Privacy (eBook)

Steven M. Cahn, Carissa Veliz (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
208 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-119-93257-4 (ISBN)

Infos

An incisive compendium of philosophical literature on privacy, part of the acclaimed Wiley-Blackwell Readings in Philosophy series

Companies collect and share much of your daily life, from your location and search history, to your likes, habits, and relationships. As more and more of our personal data is collected, analyzed, and distributed, we need to think carefully about what we might be losing when we give up our privacy.

Privacy is a thought-provoking collection of philosophical essays on privacy, offering deep insights into the nature of privacy, its value, and the consequences of its loss. Bringing together both classic and contemporary work, this timely volume explores the theories, issues, debates, and applications of the philosophical study of privacy. The essays address concealment and exposure, the liberal value of privacy, privacy in social media, privacy rights and public information, privacy and the limits of law, and more.

• Highlights the work of emerging thinkers and leaders in the subject
• Presents work from philosophers such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ruth Gavison, Thomas Scanlon, W. A. Parent, and Thomas Nagel
• Explores privacy in contexts including governance, law, ethics, political philosophy, and public policy
• Discusses data collection, online tracking, digital surveillance, and other contemporary privacy issues

Edited by award-winning privacy specialist Carissa Véliz and renowned philosopher and author Steven Cahn, Privacy is a must-read anthology for philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on digital and applied ethics, philosophy, media studies, communications, computer science, engineering, and sociology.

STEVEN M. CAHN is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he taught academic ethics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of education. He has authored or edited 70 books, including Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia, Religion Within Reason, and Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies. ?He is the series editor of Wiley-Blackwell Readings in Philosophy.

CARISSA VÉLIZ is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy, by the International Association of Computing and Philosophy. She is the author of Privacy Is Power and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics.

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An incisive compendium of philosophical literature on privacy, part of the acclaimed Wiley-Blackwell Readings in Philosophy series Companies collect and share much of your daily life, from your location and search history, to your likes, habits, and relationships. As more and more of our personal data is collected, analyzed, and distributed, we need to think carefully about what we might be losing when we give up our privacy. Privacy is a thought-provoking collection of philosophical essays on privacy, offering deep insights into the nature of privacy, its value, and the consequences of its loss. Bringing together both classic and contemporary work, this timely volume explores the theories, issues, debates, and applications of the philosophical study of privacy. The essays address concealment and exposure, the liberal value of privacy, privacy in social media, privacy rights and public information, privacy and the limits of law, and more. Highlights the work of emerging thinkers and leaders in the subject Presents work from philosophers such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ruth Gavison, Thomas Scanlon, W. A. Parent, and Thomas Nagel Explores privacy in contexts including governance, law, ethics, political philosophy, and public policy Discusses data collection, online tracking, digital surveillance, and other contemporary privacy issues Edited by award-winning privacy specialist Carissa V liz and renowned philosopher and author Steven Cahn, Privacy is a must-read anthology for philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on digital and applied ethics, philosophy, media studies, communications, computer science, engineering, and sociology.

Textauszug

2
Thomson on Privacy

Thomas Scanlon

Judith Thomson’s paper presents a strong challenge to what I take to be the common‐sense view of privacy. I have been moved by her trenchant arguments on a number of points, but basic differences between us remain.

I want to set out here my reasons for finding her account of privacy unsatisfactory, and to indicate the form that I think a more adequate theory would take. Thomson denies that there is such a thing as the right to privacy. In her view there is a cluster of diverse rights which may be called rights of privacy, but these rights lack a common foundation. Each of them is in fact a right of some other kind, e.g. a right of ownership, and its basis as a right is therefore to be found elsewhere than in a unified account of the notion of privacy.

I agree with Thomson that the rights whose violation strikes us as invasion of privacy are many and diverse, and that these rights do not derive from any single overarching right to privacy. I hold, however, that these rights have a common foundation in the special interests that we have in being able to be free from certain kinds of intrusions. The most obvious examples of such offensive intrusions involve observation of our bodies, our behavior or our interactions with other people (or overhearings of the last two), but while these are central they do not exhaust the field. The first element in an adequate account of privacy would be a general account of these interests. The second element would be an account of the structure and foundation of those conventional norms that are erected to secure and protect these interests, norms specifying when, where, and in what ways we may and may not be observed, listened to, questioned, and in other ways kept track of.

These norms vary considerably in explicitness and force. At one extreme are vague and informal understandings, such as those governing the scrutiny of others in public places and the degree to which it is permissible to listen to, watch, and follow them. Such understandings are rarely formulated as explicit rules. In making the judgment that a person who follows us and stares at us as we sit on a park bench “behaves badly” we appeal not to set formulae but to direct reasoning about what the most reasonable way would be to accommodate the interests of people involved in situations of this type. Other norms of privacy, however, take the form of quite explicit social rules, e.g. rules against walking uninvited into other people’s rooms, going through other people’s drawers or suitcases, etc. Some of these rules come to be expressed as laws (or perhaps have their origin in law), such as the laws against tampering with people’s mail or tapping their telephones.

In what follows I shall refer to these laws and conventions as defining a “zone” or “territory.” Obviously these terms cannot be understood merely in a spatial sense. For one thing, as Thomson’s example of the quarreling couple shows, whether a given observation or attempt to observe intrudes into my zone may depend not only on the locations of observer and observed but also on the means used. Furthermore, in other cases there may be no physical boundary involved at all. Consider, for example, the conventional limitations on the questions it is polite to ask in a social situation in which it would be awkward for a person to refuse to answer, or the restrictions, usually more explicit, on the questions which an official may use his special authority to coerce people into answering. In the latter case a right is involved, in the former probably not, but in both cases we have a conventional or legal boundary whose crossing invades privacy.

The clearest cases of acts which are wrong because they are invasions of privacy involve both a violation of some norm of privacy and interference with one of the central interests in not being seen, overheard, etc., which underlie these norms. Both these elements are present, for example, in the case described at the beginning of Thomson’s article. When the police train their looking and listening devices on Smith’s house they breach a convention (probably a law) forbidding such observations (I assume they lack special authority to do what they are doing). They also interfere with Smith’s interest in being able to assume that while he is in his house with the shades drawn he is unobserved. Given that this is so, it is false to say, as Thomson’s police do, that he has been let alone. But in order to explain why a right of Smith’s has been violated we needn’t invoke some general “right to be let alone”; we have the fact that his conventionally defined zone of privacy has been invaded. We are most likely to say that such invasions violate rights when, as in this case, the norm in question is a law, or at least an explicit and serious social rule. (Perhaps we would also say this when we think that the interest infringed is so important that it ought to be protected by such a law or rule even though it is not.) But where the norm breached is only a relatively vague customary understanding, and the interest in question is relatively trivial, we are more likely to say with Thomson that the agent “behaved badly” but that no right was infringed.

An act which transgresses a clear rule or law can be an invasion of privacy (and sometimes a violation of a right) even if no observation or overhearing actually results. If you press personal questions on me in a situation in which this is conventionally forbidden, I can always refuse to answer. But the fact that no information is revealed does not remove the violation, which remains just as does the analogous violation when you peek through my bathroom window but fail to see me because I have taken some mildly inconvenient evasive action. The purpose of the relevant conventions in both cases is to enable us to have our privacy without these inconveniences. The interests to which an account of privacy must refer thus include, in addition to specific interests in not being seen, overheard, etc., broader interests in having a zone of privacy in which we can carry out our activities without the necessity of being continually alert for possible observers, listeners, etc. Social rules defining such a zone by specifying when and where certain forms of observation are ruled out are thus an obvious efficiency; they decrease the need for watchfulness and restraint both on the part of those who wish not to be observed and on the part of those who want to respect these wishes. These rules are conventional in one important sense: our zone of privacy could be defined in many different ways; what matters most is that some system of limits to observation should be generally understood and observed.

I believe that this outline of a theory of privacy provides a basis for handling many of Thomson’s examples, e.g. that of the quarreling couple. It also enables us to explain why ownership, while sometimes relevant to questions of privacy, does not have the importance Thomson claims for it. Suppose someone used Thomson’s X‐ray device to examine an object in my safe. It seems to me clear that the right which is violated in such a case does not depend on my owning the object examined. Suppose it is your object which you have left in my care; suppose that it is someone else’s which I have picked up by mistake thinking it mine; suppose there is no object in the safe at all, and the person looking just wanted to see whether I had anything there or not. None of these possibilities removes the wrongfulness of the intrusion; there is a right which is violated in all these cases, and it is my right whether or not the object is mine. Now it may be said that ownership is still relevant here because it matters that the safe is my safe. This is partly right; our system of conventions is such that the fact that I own the safe normally means that it is part of my zone of privacy. (But not always. If I loan the safe to you and while it is in your house someone uses a Thomson device to look into it, it is likely that no right of mine will have been violated.) What is crucial here is the conventional boundary and not the fact of ownership itself. We could have conventions in which ownership was even less relevant than it is now. Suppose, for example, that each person was assigned a plot in the common field to use as a place to bury valuables. Then anyone who used a Thomson device on my plot without my consent and without special authority would violate a right of mine, and would do so even if all he discovered was that I didn’t have anything buried there. But I don’t own the plot. I can’t sell it; I can’t build on it; perhaps I can’t even use it for any other purpose. All that is crucial to the example is that it is part of my conventional zone of privacy. Our present conventions are not like this limiting case. For us, ownership is relevant in determining the boundaries of our zone of privacy, but its relevance is determined by norms whose basis lies in our interest in privacy, not in the notion of ownership.

A similar analysis applies to Thomson’s somewhat odd subway‐map case. Clearly, if I obscure the map on the wall of the subway by holding my coat in front of it, then no right of mine is violated if you use an X‐ray device to look through my coat to see how to get where you want to go. The reason here is that I do not turn the wall of the subway into “my territory” by putting my coat in front of it. If, however, I steal the map and put it in my pocket or in my...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.1.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• ISBN-10: 1-119-93257-2 / 1119932572
• ISBN-13: 978-1-119-93257-4 / 9781119932574