Defending Cognitive Privacy and the Right to Think

Key points

The capacity to "think in private" is fundamental to cognitive development.

Protecting childhood development requires treating cognitive processes as fundamentally private.

Current privacy frameworks protect data items, not the developmental process itself—a category error.

Cognitive privacy is the freedom to think, wonder, question, struggle, and form ideas without those processes being observed or recorded. When you're learning something genuinely new, you don't just acquire information. You form hypotheses, test ideas, make mistakes, backtrack, get confused, have insights, and gradually build understanding. This process is messy, nonlinear, and usually personal.

The questions you ask yourself while learning reveal not just what you don't know but how you think, what conf