Selected by the Economist as one of the best books of 2020. -/- Privacy Is Power argues that people should protect their personal data because privacy is a kind of power. If we give too much of our data to corporations, the wealthy will rule. If we give too much personal data to governments, we risk sliding into authoritarianism. For democracy to be strong, the bulk of power needs to be with the citizenry, and whoever has the data (...) will have the power. Privacy, I argue, is not a personal preference; it is a political concern. I also argue that personal data is a toxic asset, and should be regulated as if it were a toxic substance, similar to asbestos. I call for a complete ban to the trade in personal data. The book is at once philosophical and political, and extremely practical and accessible. It discusses liberal democracy, equality, justice, and autonomy. It includes a chapter for policymakers, and one that addresses what ordinary citizens can do to protect privacy. Finally, the book covers the tension between privacy and public health in the context of covid19. -/- . (shrink)

The phenomenon of the New Genetics raises complex social problems, particularly those of privacy. This book offers ethical and legal perspectives on the questions of a right to know and not to know genetic information from the standpoint of individuals, their relatives, employers, insurers and the state. Graeme Laurie provides a unique definition of privacy, including a concept of property rights in the person, and argues for stronger legal protection of privacy in the shadow of developments in (...) human genetics. He challenges the role and the limits of established principles in medical law and ethics, including respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality. This book will interest lawyers, philosophers and doctors concerned both with genetic information and issues of privacy; it will also interest genetic counsellors, researchers, and policy makers worldwide for its practical stance on dilemmas in modern genetic medicine. (shrink)

In this chapter I identify three problems affecting the plausibility of group privacy and argue in favour of their resolution. The first problem concerns the nature of the groups in question. I shall argue that groups are neither discovered nor invented, but designed by the level of abstraction (LoA) at which a specific analysis of a social system is developed. Their design is therefore justified insofar as the purpose, guiding the choice of the LoA, is justified. This should remove (...) the objection that groups cannot have a right to privacy because groups are mere artefacts (there are no groups, only individuals) or that, even if there are groups, it is too difficult to deal with them. The second problem concerns the possibility of attributing rights to groups. I shall argue that the same logic of attribution of a right to individuals may be used to attribute a right to a group, provided one modifies the LoA and now treats the whole group itself as an individual. This should remove the objection that, even if groups exist and are manageable, they cannot be treated as holders of rights. The third problem concerns the possibility of attributing a right to privacy to groups. I shall argue that sometimes it is the group and only the group, not its members, that is correctly identified as the correct holder of a right to privacy. This should remove the objection that privacy, as a group right, is a right held not by a group as a group but rather by the group’s members severally. The solutions of the three problems supports the thesis that an interpretation of privacy in terms of a protection of the information that constitutes an individual—both in terms of a single person and in terms of a group—is better suited than other interpretations to make sense of group privacy. (shrink)

The first few years of the 21st century were characterised by a progressive loss of privacy. Two phenomena converged to give rise to the data economy: the realisation that data trails from users interacting with technology could be used to develop personalised advertising, and a concern for security that led authorities to use such personal data for the purposes of intelligence and policing. In contrast to the early days of the data economy and internet surveillance, the last few years (...) have witnessed a rising concern for privacy. As bad data practices have come to light, citizens are starting to understand the real cost of using online digital technologies. Two events stamped 2018 as a landmark year for privacy: the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The former showed the extent to which personal data has been shared without data subjects’ knowledge and consent and many times for unacceptable purposes, such as swaying elections. The latter inaugurated the beginning of robust data protection regulation in the digital age. Getting privacy right is one of the biggest challenges of this new decade of the 21st century. The past year has shown that there is still much work to be done on privacy to tame the darkest aspects of the data economy. As data scandals continue to emerge, questions abound as to how to interpret and enforce regulation, how to design new and better laws, how to complement regulation with better ethics, and how to find technical solutions to data problems. The aim of the research project Data, Privacy, and the Individual is to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics of privacy and of differential privacy. The outcomes of the project are seven research papers on privacy, a survey, and this final report, which summarises each research paper, and goes on to offer a set of reflections and recommendations to implement best practices regarding privacy. (shrink)

From the Supreme Court to the bedroom, privacy is an intensely contested interest in our everyday lives and privacy law. Some people appeal to privacy to protect such critical areas as abortion, sexuality, and personal information. Yet, privacy skeptics argue that there is no such thing as a right to privacy. I argue that we cannot abandon the concept of privacy. If we wish to avoid extending this elusive concept to cover too much of (...) our lives or shrinking it to cover too little, we must come to understand it. After exploring the privacy arguments of philosophers and constitutional and tort privacy law, I argue for a new definition of privacy and an explanation of its value that clarifies and resolves many of our conflicts. Privacy is critical because it allows us to protect a realm in which we can have intimate relations with others. (shrink)

Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to this author, may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, she argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover's kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate inalienable, liberty-promoting privacies for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. The eight chapters of this book are reflections on public regulation (...) of privacy at home; isolation and confinement for punitive and health reasons; religious modesty attire; erotic nudity; workplace and professional confidentiality; racial privacy; online transactions; social networking; and the collection, use and storage of electronic data. (shrink)

Technological advances are bringing new light to privacy issues and changing the reasons for why privacy is important. These advances have changed not only the kind of personal data that is available to be collected, but also how that personal data can be used by those who have access to it. We are particularly concerned with how information about personal attributes inferred from collected data (such as online behaviour), can be used to tailor messages and services to specific (...) individuals or groups. This kind of ‘personalised targeting’ has the potential to influence individuals’ perceptions, attitudes, and choices in unprecedented ways. In this paper, we argue that because it is becoming easier for companies to use collected data for influence, threats to privacy are increasingly also threats to personal autonomy—an individual’s ability to reflect on and decide freely about their values, actions, and behaviour, and to act on those choices.4 While increasing attention is directed to the ethics of how personal data is collected, we make the case that a new ethics of privacy needs to also think more rigorously about how personal data may be used, and its potential impact on personal autonomy. (shrink)

Current technology and surveillance practices make behaviors traceable to persons in unprecedented ways. This causes a loss of anonymity and of many privacy measures relied on in the past. These de facto privacy losses are by many seen as problematic for individual psychology, intimate relations and democratic practices such as free speech and free assembly. I share most of these concerns but propose that an even more fundamental problem might be that our very ability to act as autonomous (...) and purposive agents relies on some degree of privacy, perhaps particularly as we act in public and semi-public spaces. I suggest that basic issues concerning action choices have been left largely unexplored, due to a series of problematic theoretical assumptions at the heart of privacy debates. One such assumption has to do with the influential conceptualization of privacy as pertaining to personal intimate facts belonging to a private sphere as opposed to a public sphere of public facts. As Helen Nissenbaum has pointed out, the notion of privacy in public sounds almost like an oxymoron given this traditional private-public dichotomy. I discuss her important attempt to defend privacy in public through her concept of ‘contextual integrity.’ Context is crucial, but Nissenbaum’s descriptive notion of existing norms seems to fall short of a solution. I here agree with Joel Reidenberg’s recent worries regarding any approach that relies on ‘reasonable expectations’ . The problem is that in many current contexts we have no such expectations. Our contexts have already lost their integrity, so to speak. By way of a functional and more biologically inspired account, I analyze the relational and contextual dynamics of both privacy needs and harms. Through an understanding of action choice as situated and options and capabilities as relational, a more consequence-oriented notion of privacy begins to appear. I suggest that privacy needs, harms and protections are relational. Privacy might have less to do with seclusion and absolute transactional control than hitherto thought. It might instead hinge on capacities to limit the social consequences of our actions through knowing and shaping our perceptible agency and social contexts of action. To act with intent we generally need the ability to conceal during exposure. If this analysis is correct then relational privacy is an important condition for autonomic purposive and responsible agency—particularly in public space. Overall, this chapter offers a first stab at a reconceptualization of our privacy needs as relational to contexts of action. In terms of ‘rights to privacy’ this means that we should expand our view from the regulation and protection of the information of individuals to questions of the kind of contexts we are creating. I am here particularly interested in what I call ‘unbounded contexts’, i.e. cases of context collapses, hidden audiences and even unknowable future agents. (shrink)

: Does the rejection of pure proceduralism show that we should adopt Brettschneider’s value theory of democracy? The answer, this paper suggests, is ‘no’. There are a potentially infinite number of incompatible ways to understand democracy, of which the value theory is, at best, only one. The paper illustrates and substantiates its claims by looking at what the secret ballot shows us about the importance of privacy and democracy. Drawing on the reasons to reject Mill’s arguments for open voting, (...) in a previous paper by A. Lever, it argues that people’s claims to privacy have a constitutive, as well as an instrumental, importance to democratic government, which is best seen by attending to democracy as a practice, and not merely as a distinctive set of values. (shrink)

Neural engineers and clinicians are starting to translate advances in electrodes, neural computation, and signal processing into clinically useful devices to allow control of wheelchairs, spellers, prostheses, and other devices. In the process, large amounts of brain data are being generated from participants, including intracortical, subdural and extracranial sources. Brain data is a vital resource for BCI research but there are concerns about whether the collection and use of this data generates risk to privacy. Further, the nature of BCI (...) research involves understanding and making inferences about device users’ mental states, thoughts, and intentions. This, too, raises privacy concerns by providing otherwise unavailable direct or privileged access to individuals mental lives. And BCI-controlled prostheses may change the way clinical care is provided and the type of physical access caregivers have to patients. This, too, has important privacy implications. I In this chapter we examine several of these privacy concerns in light of prominent views of the nature and value of privacy. We argue that increased scrutiny needs to be paid to privacy concerns arising from Big Data and decoding of mental states, but that BCI research may also provide opportunity for individuals to enhance their privacy. (shrink)

In recent years, educational institutions have started using the tools of commercial data analytics in higher education. By gathering information about students as they navigate campus information systems, learning analytics “uses analytic techniques to help target instructional, curricular, and support resources” to examine student learning behaviors and change students’ learning environments. As a result, the information educators and educational institutions have at their disposal is no longer demarcated by course content and assessments, and old boundaries between information used for assessment (...) and information about how students live and work are blurring. Our goal in this paper is to provide a systematic discussion of the ways in which privacy and learning analytics conflict and to provide a framework for understanding those conflicts. -/- We argue that there are five crucial issues about student privacy that we must address in order to ensure that whatever the laudable goals and gains of learning analytics, they are commensurate with respecting students’ privacy and associated rights, including (but not limited to) autonomy interests. First, we argue that we must distinguish among different entities with respect to whom students have, or lack, privacy. Second, we argue that we need clear criteria for what information may justifiably be collected in the name of learning analytics. Third, we need to address whether purported consequences of learning analytics (e.g., better learning outcomes) are justified and what the distributions of those consequences are. Fourth, we argue that regardless of how robust the benefits of learning analytics turn out to be, students have important autonomy interests in how information about them is collected. Finally, we argue that it is an open question whether the goods that justify higher education are advanced by learning analytics, or whether collection of information actually runs counter to those goods. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Dimensions of Privacy Theories of Privacy Liberty and Decisional Privacy Justifying a Right to Informational Privacy Secrecy and Authority Note References.

Current sophisticated technologies in the workplace offer inexpensive and user-friendly devices and the means to control ‘on-the-job’ behaviour. This promises high profitability, productivity and liability alleviation. Yet, it also gives rise to a socio-ethical crisis of incessant surveillance that often overrules its anticipated benefits and motives of control and care. The dilemma is twofold: First, scholarly studies undertaken on this issue from a principally administrative and legal point of view tend to lack a moral framework and so prove unable to (...) offer an integral understanding. Second, a majority of scholars tend to focus exclusively on individual rights, such as privacy, even at the risk of overlooking its social impact and consequences. This paper thus aims to unravel these forgotten moral and social concerns. It analyses the surveillance frameworks and the arguments for and against it; scrutinises critically the technological devices most often implemented in the workplace; examines both its individual effects (privacy) and social effects (categorising); and proposes an ethics of workplace surveillance in a framework of trust and transparency. It argues, in all these ways, for an alteration or modification of traditional organisational behaviour within a new frame of reference, situated within and going beyond questions of moral duty, principles and legal compliance. (shrink)

Bodily privacy, understood as a right to control access to one’s body, capacities, and powers, is one of our most cherished rights − a right enshrined in law and notions of common morality. Informational privacy, on the other hand, has yet to attain such a loftily status. As rational project pursuers, who operate and flourish in a world of material objects it is our ability control patterns of association and disassociation with our fellows that afford each of us (...) the room to become distinct individuals. Privacy, whether physical or informational, is valuable for beings like us. Establishing the truth this claim will be the primary focus of this article. Providing reasons, evidence, and support for this claim will take us into the historical and cultural dimensions of privacy. (shrink)

Many attempts to define privacy have been made over the last century. Early definitions and theories of privacy had little to do with the concept of information and, when they did, only in an informal sense. With the advent of information technology, the question of a precise and universally acceptable definition of privacy in this new domain became an urgent issue as legal and business problems regarding privacy started to accrue. In this paper, I propose a (...) definition of informational privacy that is simple, yet strongly tied with the concepts of information and property. Privacy thus defined is similar to intellectual property and should receive commensurate legal protection. (shrink)

The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative, phenomenal nature of conscious experiences also cannot be communicated to others in the form of a message composed of classical bits of information. Because in a classical world everything physical is observable and communicable, it is a daunting task to explain how an empirically unobservable, incommunicable consciousness could have any physical (...) substrates such as neurons composed of biochemical molecules, water, and electrolytes. The challenges encountered by classical physics are exemplified by a number of thought experiments including the inverted qualia argument, the private language argument, the beetle in the box argument and the knowledge argument. These thought experiments, however, do not imply that our consciousness is nonphysical and our introspective conscious testimonies are untrustworthy. The principles of classical physics have been superseded by modern quantum physics, which contains two fundamentally different kinds of physical objects: unobservable quantum state vectors, which define what physically exists, and quantum operators (observables), which define what can physically be observed. Identifying consciousness with the unobservable quantum information contained by quantum physical brain states allows for application of quantum information theorems to resolve possible paradoxes created by the inner privacy of conscious experiences, and explains how the observable brain is constructed by accessible bits of classical information that are bound by Holevo's theorem and extracted from the physically existing quantum brain upon measurement with physical devices. (shrink)

The goal of the book is to present the latest research on the new challenges of data technologies. It will offer an overview of the social, ethical and legal problems posed by group profiling, big data and predictive analysis and of the different approaches and methods that can be used to address them. In doing so, it will help the reader to gain a better grasp of the ethical and legal conundrums posed by group profiling. The volume first maps the (...) current and emerging uses of new data technologies and clarifies the promises and dangers of group profiling in real life situations. It then balances this with an analysis of how far the current legal paradigm grants group rights to privacy and data protection, and discusses possible routes to addressing these problems. Finally, an afterword gathers the conclusions reached by the different authors and discuss future perspectives on regulating new data technologies. (shrink)

this paper argues that people are entitled to keep some true facts about themselves to themselves, should they so wish, as a sign of respect for their moral and political status, and in order to protect themselves from being used as a public example in order to educate or to entertain other people. The “outing” - or non-consensual public disclosure - of people’s health records or status, or their sexual behaviour or orientation is usually unjustified, even when its consequences seem (...) to be beneficial. Indeed, the paper claims, the reasons to reject outing, as inconsistent with democratic commitments to freedom and equality, are reasons to insist on the importance of privacy to freedom of expression. While a free press is of the utmost importance to democratic government, it is not identical with the free expression of individuals and, on occasion, the former may have to be constrained in order to protect the latter. [Barendt, 2007, 231]. Hence, the paper concludes, we should distinguish the claims of individuals to publish reports about their lives – even if this necessarily involves revealing the private lives of others – from journalistic claims to publish information about the sex lives of consenting adults. I will start by briefly situating my argument within a democratic approach to privacy, before using the “outing” of Oliver Sipple to examine people’s claims to privacy and their implications for freedom of expression and of the press. I will be assuming that some forms of privacy are legitimate, in order to focus more closely on the question of what information, if any, people may keep to themselves. (shrink)

This volume analyses the moral and legal foundations of privacy, security, and accountability along with the tensions that arise between these important individual and social values.

This ambitious, interdisciplinary collection responds to present intellectual debates concerning the value and limits of privacy. Ever since the beginning of modernity, the line of demarcation between private and public spaces, and the distinction between them, have continually been challenged and redrawn. Such developments as new technologies that introduce previously unforeseen possibilities for infringement upon privacy and the modern spectacles of television talk shows and “reality-TV” give added urgency to the discussion on privacy. This collection examines the (...) fundamental issues structuring that debate. Bringing together for the first time leading contributors to the recent debates on privacy from both Europe and the United States, this collection affirms that privacy, in all its dimensions, remains a central value of liberal democracies. Its essays expose the complex ways in which privacy is essentially and intimately intertwined with our ideas of freedom, identity, and “the good life.”. (shrink)

Many attempts to define privacy have been made since the publication of the seminal paper by Warren and Brandeis (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). Early definitions and theories of privacy had little to do with the concept of information and, when they did, only in an informal sense. With the advent of information technology, the question of a precise and universally acceptable definition of privacy became an urgent issue as legal and business problems regarding privacy started to (...) accrue. In this paper, we propose a definition of privacy that is simple, yet strongly tied with the concepts of information and property. We show that privacy thus defined is not only useful in the context of the infosphere, but can also be successfully applied in its more traditional role as the ‘right to be let alone’. (shrink)

While the balance between individual privacy and government monitoring or corporate surveillance has been a frequent topic across numerous disciplines, the issue of privacy within the family has been largely ignored in recent privacy debates. Yet privacy intrusions between parents and children or between adult partners or spouses can be just as profound as those found in the more “public spheres” of life. Popular access to increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance technologies has altered the dynamics (...) of family relationships. Monitoring, mediated and facilitated by practices of both covert and overt electronic surveillance, has changed the nature of privacy within the family. Parents are tracking children via GPS-enabled cell phone tracking software and are monitoring the Internet use of family members. Parents, siblings, and children are also posting information about their family members online, often without consent, and are creating social media profiles for others online. Prior scholarly work in philosophy and law has primarily addressed the privacy of children from third parties, usually commercial entities, and in the context of making medical decisions. Less attention has been directed at exploring a more general right of privacy of one family member against parents, siblings, children, or spouses. In this article, we do just that. We consider several moral rules that determine appropriate privacy boundaries within the family. More specifically, we will consider when overt or covert surveillance of a child, spouse, or partner by an adult family member is morally permitted. (shrink)

This book explores the Janus-faced features of privacy, and looks at their implications for the control of personal information, for sexual and reproductive freedom, and for democratic politics. It asks what, if anything, is wrong with asking women to get licenses in order to have children, given that pregnancy and childbirth can seriously damage your health. It considers whether employers should be able to monitor the friendships and financial affairs of employees, and whether we are entitled to know whenever (...) someone rich, famous or powerful has cancer, or an adulterous affair. It considers whether we are entitled to privacy in public and, if so, what this might mean for the use of CCTV cameras, the treatment of the homeless and the provision of public facilities such as parks, libraries and lavatories. Above all, the book seeks to understand whether and, if so, why privacy is valuable in a democratic society, and what implications privacy has for the ways we see and treat each other. The ideas about privacy we have inherited from the past are marked by beliefs about what is desirable, realistic and possible which predate democratic government and, in some cases, predate constitutional government as well. Hence, this book argues, although privacy is an important democratic value, we can only realise that value if we use democratic ideas about the freedom, equality, security and rights of individuals to guide our understanding of privacy. (shrink)

This book argues that the irreducible singularity of each person as a psychical subject implies the privacy of the psychical and that of experience, and yet the private accessibility of each person to his or her mind is compatible with interpersonal communication and understanding. The book treats these major issues against the background of the author's original metaphysics--panenmentalism."--Publisher's website.

This article addresses the question of whether an expectation of privacy is reasonable in the face of new technologies of surveillance, by developing a principle that best fits our intuitions. A "no sense enhancement" principle which would rule out searches using technologically sophisticated devices is rejected. The paper instead argues for the "mischance principle," which proscribes uses of technology that reveal what could not plausibly be discovered accidentally without the technology, subject to the proviso that searches that serve a (...) great public good that clearly outweighs minimal intrusions upon privacy are permissible. Justifications of the principle are discussed, including reasons why we should use the principle and not rely solely on a utilitarian balancing test. The principle is applied to uses of aerial photography and heat-detection devices. (shrink)

For more than thirty years an extensive and significant philosophical debate about the notion of privacy has been going on. Therefore it seems puzzling that most current authors on information technology and privacy assume that all individuals intuitively know why privacy is important. This assumption allows privacy to be seen as a liberal “nice to have” value: something that can easily be discarded in the face of other really important matters like national security, the doing of (...) justice and the effective administration of the state and the corporation. In this paper I want to argue that there is something fundamental in the notion of privacy and that due to the profoundness of the notion it merits extraordinary measures of protection and overt support. I will also argue that the notion of transparency (as advocated by Wasserstrom) is a useless concept without privacy and that accountability and transparency can only be meaningful if encapsulated in the context of privacy. From philosophical and legal literature I will discuss and argue the value of privacy as the essential context and foundation of human autonomy in social relationships. In the conclusion of the paper I will discuss implications of this notion of privacy for the information society in general, and for the discipline of information systems in particular. (shrink)

This article is part of a symposium on property-owning democracy. In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to (...) form families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. -/- However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people’s claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. -/- In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy. (shrink)

Must privacy and freedom of expression conflict? To witness recent debates in Britain, you might think so. Anything other than self-regulation by the press is met by howls of anguish from journalists across the political spectrum, to the effect that efforts to protect people’s privacy will threaten press freedom, promote self-censorship and prevent the press from fulfilling its vital function of informing the public and keeping a watchful eye on the activities and antics of the powerful.[Brown, 2009, 13 (...) January]1 Effective protections for privacy, from such a perspective, inevitably pose a threat to democratic government via the constraints that they place on the press. Such concerns with privacy must be taken seriously by anyone who cares about democratic government, and the freedom, equality and wellbeing of individuals. But if it is one thing to say that privacy and freedom of expression cannot always be fully protected, it is another to suppose that protections for the one must always come at the expense of the other. After all, the economics of contemporary politics and journalism would seem to be partly responsible for our difficulties in protecting personal privacy while sustaining robust and informative forms of public discourse. [Moore, 2010, 10 -141]2 Most newspapers are loss-making businesses and the need to reduce those losses and, if possible, to turn a profit, make investigative journalism an increasingly expensive proposition as compared to both “comment” and more or less elevated forms of gossip. At the same time, politics has increasingly become the prerogative of a narrow group of people with access to the large sums of money necessary successfully to compete for high office. In those circumstances, the need for critical scrutiny is as important as it is difficult. Revising our ideas about privacy and its protection cannot alone reduce the tensions between freedom of expression and personal privacy typical of our societies, necessary though such revision may be. Moreover, this paper can only touch on some aspects of the ways in which we need to rethink our interests in privacy, in order adequately to reflect people’s diverse interests in freedom of expression, and the important role of a free press to democratic government. Nonetheless, I hope to suggest ways of thinking about people’s claims to privacy which can be generalised fairly readily, and can help us to think constructively about the nature, causes and solutions to some important social and political problems, even if, in its nature, philosophical analysis rarely tells us what to do. More specifically, this paper argues that people are entitled to keep some true facts about themselves to themselves, should they so wish, as a sign of respect for their moral and political status, and in order to protect themselves from being used as a public example in order to educate or to entertain other people. The “outing” - or non-consensual public disclosure - of people’s health records or status, or their sexual behaviour or orientation is usually unjustified, even when its consequences seem to be beneficial. Indeed, the paper claims, the reasons to reject outing, as inconsistent with democratic commitments to freedom and equality, are reasons to insist on the importance of privacy to freedom of expression. While a free press is of the utmost importance to democratic government, it is not identical with the free expression of individuals and, on occasion, the former may have to be constrained in order to protect the latter. [Barendt, 2007, 231]. Hence, the paper concludes, we should distinguish the claims of individuals to publish reports about their lives – even if this necessarily involves revealing the private lives of others – from journalistic claims to publish information about the sex lives of consenting adults. I will start by briefly situating my argument within a democratic approach to privacy, before using the “outing” of Oliver Sipple to examine people’s claims to privacy and their implications for freedom of expression and of the press. I will be assuming that some forms of privacy are legitimate, in order to focus more closely on the question of what information, if any, people may keep to themselves. (shrink)

Privacy involves a zone of inaccessibility in a particular context. In social discourse it pertains to activities that are not public, the latter being by definition knowable by outsiders. The public domain so called is the opposite of secrecy and somewhat less so of confidentiality. The private sphere is respected in law and morality, now in terms of a right to privacy. In law some violations of privacy are torts. Philosophers tend to associate privacy with personhood. (...) Professional relationships are prima facie private but may be investigated for cause. Privacy may entail both intimacy and caring but neither necessarily so. Finally, various technology-based means of intrusion are rendering privacy ever more difficult to sustain. (shrink)

In earlier work, I have expressed scepticism about privacy-based criticisms of bulk collection for counter-terrorism ( Sorell 2018 ). But even if these criticisms are accepted, is bulk collection nonetheless legitimate on balance – because of its operational utility for the security services, and the overriding importance of the purposes that the security services serve? David Anderson’s report of the Bulk Powers review in the United Kingdom suggests as much, provided bulk collection complies with strong legal safeguards ( Anderson (...) 2016 ). I think it is hard to mount a uniformly compelling operational utility argument, because purposes other than counter-terrorism are pursued by the security services with the help of bulk collection. For example, the Intelligence Services Act 1994, section 1(2) says that apart from the interests of national security and the prevention and detection of serious crime, the Secret Intelligence Service may act “in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.”The phrase “interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom” is opento a disturbingly wide range of interpretations, and it is doubtful that these interests justify bulk collection even when relevant “economic interests” are confined to those “also relevant to the interests of national security”, as required by the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) section 204 (3a). (shrink)

Are rights to privacy consistent with sexual equality? In a brief, but influential, article Catherine MacKinnon trenchantly laid out feminist criticisms of the right to privacy. In “Privacy v. Equality: Beyond Roe v. Wade” she linked familiar objections to the right to privacy and connected them to the fate of abortion rights in the U.S.A. (MacKinnon, 1983, 93-102). For many feminists, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) had suggested that, notwithstanding a dubious past, (...) legal rights to privacy might serve feminist objectives, and prove consistent with sexual equality. By arguing that Roe’s privacy justification of abortion rights was directly responsible for the weakness and vulnerability of abortion rights in America, MacKinnon took aim at feminist hopes for the right to privacy at their strongest point. Maintaining that Roe’s privacy justification of abortion is intimately, and not contingently, related to the Supreme Court’s subsequent decision in Harris v. McRae, (1980) MacKinnon concluded that privacy rights cannot be reconciled with the freedom and equality of women, and so can have no place in a democracy.1 In Harris, the Supreme Court held that the State need not provide Medicaid coverage for abortions that are necessary to preserve the health, but not the life, of a pregnant woman, effectively depriving poor women of almost all state aid for abortions.2 Moreover, the Court’s subsequent decision in Bowers v . Hardwick (1986) appeared to confirm the truth of MacKinnon’s observation – though this case concerned gay rights, rather than abortion rights, and occurred several years after MacKinnon’s condemnation of Harris. -/- This paper examines MacKinnon’s claims about the relationship of rights to privacy and equality in light of the reasoning in Harris and Bowers. When we contrast the Majority and Minority decisions in these cases, it shows, we can distinguish interpretations of the right to privacy that are consistent with sexual equality from those that are not. This is not simply because the two differ in their consequences – though they do - but because the former, unlike the latter, rely on empirical and normative assumptions that would justify sexual inequality whatever right they were used to interpret. So while I agree with MacKinnon that the Majority’s interpretation of the right to privacy in Harris is inconsistent with the equality of men and women, I show that there is no inherent inconsistency in valuing both privacy and equality, and no reason why we must chose to protect the one, rather than the other. Indeed, an examination of MacKinnon’s article, I suggest, can help us to see why rights to privacy can be part of a scheme of democratic rights, and how we might go about democratising the right to privacy in future. To avoid confusion I should emphasise that my arguments are of a philosophical, not a legal, nature. Thus, I will be ignoring the specifically legal and constitutional aspects of MacKinnon’s article, and of the Supreme Court decisions, in order to bring their philosophical significance into focus. -/- . (shrink)

Traditional arguments for privacy in public suggest that intentionally public activities, such as political speech, do not deserve privacy protection. In this article, I develop a new argument for the view that surveillance of intentionally public activities should be limited to protect the specific good that this context provides, namely democratic legitimacy. Combining insights from Helen Nissenbaum’s contextualism and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, I argue that strategic surveillance of the public sphere can undermine the capacity (...) of citizens to freely deliberate in public and therefore conflicts with democratic self-determination. (shrink)

This book attacks the assumption found in moral philosophy that social control as such is an intellectually and morally destructive force. It replaces this view with a richer and deeper perspective on the nature of social character aimed at showing how social freedom cannot mean immunity from social pressure. The author demonstrates how our competence as rational and social agents depends on a constructive adaptation of social control mechanisms. Our facility at achieving our goals is enhanced, rather than undermined, by (...) social control. The author then articulates sources, contracts, and degrees of legitimate social control in different social and historical settings. Drawing on a wide range of material in moral and political philosophy, law, cognitive and social psychology, anthropology and literature, Professor Schoeman shows how the aim of moral philosophy ought to be to understand our social character, not to establish fortifications against it in the name of rationality and autonomy. (shrink)

This paper examines MacKinnon’s claims about the relationship of rights to privacy and equality in light of the reasoning in Harris and Bowers. When we contrast the Majority and Minority decisions in these cases, it shows, we can distinguish interpretations of the right to privacy that are consistent with sexual equality from those that are not. This is not simply because the two differ in their consequences – though they do - but because the former, unlike the latter, (...) rely on empirical and normative assumptions that would justify sexual inequality whatever right they were used to interpret. So while I agree with MacKinnon that the Majority’s interpretation of the right to privacy in Harris is inconsistent with the equality of men and women, I show that there is no inherent inconsistency in valuing both privacy and equality, and no reason why we must chose to protect the one, rather than the other. Indeed, an examination of MacKinnon’s article, I suggest, can help us to see why rights to privacy can be part of a scheme of democratic rights, and how we might go about democratising the right to privacy in future. To avoid confusion I should emphasise that my arguments are of a philosophical, not a legal, nature. Thus, I will be ignoring the specifically legal and constitutional aspects of MacKinnon’s article, and of the Supreme Court decisions, in order to bring their philosophical significance into focus. (shrink)

In an age of smartphones, Facebook and You Tube, privacy may seem to be a norm of the past. This book addresses ethical and legal questions that arise when media technologies are used to give individuals unwanted attention. Drawing from a broad range of cases within the US, UK, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere, I ask whether privacy interests can ever be weightier than society’s interest in free speech and access to information. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, and (...) drawing on the work of political theorist Jeremy Waldron concerning toleration, the book argues that we can still have a legitimate interest in controlling the extent to which information about us is disseminated. The book begins by exploring why privacy and free speech are valuable, before developing a framework for weighing these conflicting values. By taking up key cases in the US and Europe, and the debate about a ‘right to be forgotten’, I discuss the potential costs of limiting free speech, and point to legal remedies and other ways to develop new social attitudes to privacy in an age of instant information sharing. (shrink)

The sense of shame is part of human nature. What, then, is the role and significance of such a particular sensation, one that causes mental anxiety in a sick person’s weakest and the most vulnerable state? We know from historical documents going back as far as ancient Greece and Egypt that respecting patient privacy should be regarded as a moral duty for physicians in charge of treatment. However much today’s healthcare may have changed compared to centuries past, we note (...) that patient privacy has not lost its importance. In the current healthcare system, digital recording of private information and images enables others, in principle, to access these personal data quite easily. While we cannot reject the advantages offered by modern medicine, we need to consider how to design a healthcare system that respects patient privacy. What should be the standards of privacy in emergency services where urgent decisions and interventions have to be made? How should we guarantee patient privacy during medical education? The chapters of this book approach questions like these from the perspectives of different disciplines. The writings illustrate the increasing complexity of patient privacy issues in modern healthcare systems, particularly the growing difficulty to protect confidential data. At the same time, we can observe that patients are becoming more aware of their rights and their sensitivity in this area has increased. In our opinion, an approach that requires us to choose between the two values –health and privacy – would be wrong. Therefore, the question we should focus on is: “what kind of healthcare system should be developed to ensure the greatest respect for humans’ natural right to privacy?” If we want to answer this question and find sustainable solutions for these problems, it is crucial to use a multidisciplinary approach. From this perspective, the present volume is a first contribution to be published in Turkey to pursue this aim, including articles offered from various disciplines. (shrink)

Privacy is one of our most essential values, but popular understanding of it lags far behind the heat the concept generates. It's easy to understand why. The concept itself has shifted in U.S. law from autonomy, to property, to confidentiality. Further, with a host of cultural differences as to how privacy is understood globally and in different religions, and with nonstop technological advancements, its significance is continually evolving. Leslie P. and John G. Francis draw upon their extensive expertise (...) in law, philosophy, political science, regulatory policy, and bioethics to parse privacy's meaning in the modern age. This book will inform, appease, and alert readers to what is at stake when privacy is breached. (shrink)

This article concerns the nature and limits of individuals’ rights to privacy over information that they have made public. For some, even suggesting that an individual can have a right to privacy over such information may seem paradoxical. First, one has no right to privacy over information that was never private to begin with. Second, insofar as one makes once-private information public – whether intentionally or unintentionally – one waives one’s right to privacy to that information. (...) In this article, however, we suggest the moral situation is more complicated than this. Rather, we argue that there is a class of public information – namely, once-private information that individuals have made public unintentionally – which remains within the scope of an individuals’ right to privacy, even when it has passed into the public domain. Significantly, this class includes any information rights-holders were unaware could be inferred from information they have made public and which they would not otherwise have wanted to be in the public domain. As we show, as well as clarifying several everyday dilemmas with regards to individuals’ privacy rights, this finding has elucidates a number of problems in the ethics of Big Data. (shrink)

Ultimately, this affects the natural interplay between privacy, personal identity and identification. This book investigates that interplay from a systemic, socio-technical perspective by combining research from the social and computer sciences. It sheds light on the basic functions of privacy, their relation to identity, and how they alter with digital identification practices. The analysis reveals a general privacy control dilemma of (digital) identification shaped by several interrelated socio-political, economic and technical factors. Uncontrolled increases in the identification modalities (...) inherent to digital technology reinforce this dilemma and benefit surveillance practices, thereby complicating the detection of privacy risks and the creation of appropriate safeguards. Easing this problem requires a novel approach to privacy impact assessment (PIA), and this book proposes an alternative PIA framework which, at its core, comprises a basic typology of (personally and technically) identifiable information. This approach contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of privacy impacts and thus, to the development of more effective protection standards. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical security studies, surveillance studies, computer and information science, science and technology studies, and politics. (shrink)

Despite widespread agreement that privacy in the context of education is important, it can be difficult to pin down precisely why and to what extent it is important, and it is challenging to determine how privacy is related to other important values. But that task is crucial. Absent a clear sense of what privacy is, it will be difficult to understand the scope of privacy protections in codes of ethics. Moreover, privacy will inevitably conflict with (...) other values, and understanding the values that underwrite privacy protections is crucial for addressing conflicts between privacy and institutional efficiency, advising efficacy, vendor benefits, and student autonomy. -/- My task in this paper is to seek a better understanding of the concept of privacy in institutional research, canvas a number of important moral values underlying privacy generally (including several that are explicit in the AIR Statement), and examine how those moral values should bear upon institutional research by considering several recent cases. (shrink)

Most people are completely oblivious to the danger that their medical data undergoes as soon as it goes out into the burgeoning world of big data. Medical data is financially valuable, and your sensitive data may be shared or sold by doctors, hospitals, clinical laboratories, and pharmacies—without your knowledge or consent. Medical data can also be found in your browsing history, the smartphone applications you use, data from wearables, your shopping list, and more. At best, data about your health might (...) end up in the hands of researchers on whose good will we depend to avoid abuses of power.2 Most likely, it will end up with data brokers who might sell it to a future employer, or an insurance company, or the government. At worst, your medical data may end up in the hands of criminals eager to commit extortion or identity theft. In addition to data harms related to exposure and discrimination, the collection of sensitive data by powerful corporations risks the creation of data monopolies that can dominate and condition access to health care. -/- This chapter aims to explore the challenge that big data brings to medical privacy. Section I offers a brief overview of the role of privacy in medical settings. I define privacy as having one’s personal information and one’s personal sensorial space (what I call autotopos) unaccessed. Section II discusses how the challenge of big data differs from other risks to medical privacy. Section III is about what can be done to minimise those risks. I argue that the most effective way of protecting people from suffering unfair medical consequences is by having a public universal healthcare system in which coverage is not influenced by personal data (e.g., genetic predisposition, exercise habits, eating habits, etc.). (shrink)

Unjustifiable assumptions about sex and gender roles, the untamable potency of maleness, and gynophobic notions about women's bodies inform and influence a broad range of policy-making institutions in this society. In December 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit continued this ignoble cultural pastime when they decided Everson v. Michigan Department of Corrections. In this decision, the Everson Court accepted the Michigan Department of Correction's claim that “the very manhood” of male prison guards both threatens the safety (...) of female inmates and violates the women's “special sense of privacy in their genitals” and declared that sex-specific employment policies for prison guards is not impermissibly discriminatory. I believe that the Court's decision relies on unacceptable stereotypes about sex, gender and sexuality and it significantly undermines Title VII's power to end discriminatory employment practices. (shrink)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users (...) of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies. (shrink)

In our digital world, we are confused by privacy – what is public, what is private? We are also challenged by it, the conditions of privacy so uncertain we become unsure about our rights to it. We may choose to share personal information, but often do so on the assumption that it won't be re-shared, sold, or passed on to other parties without our knowing. In the eighteenth century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote about a new model for a (...) prison called a Panopticon, where inmates surrounded the jailers, always under watch. Have we built ourselves a digital Panopticon? Are we the guards or the prisoners, captive or free? Can we be both? When Kim Kardashian makes the minutiae of her life available online, which is she? With great rigour, this important book draws on a Kantian philosophy of ethics and legal frameworks to examine where we are and to suggest steps – conceptual and practical – to ensure the future is not dystopian. Privacy is one of the defining issues of our time; this lively book explains why this is so, and the ways in which we might protect it. (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)

An accountability-based privacy governance model is one where organizations are charged with societal objectives, such as using personal information in a manner that maintains individual autonomy and which protects individuals from social, financial and physical harms, while leaving the actual mechanisms for achieving those objectives to the organization. This paper discusses the essential elements of accountability identified by the Galway Accountability Project, with scholarship from the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams LLP. Conceptual _Privacy by Design_ (...) principles are offered as criteria for building privacy and accountability into organizational information management practices. The authors then provide an example of an organizational control process that uses the principles to implement the essential elements. Initially developed in the ‘90s to advance privacy-enhancing information and communication technologies, Dr. Ann Cavoukian has since expanded the application of _Privacy by Design_ principles to include business processes. (shrink)