Privacy, the slippery subject 

Privacy is a timely subject for philosophical study. But it is also a vexatious puzzle to solve. The term suffers from a chronic slipperiness, an equivocal meaning that makes it difficult for academics to close a fist around it. The challenge is well known to anyone who has tried to study the topic, codify it, advocate for it, or translate it into a reliable set of laws. Privacy seems like a clear idea from a distance, but it shimmers and divides itself when one examines it closely, like a pixelated image best seen at a low resolution. In this way, it fits neatly into the phrase that St. Augustine once used to describe time: ‘If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” When a single word reaches for the inexpressible, it will always come apart under scrutiny. This is usually a sign that some complex reality lingers behind it. The dangers of privacy breaches correspond more to implicit anxieties than they do to concrete fears, and anxiety refers to the domain of existential dangers, not merely to concrete ones.

Privacy is not a universal idea. It’s primarily a Western one, and it has many synonyms that multiply its meanings. It can mean solitude, or secrecy, or even sacredness. It means to make space for intimacy, or vulnerability, or heated confrontation. It is not consistently valued or even recognized across different times and societies. In this way, it is somewhat unlike the virtues we extol in our iconic cultural cannons. Privacy is not a virtue per se, but perhaps virtue-adjacent, a relative good, an instrument of circumstance that affords something necessary for the person who exercises it. We may not need it all the time, but sometimes we need it desperately, and it helps maintain some essential aspect of our humanity. In the following sections of this monograph we shall attempt a philosophical inquiry about this essential aspect, and about the relationship between privacy and the human being. We will explore what privacy truly provides us, why it matters, what it implies about the human spirit, and therefore what is jeopardized when privacy is threatened.

At this point, it is important to note that this monograph, which is written jointly by a former policy advisor and a cognitive scientist, will not be scholarly in a classical sense. It will not attempt a comprehensive survey of privacy literature or its history, nor will it attempt a thoroughly systematic account of its features. The urgency of the topic demands a more focused and energetic approach. Our goal is to not forsake the forest for the trees; we are trying to treat our subject with a view to its wholeness, not through a disassembly of its component parts. Some will undoubtedly find this objectionable and cast doubt on its credibility. We cannot concern ourselves too much with this possibility, but simply speak into the intuition of our shared humanity, and hope that the argument can resonate on its own merits. 

One and many in human identity 

Historically, “privacy” in the West was invoked when distinguishing someone’s personal activities from those of his persona or public office. Intuitively, it has something to do with a multiplicity in human identity, the way we change our colours to match the foliage, and assume different characters on different stages. A person plays in many arenas. Those arenas augment the identity of the human agent, and create different versions of him that suit him to different settings. Privacy, as we will propose, allows the human being to subsist in these different latitudes, and accords him a spaciousness to be multiple in the ways he must naturally be. By being safely multiple, he can somehow also be unified, i.e., he can relate consciously to the different arenas of his life, give each its due, and coexist harmoniously between them. This sounds like a paradox of course, but that is precisely what human beings are. When we engage discreetly with the various roles, the personae, that orbit a person’s life, we become more conscious of the force that vectors them from the centre. We can then – to use an old Jungian metaphor – develop a deeper relationship with that mysterious sun that sits in the center of the solar system, whose gravity invisibly draws us toward a greater sense of wholeness. 

This is all well and good, one might say, but it’s already sounding abstruse. What does all this psychology have to do with privacy as such, the common sense of its meaning? It is a fair question, and we must never stray too far from it. But before we can possibly provide a meaningful account of privacy, we must understand certain things about the human being who needs it. What does privacy really protect? 

The first thing we might observe is that the human being is multivocal. He speaks in different voices, into different ears, and he must be able to hear himself in order to tune himself, much like the musician that plays before a crowd. Human beings are social creatures, we like to say. We borrow each other’s ears for this tuning, and we rely on the chambers of our relationships to bring coherence to our identities. Our identities become confused when our voice is mistaken, spoken into the wrong chamber, overheard at the wrong time, abstracted from its body and tone, or when our speech is uprooted from its intended meaning and pragmatic context. There is a relativity to each person that often goes unnoticed by anyone except for him. This relativity is not pathological, but exists insofar as we require different environments to play host to different aspects of us. The whole of us that prevails above or between these aspects – the “ineffable totality” as Jung once called it – is a much-debated subject in philosophy and psychology, and it remains beyond our naming. It suffices to say here that the person is not the same as a performer as he is as a father, or as a lover, or as a customer. Each kind of relationship has its own hermeneutics, its own subtle body of nuance and interpretation. 

At first blush, perhaps privacy has something to do with this paradoxical process of being both single and multiple. Perhaps it allows the person to make sense of himself by creating discreet space for each of these relationships, so he can hear his own voice in each of these niches, through those discerning, proportionately attuned ears that match to the identity of a given role, adapted to a certain domain of life. Perhaps privacy provides him to be known in the right way by being heard by the right ear, thereby perceived through the right relational context. This grants him an inner space of resonance, but it also allows him to participate fully in the culture around him; after all, a musician can play harmoniously with others only if he carries a coherent tune, can play a repertoire of melodies, and knows how to fit himself into the orchestra. 

Further sections will determine whether this idea of privacy can give us sufficient traction with our subject. If it bears out, we shall see that the necessity of privacy is, in one sense, remarkably self-evident. We live in and live through the relationships that unfold us, that adapt us to the world. We cannot adapt properly if these relations are in disarray. To be harmoniously related, the arenas of our agency need some ironic separation between them, a separation that must be guarded and stage managed, given over to that centripetal force, the sun, the elusive “I” we call a Self. Privacy has something to do with the elegance and excellence (or the arete, as the Greeks would say) of this management, the capacity to maintain the multiplicity between our identities, but to find a throughline that allows both individuation (a separateness from the world around us), and participation (a concert with the world around us). By the best cognitive science we now have available to us, it is evident that both of these dimensions are essential for the human being to cultivate a meaningful life and sense of home, in himself and in the cosmos.  

We can already see how, if we are not careful – or indeed become excessively careful – a topic as unassuming as privacy can become a very ponderous existential meditation. This Socratic tendency (which policy makers understandable avoid) is essential for philosophical inquiry. But it must also be used judiciously, and we will defer it to later sections. By now, however, you can anticipate the nature of the argument we will make in this monograph: that the importance of privacy is ultimately relational. That is, any relevant account of its value is best understood through a relational ontology, and a relational account of humanity itself. This is simply another way of saying that we are not monolithic, autonomous, self-contained entities. Personhood, that quality which distinguishes the human being, in virtue of which he is something more than mere impulse or instinct, is a dynamic alloy of the relationships that shape him. These include relationships with other people, with the world at large, and also with himself. Privacy helps to preserve the integrity and intimacy of every kind of relationship, and thereby preserve the integrity of identities that they hold intact. That doesn’t mean protecting the content of a given identity, but preserving the conditions in which it can create and recreate itself, be known to others, and thereby be most fully known to itself. It allows the human agent to unfold, to realize and be realized, to pursue his uniquely human capacity for self-knowledge and his transcendence. Privacy performs an indispensable role in affording these goals, and therefore maintaining his humanity. 

The times they are a-changin’ 

This relationship between privacy, identity and personal integrity is subtly present in the political treatments of our topic. In the latter half of the twentieth century, policy scholars characterized privacy as democratic value, a protection against gratuitous voyeurism by invasive governments that wanted to monitor the lives of their subjects. Rights to privacy therefore referred to the sovereignty of the person and dignity of his reputation, which could be disrupted if the different areas of his life were denuded in the wrong ways. Alan Westin, who was one of the pioneers of contemporary privacy scholarship, noted that totalitarian regimes have traditionally relied on a high degree of secrecy for the state and publicity for personal lives, while effective democracies rely on publicity for the state and secrecy for individual lives. Hence, ideas about the “freedom of public information” and “protection of personal privacy” are often linked, and continue to share similar legislative frameworks and regulators. Here too there is an attempt, albeit in the civic sense, to equilibrate these two aspects of life, the conditions that conduce both individuation and participation. The guiding value is difficult to define, although it is generally equated with free societies, and therefore with the idea of freedom itself – and with it, ideas of autonomy, self-determination, and individual agency. These ideas are not easily separated of course, and easily become conflated in the conceptual morass that one finds in public policy in general (especially when it is steered by the blandishments of political actors). But one gets the sense that, though they might lack a philosophical rigour, this tangle of meanings invoked by the term “privacy” are not without some genuine and important relationship, if only we could define it adequately.  

With the advent of smart technology, the meaning of privacy has changed paradigmatically. It seems quaint now that we once thought of privacy as drawing curtains over the window at night, or leaving the dinner table to take a phone call in an empty room. It meant the ability to create solitude, spaces of containment where a person could undress himself, or his pretenses, without being perceived. The threats to privacy were more visible, or at least imaginable, largely because the information being protected was known to the person protecting it and so was its means of transmission. Now, of course, neither are very straightforward. The prying eyes don’t just observe us from the outside in, but now also from the inside out. They have become part of the ecology of our digital space, proverbial flies poised on the inner wall of our attention, hovering over the extended mind that images our thinking through the devices we carry in our pockets – or stuck to our palms. 

The source of the witnessing eye is not the only thing that has changed. The nature of the information being witnessed has fanned out dramatically, and it has changed it at least three ways: by source, by quantity, and by quality. The sources of information now don’t come from a shortlist of conventional custodians – governments, homes, banks, hospitals, schools, etc. – but through a vast and disarrayed network of entities that access us through services we use. We now give personal information when buying movie tickets or making restaurant reservations, taking taxis or trains, meeting prospective lovers, or listening to our libraries of music. App developers and their service providers collect our data profusely, and store it in distant repositories that are impossible to tally. Perhaps for this reason, the legal language around the treatment of personal information has shifted over the years from mere “protection” to issues of “custody,” “control,” and “ownership.” 

But even the most ardent proponents of privacy must admit that these objectives are somewhat fantastical. The digital landscape is now so dispersed that this information can exist virtually everywhere, and it would be impossible for any person to track down the scenes of his virtual sojourns, the various places where he has left traces of himself. It would be much like trying to recollect all of the atoms that have once been part of your body, or retrieve all the garbage you’ve produced, even while it is being collected and aggregated with everyone else’s and transported to goodness knows where.  

The varieties of information that can be formulated about a person have also multiplied, become more nuanced, and become easier to trade and exchange. Our services do not just pick up financial or social security information (which traditionally concern identity theft) or even salacious details about our vices (which traditionally concern reputational damage) but also microscopic details about our daily habits and dispositions. It is well known now that these details can be inferred from the data collected by our devices. Private companies are now duly treated with as much suspicion as governments because they are privy to us on a level that no one else is, and by some definition of the term, could be said to “know” us better than we know ourselves. App providers deploy programs that can manage our budgets, monitor our sleep, track our diets, source our reconnaissance, and help us find love and sex. And of course the information about us can now reveal microscopic details about our movements of our footsteps, our eyes, our fingertips, and our heart rates. They can infer our skills, tastes, dreams, appetites, apprehensions, desires, fears, beliefs and ideological affiliations. Our messaging history reveals the intimate content of our relationships. Our scrolling, searching and browsing histories can reveal the very substance of our attention, something so cognitively primordial that it is largely unconscious to us, and if revealed in anything but the most solitary, secret, and sacred manner, would make most of us curdle with shame. Anyone who has ever taken a detailed psychometric test has felt a tiny sample of this experience. We can scarcely imagine the level of exposure that looms over the landscape of big tech and its “big data.” 

The level of detail that is now digitally available about a person also vitiates the distinction that held the old model of privacy intact, i.e. the distinction between public office and personal behaviour. It this much was not already obvious, it became painfully so during COVID-19, when many people shifted to remote work and employers deployed advanced software to ensure the diligence of their worker bees. These programs could photograph employees with their laptop cameras, note how long they stepped away to the bathroom, track how fast their keystrokes moved, how long they lingered on certain web pages. These programs became controversial of course, and posed a vexing public policy dilemma because of how they utterly eviscerated the erstwhile distinction between “business information” and “personal information.” After all, if you measure the speed of someone’s typing, track their reading, analyze the way they revised a working draft, monitor the patterns of their productivity, and situate this against certain behavioural models, you can come up with a penetrating profile of an individual’s intelligence, competence, and even perhaps personality type. This does not fit neatly into the domain of professional identity, of course, but instead collapses the boundaries that separate a person’s identities, removing the space between them, and significantly disrupting the equilibrium we discussed in the previous section, effectively crushing the corridor that allows a person to move coherently from one identity to another. Even if the model is flawed (as it inevitably will be) it could be used by an employer to evaluate the person in a very penetrative manner, and invade their home in ways far subtler than the old-fashioned phone tapping and mail interception of government surveillance that we feared in the days of yore. 

What is at stake? 

Perhaps the most unnerving possible outcome of such precented technology is this: that it will naturalize the use of such modelling as a fitting means of evaluating human beings. We noted above that tech companies, by some definition, could be said to know us better than we know ourselves. But what kind of knowing are we talking about? This is perhaps the most vertiginous prospect we must face in this technology, the way it elides the relational presence in our experience of knowing, and being known. It eliminates the discretion of context, rather like removing someone’s clothes to know them more intimately, only to inspect their skin and size as one would inspect a cat, and simultaneously expect them to perform and continue their conference meeting. We rest in our own skin precisely by clothing it. With such a reductive kind of nakedness, our way of knowing becomes reductive, and it ignores the relational context entirely. It is analogous (and sometimes identical) to something pornographic, and it compromises the person’s ability to subsist in his multiplicity, the very thing that allows for the person to modulate his relationships, to contemplate, to integrate the domains of his life. When you reduce everything to one, it cannot make space within itself, know itself by relating between its parts. This has consequences both for the individual person, and for the idea of “personhood” in the broadest possible sense.

What we are coming up against then, in this modest discussion of privacy, is the question of how the person is known as a person, by others and by herself, and how this affects her ability to unfold, to individuate and participate. This invokes much deeper dangers than the harms overtly motivating most privacy laws, which though significant are nevertheless concrete and tameable. This deeper anxiety seems to lie unspoken beneath these tangible fears. “One of the perils of having a soul,” Jung said, “is to risk losing it.” We fear losing our humanity, the part of us that becomes available only in solitude, only in secret, only when we return to a source of experience that is marked by silence and concealment from exposure. If we cannot fall silent before the world, and be unseen, we cannot be seen in the ways that reveal us, as creatures of reflection and relation, to ourselves and to others. We become less than human, more like animal. This is what it at stake, a technology that turns human beings back into animals by the ways it knows us, and causes us to know ourselves. 

Given the nature of this technology, the problem is vast and deep in its proportions. It is not simply that we cannot protect our data from exposure, it is that we don’t even know what data to protect – the detail inferred about us by these new modelling methods, powerfully strengthened by AI, that can reveal a level of detail that we didn’t know existed, and would never have thought to protect. It includes not only information we give, but give off. There is a compulsive talkativeness to our virtual culture, and it creates an incontinence we cannot avoid. We express with every we move we make, and cannot help but make, for to live in this virtual world is to impress every moment with an involuntary thumbprint. No silence is possible, no discretion is permitted, and no one is immune. Impulsivity is rewarded, and there is no way we can opt out. If we did, it would mean opting out of culture itself, and so we remain inside the tempest and live in its perpetual anxiety. This creates a double bind that we cannot escape. Ironically enough, this kind of participation forfeits individuation, because each of us becomes identifiable only by the tokens of our unreflective impulses, which are generalized and haphazardly aggregated with the rest of the culture. In this new context we excessively known, and therefore completely unknown.

The knowledge about a person, when obtained without privacy, can produce a deeper kind of ignorance. We see a less pernicious version of this in parasocial relationships, when a person is observed – on a podcast perhaps, or through social media – without having the opportunity to know her observer. Dispassionate impressions are easily mistaken for knowledge of a person, but they are acquired without reciprocity or mutuality. This means that they do not participate. They are not placed into an active context where they must step into the light, declare their presence, meet their subjects at eye level, account for their own biases, and have their categorical rigidities pressure tested or subject to novelty. This information is not being gathered through the prism of an intimacy, but through a one-sided observation, as if through one-way glass. This makes for an impersonal, empirical process that does not know us directly or humanly. It does not share our inwardness or world of experience. Anyone who has ever entered information into an LLM and watched it produce a profile will see that the summary is simultaneously accurate and completely vacant. It says so much about us, and yet also so little, so it creates an uncanny valley of simulated knowledge with no consciousness or basis of experience. This experiential knowledge, the kind that we get from knowing what it is like to be in someone’s company, to see them, and be seen by them, is precisely what is enabled by solitude, secrecy, and the presence of the sacred. Privacy is a condition for these non-instrumental interactions, the kind that Martin Buber famously called I-Thou relationships. When we remove privacy from the world of tech, everyone becomes an “it”.  

If we take all of this into account, we must conclude that the collection of our data at this microscopic level is dehumanizing in a very strict, technical sense. It grants to faceless and self-interested entities an access to us that we don’t have of ourselves, and this creates a nebulous power imbalance that we don’t fully understand. In the next section, we will explore the practical consequences of this power imbalance, and the dystopic new world of behavioural nudging and manipulation. For now, however, it suffices to say that the view of humanity generated by our data can carry a great existential risk to the individual person, and to the integrity of personhood itself. It drives a wedge between us and the possibility of us, the version that is known in genuine human relation, with a view to what is unseen or undiscovered. Used in the wrong way, this is a technology that abbreviates us rather than expanding us. 

The business of translating these philosophical intuitions into a coherent explanation is formidable enough, let alone into a rectifying strategy, or technology, or set of laws. The challenge is evident when we survey the scattered landscape of new global privacy regulations that have sprung up over the last 10 years. Each is trying to leap over a shadow cast by a value they feel, but cannot fully see. This is not a new problem, of course. It is one that Plato lamented almost 2,500 years ago when he wrote the famous Republic. Plato showed a powerful correspondence between a person’s internal coherence, the longing they feel for reality, and their ability to participate virtuously in the world around them. His insights remain formative for this discussion, taking place at such a pivotal and decisive time in our society. They will continue to instruct us as we delve more deeply into the relationship between privacy and virtue.