After “I have nothing to hide anyway…” and “The jailers of ourselves“, here’s the third and final installment of my saga on data privacy.
Following the question of our own surrenders, another looms, more formidable still: what legacy do we leave to those growing up in this world saturated with gazes and data?
We adults have known, however imperfectly, a time when the intimate still had boundaries, when the absence of connection allowed for escapes. But today’s children are born into a universe where transparency is no longer a choice but a given, where every gesture, every image, every word can become a trace.
From this point forward, what we regard as a loss is to them a normality. Where we speak of surrender, they experience an inaugural condition. This is why the question is no longer simply: how do we preserve our inner freedom? It becomes: what humanity do we pass down to a generation that has never known the protective shadow of secrecy?
The generation growing up without private space
For today’s children, private space is no longer a refuge, but an illusion. Their existence is often exposed before they’ve uttered a single word: birth photos published, anecdotes shared, first steps recorded. Their digital identity precedes their own consciousness of existing.
Once, childhood preserved something of a sanctuary: a closed room, a secret garden, the right to silence. Now, the outside world invites itself into the heart of this intimacy from the very first moments. Every smile becomes a shared image, every mishap a stored video, every preference an archived piece of data.
To grow up in such a universe is to feel from childhood that one’s life is always played out under others’ gaze. The “self” is no longer experienced through discretion and slowness, but through exposure and trace. The child discovers himself through the digital mirror that his parents hold before him, not through the inner secret he might have cultivated.
It’s as if the child, instead of being welcomed into the protective twilight of the cave, were presented straightaway in the public square, offered to gazes as certain peoples once offered their newborns to the gods. The closed chamber has become a display window, the cradle an altar of exposition.
Thus is lost the first experience of freedom: that of beginning one’s life in the protective shadow of the private. And when this shadow disappears, it gives way to another light, more glaring: that of a constant gaze, which imposes itself from childhood as self-evident.
Learning surveillance as normality
Today’s children grow up in a world where being surveilled is no longer the exception but the rule. Cameras in the streets, digitized school records, connected bracelets, phone geolocation: everything teaches them that transparency is the condition of trust, and that control is synonymous with security.
What for us might still have been felt as an intrusion becomes for them self-evident. They no longer learn to distinguish what belongs to the public domain from what belongs to the intimate. Their daily life is punctuated by notifications, tracking, evaluations, as if life itself must constantly justify itself.
The paradox lies here: the child doesn’t feel imprisoned, for surveillance comes with rewards, badges, compliments. It takes on the guise of play, protection, care. It’s a panopticon that smiles.
This smiling panopticon has an ancient face, however. In mythology, Argus, the guardian with a hundred eyes, watched without ever resting. Today, Argus has become digital. No gesture escapes him, for when some of his eyes close, others remain open. He hides in screens, sensors, streams of information. The child grows up under this tireless gaze, learning to walk, to speak, to think beneath the eye of an invisible master.
Very early, this gaze is internalized. One adjusts one’s behavior even before being observed. One anticipates what the Eye expects of us. Argus no longer watches only from without; he now inhabits our consciousness. And we grow accustomed to this presence as to a climate: no one contests it, because it seems to have always been there.
The loss of transmitting values of interiority
Once, to pass down meant not only teaching rules or knowledge, but offering spaces of silence. A room one could close, an intimate journal to protect, a path in nature where one disappeared to dream. These refuges were part of parents’ invisible heritage: they gave the child the possibility of inhabiting a place that belonged to him alone.
Today, this transmission is crumbling. Interiority is no longer bequeathed, for it no longer has space to settle. The child learns to share before learning to be silent, to show before learning to keep, to produce a trace before experiencing secrecy. The gesture of writing for oneself fades before the reflex of publishing for others.
Yet without interiority, there is no genuine inner growth. What remains are updated profiles, renewed shop windows. The child no longer experiences the slow alchemy of silence, but the instantaneity of exposure. What once formed the bedrock of consciousness, fertile solitude, the possibility of speaking to oneself, gradually disappears.
In myths, heroes had to cross a dark forest or traverse a cavern to find themselves. Today, our children grow up in a clearing without shadow, where everything is visible, where nothing hides. But how can we hope they’ll discover an inner path if no veil, no darkness is left to them?
The loss of interiority is not merely a personal fragility: it’s a rupture in the chain of human transmission. For to pass down interiority is to pass down the very possibility of becoming oneself.
What will remain of freedom?
What we pass down to our children is not only a world saturated with technologies, but a way of living under the gaze. We bequeath them a childhood without shadow, a socialization shaped by surveillance, an identity that exposes itself before it can even construct itself.
We thought we were offering them security, fluidity, connection. But perhaps we’ve taken away something far more precious: the right to hide, to remain silent, to reinvent oneself far from others’ eyes.
So the real question is no longer simply: how much longer will I remain capable of preserving what makes me a free being? It becomes: what will remain of freedom if we don’t pass it down to those who come after us?
The answer is not written. It depends on our courage to give back to children what we have neglected: zones of silence, spaces of secrecy, places where one learns not to be seen. For it is in these invisible interstices that human dignity is forged, and where a truly free generation can still be born.