Epistemological Dimensions of Informational Privacy (original) (raw)
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There is widespread disagreement about the terms in which privacy ought to be defined and consequently about the scope of the concept. It is said to lack coherence, leading some to question its value for practical reasoning. In this essay I argue that disagreement about privacy is, at least in part, a manifestation of disagreement about more general moral-political values that the concept of privacy is invoked to serve. Commitment to these values will lead not only to differing views on the value of privacy, but also as to the terms in which it ought to be defined. Locating accounts of privacy in political theory will e
The meaning of privacy has been frequently disputed in the philosophical and legal literature since Warren and Brandeis first argued for it as a distinct and important personal and social value. Nevertheless, while the meaning of privacy is held to be vague, there is general agreement that Warren and Brandeis were correct in their assessment of its value. Theorists of democracy, on the other hand, have been ambivalent towards the realm of the private. This paper interrogates the intersection between privacy and democracy, questioning the place of privacy as a distinctly democratic value. Introduction My concern in this paper is with the place a right to privacy has in a normative account of democracy. 1 One difficulty with my topic is that both privacy and democracy are highly contested ideas and so I am liable to become entangled in too many matters of definition. I am going to attempt to evade this problem by offering an account of privacy that addresses, I think, the essential worry that advocates of privacy express and one that is not overly controversial. This will not be a full definition of privacy but a partial one suited to my purposes here. With this account in hand I will then show how three alternative views of democracy place different values on privacy. I will end by arguing that only what I call full deliberative democracy requires a right to privacy as a central part of its democratic vision and, consequently, offers a democratic argument for the right to privacy. Although many countries, states, and international organisations have or advocate for a right to privacy, the idea that privacy is valuable is by no means universally accepted. Some have argued that privacy is a dated notion incompatible with modern technology, while others have argued for its limited value. I think it is important at the beginning to distinguish between what privacy amounts to and what its value is. What we value about privacy will change according to how we understand it. However, there is no easy way to say what privacy means, as is evident in the extensive philosophical and legal literature on just this topic, beginning in 1890 with Warren and Brandeis's law journal article called the " Right to Privacy ". There they argued that the right to privacy was a right to be " let alone " (Warren and Brandeis 1890, 205) and free from the invasion of the " sacred precincts of private and domestic life " (Warren and Brandeis 1890, 196). This definition of privacy has some obvious flaws. It is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for privacy. It confuses solitude with privacy and, as Judith Thomson notes, I can fail to let you alone by dropping a brick on your head, but in doing so I have not violated your privacy (Thomson 1975, 295). Nevertheless, it does capture one aspect of what privacy means by pointing to the idea of limited or restricted access as an important part of its definition. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will focus on a second feature of privacy that has less to do with encroachment into personal domains and more to do with restrictions on what other people and institutions know about a person. On this account, one is in a state of privacy with respect to a piece of information to the extent that others are not in a cognitive relationship with it. In other words, the fewer people who know some fact about me, the more private that information is. If no-one else knows it, then it is absolutely private.
Disattendability, Civil Inattention, and the Epistemology of Privacy
Philosophical Analysis (철학적 분석)
The concept of privacy is intimately related to epistemological concepts such as information and knowledge, yet for the longest time had received only scant attention from epistemologists. This has begun to change in recent years, and different philosophical accounts have been proposed. On the liberal model of privacy, what privacy aims at is the protection of individuals from interference in personal matters. On the (more narrowly epistemological) informational model, privacy is a matter of limiting access to (or maintaining control over) certain types of information. Furthermore, it is sometimes claimed that privacy aims at preventing the formation of (potentially negative) judgments by others. This paper compares and contrasts the various approaches and identifies a number of shortcomings. It then outlines an alternative account, the disattendability/civil inattention model of privacy, according to which what constitutes a breach of privacy is neither the acquisition of new information per se, nor the formation of judgments by others, but the fact that undue attention is being paid to routinized (or otherwise unobtrusive) aspects of the target’s everyday life. This account, it is argued, is explanatorily superior to its competitors, in that it accounts both for the cultural contingency of privacy conventions and for the emergence of new threats to privacy (e.g. from electronic surveillance). The paper concludes by reflecting on remaining tensions within the proposed account of privacy and by commenting on its social ramifications.
Social Pathologies of Informational Privacy, in: Journal of Social Philosophy, Online first.
Journal of Social Philosophy, 2022
Following the recent practice turn in privacy research, informational privacy is increasingly analyzed with regard to the “appropriate flow of information” within a given practice, which preserves the “contextual integrity” of that practice (Nissenbaum 2010, 149). Such a practice-theoretical take on privacy emphasizes the normative structure of practices as well as its structural injustices and power asymmetries, rather than focusing on the intentions and moral considerations of individual or institutional actors. Since privacy norms are seen to be institutionalized via the role obligations of the practice’s participants, it can analyze structural and systematic privacy infringements in terms of “defective role performances and defective social relations” (Roessler and Mokrosinska 2013, 780). Unfortunately, it is still often somewhat unclear what this exactly means within the context of informational privacy, why these performances and relations are defective and for whom. This raises the common objection of a so-called “practice positivism” (Applbaum 1999, 51), i.e. the difficulty of practice-theoretical accounts to take a practice-independent standpoint, from which to normatively evaluate the existing practice norms themselves . For example, Nissenbaum herself initially argues for a “presumption in favor of the status quo” with respect to the appropriateness and flow of privacy norms within a practice (2004, 127). Such a “practice conservatism” (Nissenbaum 2010, 169) comes dangerously close to committing a naturalistic fallacy, if not undergirded by practice-external criteria (which is ultimately what she does). Merely resorting to existing practice norms to assess what defective role performances amount to, only shifts the question from how to recognize an appropriate flow of information to the question of how to recognize those defective role performances and social relations. Against this backdrop, the central aim of this paper is to shed light on this question without resorting to practice-independent first principles or far-reaching universalistic anthropological assumptions. For this, I will analyze the notion of “defective role performances and social relations” in terms of social pathologies. Doing so has two advantages: First of all, it can draw on already existing concepts and distinctions, which help to categorize the different levels of analysis that exist in informational privacy research and situate the notion of “defective role performances” within them (sec. 1). Secondly, those concepts and distinctions can serve as a basis for establishing a typology of phenomena with regard to deficient practices of informational privacy (sec. 4). Having thus set the scene in section one, I can move on to address the notion of “defective role performances and social relations” with respect to informational privacy. In section two, I employ the social-ontological recognitional model of privacy (SORM) that I developed in more detail elsewhere (Loh, 2018). The SORM has the advantage to evade some of the pitfalls of practice positivism: It can help explain what “adequate flow of information” and “contextual integrity” amounts to on a more fundamental social-ontological level, without recurring to practice-independent criteria. Following the insights gained from the SORM, in section three I analyze pathologies of informational privacy as the structural and systematic failure to recognize all bearers of constitutive roles within a datafication practice as standard authorities. This account not only gives an answer to why these practices are defective on a social-ontological level. Also, it helps to explain in more detail how deficiencies that prevent the mutual recognition of standard authority are structured in general. Finally, in section four I distinguish four interrelated types of structural distortions which are often employed in diagnoses of social pathologies, and which are also at play in the context of datafication practices: Epistemic, cognitive, psychomotivational, and power-relational distortions. This paper brings together social ontology, practice theory, privacy theory, as well as methodological questions of ideology critique (in the form of theories of social pathologies), and applies them to datafication contexts. As a result, it can provide a theoretical – but still practice-dependent – foundation for empirical analyses of systematic and structural privacy infringements and the underlying issues of datafication. In this respect, the paper contributes to the existing privacy research by giving a functional account of these infringements in terms of “social pathologies”: They are pathological in the sense that they prevent the mutual recognition as standard authorities within datafication practices and thereby seriously weaken the reproducibility of these practices. In sum, the paper’s original contribution is threefold: 1. It expands on the notion of “informational privacy” as a function of standard authority in datafication practices (the SORM), by showing how a misrecognition as standard authority will result in deficient datafication practices. 2. In framing these deficiencies as “pathologies of informational privacy”, it gives a functional account of social pathologies as a formal social-ontological criterion for certain structures of practices that are likely to seriously inhibit their reproducibility. 3. By offering a typology of social pathologies, it helps structuring and categorizing the findings on privacy infringements from empirical research.
A Practice-Theoretical Account of Privacy, in: Ethics & Information Technology 20, pp. 233-247.
Ethics & Information Technology, 2018
This paper distinguishes between two main questions regarding the notion of privacy: “What is privacy?” and “Why do/should we value privacy?”. In developing a social-ontological recognitional model of privacy (SORM), it gives an answer to the first question. According to the SORM, Privacy is a second order quality of roles within social practices. It is a function of who is or should be recognized as a “standard authority”. Enjoying standard authority means to have the right to interpret and contest role behavior and role obligations within a specific practice (first level), as well as evaluate the normative structure, the fundamental practice norms as well as the roles and their status (second level). The SORM utilizes the concept of standard authority to explicate privacy with regard to two categories that capture the rele-vant phenomena of privacy: decisional and informational privacy. Within a practice, an actor is said to have decisional privacy if she as a BCR does not (or does not have to) recognize bearers of accidental roles as standard authorities. Vice versa, an actor is said to enjoy in-formational privacy if all other BCRs (and especially data collecting actors) recognize her as a standard authority. Additionally, the requirement of mutual recognition by the practice participants as standard authorities introduces a “weak normativity” into the theory, which can be used to identify deficient privacy arrangements within practices.
The Conflicting Frames of Privacy
This paper discusses the results of the research project 'Privacy and Anonymity on the Net (PRIANO, 2014–2016)', which tries to chart the fate of online privacy in Finland after the Snowden revelations and during the ongoing law-making process. From interviews (n = 17) conducted with Finnish experts, we identified three frames of opinion (national security, business, and fundamental rights) and analysed their values and strategies of justification. I also conducted a survey (n = 1000) on Finns' opinions about online privacy and compared the results with those of similar surveys in the U.S. and Estonia. The survey findings indicated that Finnish internet users still value privacy. Finally, in the conclusive part, I reflect on the empirical results based on the theoretical literature on surveillance capitalism and the fate of social trust and democracy.
The Alternative Definition of Privacy
In my presentation, I assume three hypotheses, validate them and come to a conclusion that leads to the alternative definition of privacy. a) Apprehension is an unpleasant emotion that is specifically linked to our public appearances. b) Privacy is a system, in which apprehension can be undone. c) Confidence or trust (used here as synonyms), when it comes to personal information, undoes apprehension. If (a), (b) and (c) are true, hence: d) Privacy is made of a network of trustworthy relationships that concern the use of personal information, no more, no less. To proceed, I will need to define the concepts I have named above, especially by distinguishing confidence from what I call “reasoned confidence”. In order to do so, I will oppose two different historical conceptions of privacy: the “classical” and the “alternative”; and will show that the latter is the contemporary conception of privacy.
The Politics of Privacy - A Useful Tautology
"Media and Communication", 2020
While communication and media studies tend to define privacy with reference to data security, current processes of datafication and commodification substantially transform ways of how people act in increasingly dense communicative networks. This begs for advancing research on the flow of individual and organizational information considering its relational, con-textual and, in consequence, political dimensions. Privacy, understood as the control over the flow of individual or group information in relation to communicative actions of others, frames the articles assembled in this thematic issue. These contributions focus on theoretical challenges of contemporary communication and media privacy research as well as on structural privacy conditions and people's mundane communicative practices underlining inherent political aspect. They highlight how particular acts of doing privacy are grounded in citizen agency realized in datafied environments. Overall, this collection of articles unfolds the concept of 'Politics of Privacy' in diverse ways, contributing to an emerging body of communication and media research.