Is All Privacy Informational Privacy?

Cameron is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Michigan. His interests are wide ranging, but he works primarily in normative ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and legal philosophy.

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Talk: Is All Privacy Informational Privacy?

Abstract: Orthodoxy in the study of privacy holds that privacy comes in different modalities or dimensions. The three most commonly distinguished modalities are: informational, decisional, and physical/local. Though concerns that arise under the ambit of each of these dimensions are all said to involve privacy, they are also thought to be sufficiently distinct from each other to require separate treatment. Scholars have struggled to square the supposed unity of these plurality of concerns as privacy-implicating, with their seeming difference. In this paper, I ask whether decisional and local privacy are really best thought of as characterizing non-informational concerns that nevertheless are properly understood as being concerned with privacy. I argue that the answer should be a qualified "No." By comparing a weak and a strong version of the thesis that all privacy is informational privacy, I argue that we have both conceptual/theoretical and moral/normative reasons to think that talk of decisional and local privacy distorts our thinking about privacy, rather than leading to a more refined understanding.