Privacy and the Threat to the Self

In the wake of continuing revelations of government spying programs and the recent Supreme Court ruling on DNA collection – both of which push the generally accepted boundaries against state intrusion on the person — the issue of privacy is foremost on the public mind. The frequent mantra, heard from both media commentators and government officials, is that we face a “trade-off” between safety and convenience on one hand and privacy on the other. We just need, we are told, to find the right balance.

This way of framing the issue makes sense if you understand privacy solely as a political or legal concept. And its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.

What makes your thoughts your thoughts? One answer is that you have what philosophers sometimes call “privileged access” to them. This means at least two things. First, you access them in a way I can’t. Even if I could walk a mile in your shoes, I can’t know what you feel in the same way you can: you see it from the inside so to speak. Second, you can, at least sometimes, control what I know about your thoughts. You can hide your true feelings from me, or let me have the key to your heart.

The idea that the mind is essentially private is a central element of the Cartesian concept of the self — a concept that has been largely abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Descartes not only held that my thoughts were private, he took them to be transparent — all thoughts were conscious. Freud cured us of that. Descartes also thought that the only way to account for my special access to my thoughts was to take thoughts to be made out of a different sort of stuff than my body — to take our minds, in short, to be non-physical, distinct from the brain. Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have convinced many of us otherwise.

But while Descartes’s overall view has been rightly rejected, there is something profoundly right about the connection between privacy and the self, something that recent events should cause us to appreciate. What is right about it, in my view, is that to be an autonomous person is to be capable of having privileged access (in the two senses defined above) to information about your psychological profile — your hopes, dreams, beliefs and fears. A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.

To get a sense of what I mean, imagine that I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings — I could know about them in as much detail as you know about them yourself — and further, that you could not, in any way, control my access. You don’t, in other words, share your thoughts with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you, what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do.  And that means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent control what you do.

That is the political worry about the loss of privacy: it threatens  a loss of freedom. And the worry, of course, is not merely theoretical. Targeted ad programs, like Google’s, which track your Internet searches for the purpose of sending you ads that reflect your interests can create deeply complex psychological profiles — especially when one conducts searches for emotional or personal advice information: Am I gay? What is terrorism? What is atheism? If the government or some entity should request the identity of the person making these searches for national security purposes, we’d be on the way to having a real-world version of our thought experiment.

But the loss of privacy doesn’t just threaten political freedom. Return for a moment to our thought experiment where I telepathically know all your thoughts whether you like it or not  From my perspective, the perspective of the knower — your existence as a distinct person would begin to shrink. Our relationship would be so lopsided that there might cease to be, at least to me, anything subjective about you. As I learn what reactions you will have to stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized

The connection between a loss of privacy and dehumanization is of course, a well-known and ancient fact, and one for which we don’t need to appeal to science fiction to illustrate. It is employed the world over in every prison and detention camp. It is at the root of interrogation techniques that begin by stripping a person literally and figuratively of everything they own. Our thought experiment merely shows us the logical endgame. Prisoners might hide their resentment, or bravely resist torture (at least for a time) but when we lose the very capacity to have privileged access to our psychological information — the capacity for self-knowledge, so to speak, we literally lose our selves.

In making the connection between autonomous personhood and the privacy of thought in this way, we needn’t rely on a Cartesian view of the mind. The connection isn’t metaphysical. It is a presupposition of understanding and communicating with one another. Mutual communication — as opposed to, say, eavesdropping — is about sharing. When communicating freely in this way, we see one another as subjects, as persons whose thoughts are our own — thoughts to which we have privileged access and are attempting to communicate. This assumption might be mistaken in particular cases of course. But it is hard to make sense of mutual, open communication without it. This is not a fact that requires us to think that the mind is non-physical. But it does tell us that our concept of psychological privacy and one centrally important notion of personhood — that of an autonomous person — are deeply linked.

John Locke, who thought about all these ideas, described personhood in general as a forensic concept. By this, he meant that it was an idea with a legal purpose — and it is. We use it to decide who can be held responsible, and who has rights that the state should not violate. But the concept of an autonomous person has an additional role. It matters because it is the idea we use when we think of ourselves as just that — as developed adult selves. So while privacy, too, is a legal concept, its roots are deeply intertwined with the purposes and point of the more basic concept of having a self. And that in turn raises all sorts of questions worth asking. Some of these are philosophical and psychological: including the limits of, and underlying explanation for, the privacy of the mental. But others should get us to think about how our technologies are themselves changing our ways of thinking about the self.

However we resolve these issues, we would do well to keep the connections between self, personhood and privacy in mind as we chew over the recent revelations about governmental access to Big Data. The underlying issue is not simply a matter of balancing convenience and liberty. To the extent we risk the loss of privacy we risk, in a very real sense, the loss of our very status as subjective, autonomous persons.

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Michael P. Lynch is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of “In Praise of Reason” and “Truth as One and Many.” He is at work on a new book, “Prisoners of Babel: Knowledge in the Datasphere.” Twitter @Plural_truth.