PERSON

Carissa Véliz

The Oxford philosopher who reconnected privacy to power—arguing that whoever holds your data holds power over you, that personal data is a toxic asset rather than a precious resource, and that the surveillance economy was never inevitable but a series of choices that can still be unmade.

Carissa Véliz is a Mexican, Spanish, and British philosopher who teaches at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, where she is also a Fellow of Hertford College. Her 2020 book Privacy Is Power made a claim that sounded at first like an exaggeration but turned out to be the central political observation of the decade: privacy is not a matter of personal preference but of structural power, and the casual surrender of personal data is not a private lifestyle choice but a quiet transfer of power from citizens to corporations and states. Véliz’s central move was to reconnect two words the technology industry had successfully separated: privacy and power. Knowledge of a person furnishes the capacity to predict their behavior, exploit their fears, influence their choices, and expose what they would prefer to keep hidden; whoever has the data has the power. Her diagnosis of the

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