Aadhaar. Never before has a technology so radically polarised India. There are those who are excited by the possibilities it has opened up, while doomsayers only see all the harms that would arise if it is misused. In many ways, the visceral opposition to Aadhaar stems from the fact that it is India’s first brush with an indigenous technology that calls into question our understanding of privacy. Around the world, whenever a new technology has come up with implications on privacy – like the printing press, the telegraph and portable cameras – society initially opposed it violently before eventually learning to adjust to its drawbacks in order to benefit from its advantages. We are at a similar crossroads today. In a world where people live their lives in full public view on social media and where data is the new oil, the advantages of big data are undeniable. At the same time, we have already seen the harms that can arise if this new technology is poorly deployed. What we need is a framework that can safeguard privacy while still unlocking the potential of a data-driven future. In this pioneering work, technology lawyer Rahul Matthan traces the changing notions of privacy from the earliest times to its evolution in law through landmark cases in the UK, US and India, and re-imagines the way we think about privacy so that we can take full advantage of the modern data-driven world. He argues for an entirely new approach to thinking about privacy, cautioning against getting so obsessed with the harms that may befall us if our privacy is violated that we design our laws to prevent that from occurring at all costs.