The privacy anomaly¶

Research brief, The Morporkian Civil Liberties Union (MCLU). Open file.

Somebody pays in coin. Declines the loyalty card. Refuses the face reader at the door and uses the slow queue. Keeps no account with anything, and asks not to be photographed at the staff dinner.

None of that is punished. Every one of those choices is offered, and taking them is precisely what the offer means.

But the absence has a shape. Everybody else is in the record, so the gap where this person should be is legible, and it is the only gap. The system does not need to know what they are keeping to themselves. It only needs to notice that they are keeping something.

Privacy, exercised consistently, becomes the interesting thing about them.

• When an opt-out is rare enough to be conspicuous, is it still an opt-out?

• What is the remedy for being noticed, given that nobody has done anything to you?

Whether an absence is data¶

• Whether any regulator has considered the informational value of an absence, which we suspect nobody has and would like to be wrong about. - Fraud, insurance and creditworthiness scoring: whether thin file or missing data is treated as a negative signal, and who has documented it. - The Polish authority’s canteen decision, where the pupils without a fingerprint waited at the end of the queue and were let in one at a time. Annulled on appeal. - Employment cases where declining a monitoring system was treated as grounds for anything. - Anything in the research on chilling effects that measures behaviour rather than reported intent.

Last updated: 17 September 2026