Next week, the new term begins and I’ll be teaching an undergraduate philosophy course called, “Technology, Privacy, and the Law.” The first order of business will be to explain why thinking critically about privacy—determining what it is, deciding when it should be protected, and pinpointing how it ought to be safeguarded—means doing philosophy. Given the practical stakes of these issues, you might not realize that getting into them involves philosophical thinking. But if you’ve got a principled bone to pick with corporate, peer, or governmental surveillance, or if you’ve good reasons for being displeased with the activists who are taking stands against it, you’ve got your philosopher’s cap on.
Not too long ago, a privacy course in the humanities would be of limited interest. Many students were predisposed to believe that privacy issues mostly concerned bad things that happened to indiscreet blabbermouths or anxiety experienced by folks with skeletons in the closet—you know, people with something to hide.
But since privacy became a headline-grabbing issue, things have changed. Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA activity, fast-moving developments in surveillance and online information and communication technology, potent advances in data storage and analysis, and the emergence of powerful data brokers have all played a part in making privacy a matter of great daily concern for everyone. Students are especially interested in what the transition to a big data society riddled with privacy challenges means for them personally, civically, and professionally.
Philosophy needs to play a leading role in privacy education at because, at its core, privacy is an inherently philosophical issue. Yes, privacy concerns social norms, design choices, and legal procedures. But many of the thorny privacy debates revolve around normative disputes—disputes about the correct way to do things, like how to properly govern and treat each other fairly. Whereas lots of other disciplines specialize in obtaining and presenting empirical facts, normative claims are prime philosophical territory.
Once you really get deep into a privacy controversy, you find ideas related to “privacy harms” and “privacy rights” get invoked. But what, exactly, is a privacy harm? Is it something that can be measured? Is it a subjective or objective state? Can it exist in cases where nobody is psychologically traumatized or has their reputation compromised?
The idea of rights is even trickier. If rights exist, where do they come from, why aren’t they universally championed, and how absolute must they be? Can privacy rights be trumped by other goods society deems important? What about competing claims made in the same of security, individual responsibility, pluralism, and the promotion of viable markets that enhance growth and provide consumers with desired products and services?
I’m not interested per se in the answers my students give to these questions. After all, I’m their professor, not their dad. To do my job well, I’ve got to be open to all carefully considered perspectives that are underwritten by rational and rigorous exploration. Analyzing when normative arguments are properly justified and why normative conflicts arise are two of the things philosophy does best, and I just want my students to do their best when being philosophical.
There’s another reason why privacy is an inherently philosophical issue. As leading principals argue, the concepts used to discuss matters of both ‘private’ and ‘public’ concern are not always adequate for addressing the nuanced tensions that arise when technology disrupts social and institutional norms. In some cases, appeals to the very concept of ‘privacy’ may actually impede debate and get in the way of discovering productive solutions. In numerous articles, law professor Woodrow Hartzog and I have argued that the notion of ‘obscurity’ is preferable on both intellectual and practical grounds. This certainty isn’t the only new concept that’s needed to shake up the privacy lexicon.
While privacy education requires philosophical insight, relevant philosophical analysis must be applied to constantly shifting technological, social, legal, and political conditions. To try to keep pace, I’ve got great guest-speakers lined up—folks with different views who come from different fields and different professions. With their permission, in later posts I’ll fill you in what on they have to say. Until then, do me a favor. The next time someone rolls their eyes when philosophy is mentioned, let them know why it matters more than they think.
