Recommended read from Salon.com: You don't "have nothing to hide": How privacy breaches are quietly controlling you

"Another reason why privacy is important, as Greenwald and many others, including the philosopher Hannah Arendt, have argued, is that privacy is crucial to personal exploration, creativity, dissent — those interests and thoughts that reflect the complexity of human beings and their ability to flourish and lead meaningful lives. But as we also know, creativity and dissent can be disruptive to the smooth functioning of society — making the lives of bureaucrats and autocratic politicians much harder because their authority would be constantly challenged. As Professor Roger Berkowitz, Director of Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center, suggests in an excellent post on the importance of privacy for Hannah Arendt,

Such independent thinking is dangerous, or at least disturbing to the demands for conformity and correctness of public society. The real reason privacy is in decline today is because the very fruits of a rich private life — uniqueness, difference, and plurality — are scorned by the insistence on uniformity of opinion and behavior in good society. What suffers in the poverty of a meaningful private sphere is politics."