This post is a summary of an article published at http://philosophynow.org/issues/66/, in 2008. Written by John Goff, creator of http://capcog.com/. The title is above.
In recent years, worries about privacy have increased markedly. Many people have become aware that they are the objects of an increasingly intensive, process of commercial and political information gathering. Concerns about the surveillance of our movements, and about "data-mining", evoke an anxiety that our privacy is rapidly being eroded. It seems that privacy is now something that has to be justified rather than simply taken for granted. This job of justification falls in part to philosophy, to undertake the philosophical consideration of the meaning and significance of privacy. Privacy largely depends on our control over whether or not to disclose information about ourselves. The extent to which you wish to increase my transparency to you will depend on what you wish to know about me and why. However, you may also decide to spy on me without my knowing. An information predator, that is some person or agency who desires to obtain information about others, or to lower their privacy, will attempt to present information gathering as not involving a threat to privacy. This appears to have been one of the tactics behind the introduction of loyalty cards, for example. Given that there has been a large increase in information gathering, the question "why?" arises. This increase, we have been witnessed over the last 25 years or so has hardly been the result of an increase in simple curiosity about others. One possible answer is that this information has value to someone, and the value of this information is both economic and political. Personal information has economic and political value because it increase the predictability of the target individual or group. In a commercial context, it helps to reduce the incertainty about what that individual will buy or might consider buying. In others contexts, it might help to flag up individuals who could pose a political, criminal or social threat. Since that the valuable asset is information and you have made yourself more transparent, and thereby shifted the balance of power in favour of the information predator. But if such information is an asset, then whose asset is it? To whom ought this information belong? Suppose that every time that I leave my house my neighbour records the time I go and the time I return. Suppose also that my neighbour records the age, ethnicity, height, and so on of everyone who lives at my house. Suppose also that this neighbour sells this information, now imagine that some marketing agency wants to buy this information. Everyone might realises some profit from this information, except the source of this information. In other words, I am a source of value but do not share in the financial returns. Furthermore, not only do I not share in any returns, but also incur a loss of privacy. Should I be compensated for such a loss? Do not I have any claim on the profits accruing from this trade in my personal information? In so far as information is about us, we have an interest in it. In so far as we are a source of value, of whatever kind, we also have an interest in this value. A question then arises as to the nature of our claims on this value, and whether we can claim rights in relation to our personal information, including claims on any value, financial or otherwise, arising from it. I might make such claims on political, economic and ethical grounds. Privacy is a primary controlling factor in our relations with others. Whereas we can not control what others know about us and what is said about us, we can not control what be known about us. The effectiveness of personal data protection legislation such as European Union`s directive 95/46, should be assessed in the context of such an imperative. Furthermore, if there is an imperative to gather more and more information and to increasingly define individuals and groups, then individual claims to privacy begin to take on the form of a kind of dissent. A dissent which asserts not just a right to opacity, but also to a subjectivity that is neither defined by the information held about us nor accessible through it. The game of the predators of information is complex, but it has an overriding function: to define individuals according to information profiles so that they become increasingly predictable and malleable. The question of whether individual autonomy is thereby undermined, becomes a ethical question. Privacy, opacity, becomes a defence of subjectivity, of personal identity. What is their own is their being, presence, consciousness. A claim to privacy in which subjectivity prospers takes the form of dissent, life lived in opacity, beyond deliberate scrutiny. It is to aim to put ourselves beyond the information that is supposed to define us. Laying claim to the value bound up in one`s personal information may also be a form of dissent. Controlling information in this fashion, as an asset, may not only help us preserve our subjectivity, but also ground our power as citizens in the age of information, by us owning our own stake in its primary resource.
