On the Individual, Social, and Political Value of Privacy

Abstract

One of the most influential views in privacy scholarship is that privacy protects individual autonomy: the exercise of autonomy requires detachment from social and political life and privacy facilitates it. This view of privacy presupposes a tension between privacy and society and is responsible for the underrating of privacy in legal and political practice. I argue that we should understand autonomy as politically embedded. Revised along these lines, privacy has a political value: when we claim privacy, we do not make a claim to withdraw from political life, but rather make a claim to protect certain forms of political engagement.