Language and Intercultural Information Ethics Concepts: A Preliminary Discussion of Privacy

Abstract

This paper introduces the perspective to understand privacy via language as an intercultural information ethics (IIE) concept. This research perspective carries two goals: to understand privacy as an IIE concept and to do so via natural language. The paper suggests that studying privacy through language answers the challenge faced by IIE work; in addition, studying privacy as an information ethics concept through language seems most appropriate considering that language both embodies and shapes meaning. Specifically, this paper briefly discusses privacy and some of its language expressions in the Chinese and English languages, through which it hopes to reveal the richness and possibilities of using natural language as a research instrument to understand privacy in intercultural settings, which is an area of researching privacy that has attracted little discussion so far.