have – strong legal privacy protections” on a federal level (197). As Lipton points out, this 

is problematic in the digital age, where various institutions and organizations take our personal 

data for scientific study, efficiency, profit, surveillance, and more. Moreover, the documents made 

available to us, which outline how our data is being collected and for what purpose, are often 

difficult to parse. For example, tech companies’ terms of service (TOS) and HIPAA consent forms 

ostensibly exist to inform consumers yet are written in an inaccessible legal register. Lipton tackles 

these issues through offering detailed explanations of 1) digital privacy issues in each domain of 

life; 2) the pertinent laws and legal attempts that seek to address the lack of privacy protections in 

the US; 3) what we – as individuals – can do to protect our digital privacy and personal 

information. Thus, the book should be understood as a guide for individuals that draws on the 

author’s legal expertise to inform people about contemporary challenges to personal privacy in the 

digital era.  

How effective is Lipton’s attempt to explain the complex legal and political terrain of privacy to 

the average user without a legal background? I think Lipton writes effectively in this sense, 

although, of course, I am reading from a standpoint of relative privilege. The main thrust of the 

book is clear: in lieu of a sweeping federal privacy law, privacy issues in the US are addressed 

through a web of state and federal legislation. Individuals’ health information privacy, for 



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example, is protected on the federal level under the Health Insurance Portability and 

Accountability Act (HIPAA) (p. 144). Meanwhile, tort law – which concerns “situations where 

the law allows one person to sue another for causing [civil] harm” – operates on the state-level 

(pp. 34-35). For instance, doxing – “the gathering and publishing of private information, which 

may be aggregated from publicly available websites or require physical and/or digital incursions 

into a person’s private space” – is usually addressed through tort law (p. 35). In contrast, several 

European countries consider privacy a basic human right through Article 8 of the European 

Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (p. 131). Lipton does a fair job of defining terms, clearly 

describing the histories of various legislation, and outlining the implications of laws addressing 

digital privacy for business interests and individual freedom of speech. 

Yet, Lipton’s individualistic framework is limited at best and neglectful of systemic violence at 

worst. First, she takes the social, political, and economic factors shaping her audience’s lives for 

granted. Reading this book as anthropologist, I got the sense that she reflected little on the 

inequalities among potential readers. This is particularly evident in the last section of each chapter, 

titled “Privacy Tips and Tricks,” where she lists the steps individuals might take to safeguard their 

privacy in each domain. In several chapters, she recommends that people read companies’ privacy 

policies, terms of service (TOS), and other documents pertaining to user privacy. For example, in 

the chapter titled “Our Data at Home,” she recommends that when buying devices like Alexa or 

Nest Cam, readers “do [their] homework…[and] read each company’s privacy policy and compare 

policies across companies” (p. 43). This not only contradicts the point of her book, i.e., to parse 

the legal register for non-legal experts, but also reflects the unrealistic expectation that people have 

the time and resources to sift through multiple policy documents. Moreover, such documents were 

not written to be read: companies write them to avoid liability and protect themselves from future 

litigation. In this way, documents like social media platforms’ TOS should be understood as 

mechanisms to protect corporations’ profit and disempower users. The book would be stronger if 

Lipton, at the very least, acknowledged the fact that her advice is applicable to a very thin slice of 

the US population: white, wealthy people who have the resources to enact her suggestions.  

Second, Lipton’s individualistic framework leads her to ignore systemic inequalities. While the 

lack of robust all-encompassing privacy protections affects everyone, it is especially a problem for 

marginalized communities, whose data are disproportionately misused and harvested by 



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corporations and the state. It is worth noting, of course, that this phenomenon is not new: 

surveillance technologies have long been used to control people of color in the US and colonized 

peoples in the “Global South” for centuries. The scale and efficiency of surveillance has only 

intensified in the digital age. For example, when Roe v. Wade was repealed, the commodification 

of cis women, non-binary, and trans men’s location data when seeking reproductive healthcare 

became a matter of serious risk to their safety.1 Lipton occasionally acknowledges such inequities, 

but she does so unevenly and in ways that neglect their systematic character. For example, in the 

chapter “Who Owns Our Data?” she discusses the case of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose 

cancer cells were acquired by Johns Hopkins without her consent for cancer research in the 1950’s. 

Lipton writes that Lacks’ case constitutes “one of the more high-profile and significant 

unauthorized uses of a person’s biological material” (p. 15) but does not acknowledge how this 

breach of privacy was made possible by a racist system that continues to deprive Black people of 

their dignity as human beings.  

In sum, this book is best regarded as a reference for understanding just how little we have in the 

way of legal privacy protections in the US. Insofar as the book constitutes a “guide” to protecting 

one’s privacy, however, it fails to offer any solutions that get at the root social causes of privacy 

issues. Lipton’s lack of attention to power means that her suggestions fit squarely within neoliberal 

logics of individual responsibility, which is problematic in the digital economy not only because 

few can apply her “tips and tricks,” as I pointed out, but also because it reinforces the defeatist 

notion that our only recourse comes from individual action. I submit, instead, that our only hope 

is through organizing and collective action: it is only by drawing connections between our 

experiences and mobilizing on the basis of this shared – albeit uneven – reality of exploitation that 

we can hope to protect our privacy.  

 

Rae Jereza is a queer, Filipinx anthropologist based in the US. They are a research assistant 
professor and senior researcher at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab 
(PERIL) at American University. They are currently researching the hate speech/free speech 
dichotomy in the digital age, gun violence, content moderation, and how disabled users make 

 
1 Lai, Samantha and Brooke Tanner, “Examining the Intersection of Data Privacy and Civil Rights,” The Brookings 
Institute, July 18, 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2022/07/18/examining-the-intersection-of-data-
privacy-and-civil-rights/.  



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sense of those who question their diagnoses on social media. Geographically speaking, their 
work focuses on North America.  

 

 

© 2023 Rae Jereza 

 


