Private Property without Privacy: Private Information and the Silent Transformation of Ownership in the Information Age

Abstract

Classical political economy treats private property as foundational to economic coordination and individual autonomy. This paper argues that while private property remains formally intact, it has been substantively hollowed out by the erosion of privacy in the information age. The central claim is that private information—defined as the owner's privileged epistemic access to knowledge relevant to her assets—is a necessary condition for meaningful private property. When such information is no longer privately controlled, ownership persists only as legal fiction rather than effective sovereignty. Through analysis of software licensing, smart property, and decentralized finance, the paper shows how contemporary property increasingly functions as conditional, reversible, access-based arrangements dependent on informational infrastructures governed by others. Revisiting Hayek's epistemological defense of property, the analysis demonstrates that the loss of informational privacy undermines the assumptions that allowed private property to sustain an extended order. The paper engages with objections from information economics and cryptographic privacy, examines systemic risks to economic stability, innovation, and political order, and concludes that the defining challenge of our time is not the abolition of private property, but the disappearance of the private itself.