The essay proposes to use alienation as a heuristic and conceptual tool for the analysis of the impact of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) on users. It follows a historical materialist understanding, according to which data can be considered as things produced in an industrial fashion. A representational interpretation, according to which data would merely reflect a given reality, is untenable. It will be argued instead to understand data as an additional layer which has a transformative impact on reality (...) as a whole. The analysis follows the early Marx in thinking of alienation as a structural condition which holds even if it is not experienced psychologically by users. Alienation means that the desire to express oneself and achieve social recognition, self-realization, and participation through the use of ICTs is incongruent to the inherent purposes and functions of these technologies. Digital platforms create the ideological illusion that users contribute to the production of data solely for their own gratification. Users, in turn, react to structural alienation either by internalizing it, in which case they may become enthusiastic data producers, or by imposing alienating conditions on other users. Finally, it will be shown that a strong notion of privacy is less suited to articulate concerns about the impact of ICTs because it expresses a desire for privilege and individual control which has become unfulfillable in the environment of data industries. The essay closes by showing some of the changes in institutional structures and behavior that could follow from the focus on alienation. (shrink)

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of (...) surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere. (shrink)

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how (...) new networked technologies, such as facial recognition, challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public. (shrink)

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative (...) framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices. (shrink)

The debate on the ethics of privacy has been mainly dominated by Western perspectives, to the exclusion of broader ethical theories and socio-cultural perspectives. This imbalance carries risks; transplanted ethical norms and values can collide with those of the communities in which they are deployed. The consequent homogenization might also represent a missed opportunity to enrich and develop the current paradigm of privacy protection so as to effectively face new technological challenges. This article introduces and discusses the sub-Saharan philosophy of (...) Ubuntu and argues how its conception of the self helps to reinterpret some of the emerging issues revolving digital information technologies. To begin with, a general overview of the debate on the ethics of privacy is provided by distinguishing between individual and relational privacy. Also, the challenges of 'group privacy' are discussed. Then, we introduce basic principles of Ubuntu focusing on how these may have affected privacy conceptions and related legal practices. By outlining opportunities and risks of intercultural information ethics, we argue how Ubuntu—similarly to other communitarian moral philosophies—strengthens the development of the concept of relational privacy and, in particular, of group privacy. (shrink)

Increasing privacy concerns are arising from expanding use of aggregated personal information in health practices. Conversely, in light of the promising benefits of data driven healthcare, privacy...

One of the most influential views in privacy scholarship is that privacy protects individual autonomy. On the early liberal view, the exercise of autonomy requires detachment from social and political life and privacy facilitates it. This view of privacy still informs current legal and political practice. As this view of privacy presupposes a tension between privacy and society, it is responsible for the underrating of privacy in legal and political practice. Over the last decades, liberal reflection on autonomy has shifted (...) from the early liberal understanding of autonomy as calling for detachment from social life to the idea of autonomy as socially embedded. This development has brought about a corresponding adjustment in the liberal concept of privacy: privacy has come to be seen as a social rather than merely an individual interest. The social turn in thinking about privacy has gone a long way to change the problematic image of privacy in legal and political practice. It has not gone far enough, however, to draw conclusions regarding the political relevance of privacy. I argue that we should understand autonomy as politically embedded. Revised along these lines, privacy has a political value: when we claim privacy, we do not make a claim to withdraw from political life, but rather make a claim to protect certain forms of political engagement. (shrink)

In the digital age individuals face key choices about whether and how to share intimate details of their lives, “images of the body, biological data in general and diagnostic information” (Pyrrho,...

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, p. 149; 2015). 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, this approach can analyze structural and systematic privacy infringements in terms of “defective role performances and defective social relations” (Roessler & Mokrosinska, 2013, p. 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, p. 51), that is, 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 (Nissenbaum, 2004, p. 127). Such a “practice conservatism” (Nissenbaum, 2010, p. 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 article 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.1 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 (Section 1). Second, those concepts and distinctions can serve as a basis for establishing a typology of phenomena with regard to deficient practices of informational privacy (Section 4). (shrink)

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, 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, as well as evaluate the normative structure, the fundamental practice norms as well as the roles and their status. The SORM utilizes the concept of standard authority to explicate privacy with regard to two categories that capture the relevant 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 recognize bearers of accidental roles as standard authorities. Vice versa, an actor is said to enjoy informational privacy if all other BCRs 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. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen an unprecedented proliferation of surveillance programs by government agencies. This development has been driven both by technological progress, which has made large scale surveillance operations relatively cheap and easy, and by the threat of terrorism, organized crime and pandemics, which supplies a ready justification for surveillance. For a long time, mass surveillance programs have been associated with autocratic regimes, most notoriously with the German Democratic Republic and the Stasi, its secret police. A more recent case in (...) point is the efforts of the People’s Republic of China to set up a comprehensive surveillance system that assigns citizens a score reflecting their social and political conformity. But the current rise of state mass surveillance is mostly attributable to the new readiness of liberal democracies to monitor their populations. The vast surveillance system uncovered by whistleblower Edward Snowden is maintained and supported by a group of established liberal democracies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and many others. While surveillance programs of authoritarian regimes, installed to monitor and quash political dissidents, are uncontroversially unjust, surveillance operations carried out by liberal democracies possess at least some prima facie legitimacy. They are set up with the stated objective of protecting citizens against terrorism, organized crime and pandemics, which few would deny is the duty of any state. Still, the expansion of large-scale surveillance by democratic governments has widely been perceived as objectionable or at least problematic on account of its harmful effects on both individuals and liberal society at large. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS) aim to facilitate the sharing of personal information and protect privacy. Efforts to enhance privacy management, aligned with established privacy policies, have led to guidelines for integrating transparent notices and meaningful choices within these systems. Although discussions have revolved around the design of privacy-friendly systems that comply with legal requirements, there has been relatively limited philosophical discourse on incorporating the value of privacy into these systems. Exploring the connection between privacy and personal autonomy illuminates the (...) instrumental value of privacy and highlights the importance of intentionally embedding the value of privacy into these systems. To translate the value of privacy into concrete design requirements, this study constructs a values hierarchy consisting of values, norms, and design requirements. After analyzing the relationships between privacy and autonomy and identifying norms, the design requirements translated from the norms associated with the components of personal autonomy are specified at the lowest layer. These requirements include a design to prevent unauthorized access and dark patterns and to provide effective and efficient notices and choices. The findings contribute to expanding the requirements for designing the aspect of privacy as a legal requirement to incorporate the value of privacy into systems. (shrink)

This article argues that the self-management of one’s privacy is impossible due to privacy externalities. Privacy externalities are the negative by-product of the services offered by some data controllers, whereby the price to ‘pay’ for a service includes not just the provision of the user’s own personal data, but also that of others. This term, related to similar concepts from the literature on privacy such as ‘networked privacy’ or ‘data pollution’, is used here to bring to light the incentives and (...) exploitative dynamics behind a phenomenon which, I demonstrate, benefits both the user and the data controller to the detriment of third-party data subjects. Building on these novel elements and on the relevant concepts and examples found in the existing literature, this article draws a comprehensive picture of the phenomenon, and offers two promising paths to address it—better enforcing the principle of data protection by design and by default, and relying on the framework of joint controllership. (shrink)