PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reconsider the concept of the right to information privacy and to propose, from a Japanese perspective, a revised conception of this right that is suitable for the modern information society.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the concept of privacy and personal information protection in the information society is briefly explained. After that, confused situations in Japan caused by the enforcement of Act on the Protection of Personal Information are described followed by the analysis of the Japanese socio‐cultural circumstances (...) surrounding privacy. Based on these, the effectiveness of the concept of the right to information privacy in the Japanese socio‐cultural and economic context is examined and the need to rethink the concept of the right to information privacy discussed. Finally, a revised conception of the right is proposed.FindingsIn view of the circumstances in Japan, the concept of the right to information privacy, defined as “an individual's right to control the circulation of information relating to him/herself”, as well as the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development's eight principles already become outdated in today's sophisticated information‐communication society. There is a need to control/restrict use of personal information so that individuals' autonomy and freedom is ensured in the current situation and to revise the concept of the right to information privacy based on this idea.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a revision of the concept of the right to information privacy focused on control of, not access to, use of personal information. The revised concept is defined so that individuals' autonomy and freedom is ensured even in the “informational transparent” society. (shrink)

With the advent of social networking websites, privacy concerns have reached a new high. One particularly problematic concern entails employers requesting login credentials to popular social media platforms. While many people may consider this request unethical, they may not agree on the reasons it is unethical. One reason may be to blame the behavior on egoism. Egoism, however, comes in multiple flavors, not all of which would agree that violating privacy is acceptable. In this paper, we articulate how one egoist (...) perspective provides a defense of privacy in the face of unjust information access requests. Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, offers an egoist approach to ethics that values individual privacy on rational, self-interested grounds. By applying Objectivist principles to a business context, we observe that businesspeople should not violate other people’s privacy for short-term gains. Furthermore, we observe that privacy can be protected without distinct right to privacy. Rather, Objectivism’s conception of rational self-interest suggests that long-term flourishing is the proper end of individuals and businesses, predicated on, among other things, respecting privacy and enforcing individual rights. (shrink)

Today’s computer network technologies are sociologically founded on hunter-gatherer principles; common users may be possible subjects of surveillance and sophisticated internet-based attacks are almost impossible to prevent. At the same time, information and communication technology, ICT offers the technical possibility of embedded privacy protection. Making technology legitimate by design is a part of the intentional design for democracy. This means incorporating options for socially acceptable behaviour in technical systems, and making the basic principles of privacy protection, rights and responsibilities, transparent (...) to the user. The current global e-polis already has, by means of different technologies, de facto built-in policies that define the level of user-privacy protection. That which remains is to make their ethical implications explicit and understandable to citizens of the global village through interdisciplinary disclosive ethical methods, and to make them correspond to the high ethical norms that support trust, the essential precondition of any socialization. The good news is that research along these lines is already in progress. Hopefully, this will result in a future standard approach to the privacy of network communications. (shrink)

This paper deals with intercultural aspects of privacy, particularly with regard to differences between Japanese and Western conceptions. It starts with a reconstruction of the genealogy of Western subjectivity and human dignity as the basic assumptions underlying Western views on privacy. An analysis of the Western concept of informational privacy is presented. The Japanese topic of ‘‘denial of self” (Musi) as well as the concepts of Seken, Shakai and Ikai (as analyzed by the authors of the companion piece on privacy (...) in Japan) give rise to intercultural comparisons. The paper addresses the question of privacy in cyberspace and mass media. Finally the question of freedom of speech is related to the Japanese concepts of Ohyake and Watakusi. (shrink)

We analyse the contention that privacy is an alien concept within Japanese society, put forward in various presentations of Japanese cultural norms at least as far back as Benedict in The chrysanthemum and the sword: patterns of Japanese culture. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1946. In this paper we distinguish between information privacy and physical privacy. As we show, there is good evidence for social norms of limits on the sharing and use of personal information (i.e. information privacy) from traditional interactions in (...) Japanese society, as well as constitutional evidence from the late 19th century (in the Meiji Constitution of 1889). In this context the growing awareness of the Japanese public about problems with networked information processing by public sector and commercial organisations from the 1980s (when a law governing public sector use of personal information was first passed) to recent years (when that law was updated and a first law governing commercial use of personal information was adopted) are not the imposition or adoption of foreign practices nor solely an attempt to lead Japanese society into coherence with the rest of the OECD. Instead they are drawing on the experience of the rest of the developed world in developing legal responses to the breakdown of social norms governing interchange and use of personal information, stressed by the architectural changes wrought by networked information processing capabilities. This claim is supported by consideration of standard models of Japanese social interactions as well as of Supreme Court judgements declaring reasonable expectations of protection of privacy to hold in Japan. (shrink)

The recent development of the research field of Computing and Philosophy has triggered investigations into the theoretical foundations of computing and information. This thesis consists of two parts which are the result of studies in two areas of Philosophy of Computing and Philosophy of Information regarding the production of meaning and the value system with applications. The first part develops a unified dual-aspect theory of information and computation, in which information is characterized as structure, and computation is the information dynamics. (...) This enables naturalization of epistemology, based on interactive information representation and communication. In the study of systems modeling, meaning, truth and agency are discussed within the framework of the PI/PC unification. The second part of the thesis addresses the necessity of ethical judgment in rational agency illustrated by the problem of information privacy and surveillance in the networked society. The value grounds and socio-technological solutions for securing trustworthiness of computing are analyzed. Privacy issues clearly show the need for computing professionals to contribute to understanding of the technological mechanisms of Information and Communication Technology. The main original contribution of this thesis is the unified dual-aspect theory of computation/information. Semantics of information is seen as a part of the data-information-knowledge structuring, in which complex structures are self-organized by the computational processing of information. Within the unified model, complexity is a result of computational processes on informational structures. The thesis argues for the necessity of computing beyond the Turing-Church limit, motivated by natural computation, and wider by pancomputationalism and paninformationalism, seen as two complementary views of the same physical reality. Moreover, it follows that pancomputationalism does not depend on the assumption that the physical world on some basic level is digital. Contrary to many believes it is entirely compatible with dual quantum-mechanical computing. (shrink)