Abstract
Questions of privacy have become particularly salient in recent years due, in part, to information-gathering initiatives precipitated by the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, increasing power of surveillance and computing technologies, and massive data collection about individuals for commercial purposes. While privacy is not new to the philosophical and legal literature, there is much to say about the nature and value of privacy. My focus here is on the nature of informational privacy. I argue that the predominant accounts of privacy are unsatisfactory and offer an alternative: for a person to have informational privacy is for there to be limits on the particularized judgments that others are able to reasonably make about that person.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Note any such belief will require inference, if only about the reliability of our belief-forming mechanisms; the difference I refer to here is one of degree. Nonetheless, some beliefs require more inference than others, and here I wish to pick out those beliefs that require a substantial degree of inference. The point I wish to make is just that privacy may continue to decrease as judgments accrue; the whole picture of P’s privacy is not complete once observations are made.
One could argue that falsehoods cannot decrease privacy because only true propositions constitute information. See Floridi (2004, p. 197). Q’s hearing a falsehood about P imparts no information, and hence P’s informational privacy cannot decrease. But information need not be true. James Fetzer maintains that for a proposition to constitute information, it need only be well-formed and meaningful Fetzer (2004, pp. 224–225). Even if it were correct that information must be true, we would still need a concept to apply to well-formed and meaningful propositions that are either untrue or whose truth is unknown (Fetzer suggests ‘information,’), and we would have to investigate whether such propositions are relevant to privacy. Concluding that privacy depends only upon truths on the grounds that information is by definition true would assume the answer to the question at hand—namely, whether falsehoods are relevant to personal privacy.
See Christensen (1997) for a discussion of the conceptual difficulties regarding what it means for evidence to confirm a hypothesis relative to a set of background propositions.
Computer scientist LaTanya Sweeney was able to use summaries of hospital visits with explicit identifying information redacted in combination with voting records to identify patients, including the governor of Massachusetts. Analyzing 1990 census data, Sweeney determined that three pieces of information (postal code, birth date, and sex) uniquely identify 87 percent of people in the United States; city, birth date, and sex can uniquely identify 53 percent; county, birth date, and sex can uniquely identify 18 percent. Sweeney (2000). In a widely publicized case, America Online released data regarding user searches, with ‘personal’ information redacted and unique numbers assigned to each. Because the queries often related to users’ lives, they were far from anonymous, and New York Times reporters tracked one such user down for an interview. Barbaro and Zeller (2006). See also Narayanan and Shmatikov (2008).
Put another way, ‘making a particularized judgment about’ is referentially transparent. We can substitute ‘P’ and ‘the author of the journal’ without altering the truth value of ‘Q made a particularized judgment about P, viz., that P has ennui.’ To use a familiar example, Q might make a particularized judgment about Cicero, viz., that he is a gifted writer. Q has likewise made such a judgment about Tully, even though Q does not know Tully and Cicero are the same person. Of course, Q does not believe that Tully is a gifted writer.
References
Allen, Anita. 1988. Uneasy access: Privacy for women in a free society. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield.
Barbaro, Michael and Tom Zeller Jr. 2006. A face is exposed for AOL searcher no. 4417749. New York Times, August 9.
Beardsley, Elizabeth. 1971. Privacy, autonomy, and selective disclosure. In NOMOS XIII: Privacy, ed. J. Roland Pennock, and John W. Chapman, 65–70. New York: Atherton Press.
Christensen, David. 1997. What is relative confirmation? Noûs 31: 370–384.
DeCew, Judith. 1997. In pursuit of privacy: Law, ethics, and the rise of technology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Fetzer, James. 2004. Information: Does it have to be true? Minds and Machines 14: 223–229.
Floridi, Luciano. 2004. Outline of a theory of strongly semantic information. Minds and Machines 14: 197–221.
Fried, Charles. 1984. Privacy [a moral analysis]. In Philosophical dimensions of privacy, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman, 203–222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gavison, Ruth. 1984. Privacy and the limits of law. In Philosophical dimensions of privacy, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman, 346–402. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gross, Hyman. 1971. Privacy and autonomy. In NOMOS XIII: Privacy, ed. J. Roland Pennock, and John W. Chapman, 169–181. New York: Atherton Press.
Inness, Julie. 1992. Privacy, intimacy, and isolation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Moore, Adam. 2010. Privacy rights: Moral and legal foundations. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Narayanan, Arvind and Vitaly Shmatikov. 2008. Robust de-anonymization of large sparse datasets. Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: 111–122.
Ohm, Paul. 2009. Broken promises of privacy: Responding to the surprising failure of anonymization. UCLA Law Review 57: 1701–1777.
Parent, W.A. 1983. Privacy, morality, and the law. Philosophy and Public Affairs 12: 269–288.
Pick, Daniel. 1989. Faces of degeneration: A European disorder, c.1848-c.1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Posner, Richard. 2006. Not a suicide pact: The constitution in a time of national emergency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Powers, Madison. 1996. A cognitive access definition of privacy. Law and Philosophy 15: 369–386.
Rachels, James. 1975. Why privacy is important. Philosophy and Public Affairs 2: 323–333.
Rubel, Alan. 2007. Claims to privacy and the distributed value view. San Diego Law Review 44: 921–956.
Solove, Daniel. 2002. Conceptualizing privacy. California Law Review 90: 1087–1155.
Sweeney, Latanya. 2000. Uniqueness of simple demographics in the U.S. population. Laboratory for International Data Privacy, Working Paper LIDAP-WP4.
Tokson, Matthew. 2011. Automation and the fourth amendment. Iowa Law Review 96: 581–647.
Van Den Haag, Ernest. 1971. On privacy. In NOMOS XIII: Privacy, ed. J. Roland Pennock, and John W. Chapman, 149–168. New York: Atherton Press.
Westin, Alan. 1967. Privacy and freedom. New York: Atheneum.
Young, Robert. 1970. Mind, brain and adaptation in the nineteenth century: Cerebral localization and its biological context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Acknowledgments
I very much appreciate the many helpful comments I’ve received from Claudia Card, Robert Streiffer, Russ Shafer Landau, Harry Brighouse, Victoria Nourse, Fred Harrington, Madison Powers, and Tom Beauchamp; audiences at the University of Wisconsin, University at Albany, and Georgetown University; and the paper’s anonymous referees.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rubel, A. The Particularized Judgment Account of Privacy. Res Publica 17, 275–290 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9160-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9160-4