Emphasis mine - I think the problem might be that we don't have clear guidelines set as to what level of monitoring is acceptable. Is it okay to monitor the transactions of a website that sells guns and weapons? Is it okay for Facebook to see what kind of things you buy on Amazon and tailor ads accordingly? Is it okay to collect data about who someone calls, or how often, as long as the phone call itself isn't recorded? I feel like there isn't really a precedent for this stuff, only people's preferences.Foucault’s point wasn’t that disciplinary power was intrinsically bad; the idea that, for example, pedophiles might be deterred from accessing child pornography for fear of state surveillance of child porn sites shouldn’t bother anyone. Rather, Foucault warned, disciplinary power was dangerous — used in certain fashions, it could be subtly corrosive of exactly the sorts of freedoms of expression and self-identity that liberal democracies purportedly protected absolutely.
I do think people should have privacy rights, but the limits aren't clear. Having complete and total privacy is unrealistic by nature - if you send a letter to someone, others could see you sending it, if you tell a secret to someone, somebody else could overhear. If you live in a society where you depend on systems of economy and government, those systems, probably including some people that you don't know, will have to know some things about you in order to interact with you at all. But there's no clear guideline as to how much they should be able to know about you.
