Privacy and Autonomy: On Some Misconceptions Concerning the Political Dimensions of Privacy

Dorota Mokrosinska

doi:10.1007/s10982-017-9307-3

Abstract

One of the most influential views in privacy scholarship is that privacy protects individual autonomy. On the early liberal view, the exercise of autonomy requires detachment from social and political life and privacy facilitates it. This view of privacy still informs current legal and political practice. As this view of privacy presupposes a tension between privacy and society, it is responsible for the underrating of privacy in legal and political practice. Over the last decades, liberal reflection on autonomy has shifted from the early liberal understanding of autonomy as calling for detachment from social life to the idea of autonomy as socially embedded. This development has brought about a corresponding adjustment in the liberal concept of privacy: privacy has come to be seen as a social rather than merely an individual interest. The social turn in thinking about privacy has gone a long way to change the problematic image of privacy in legal and political practice. It has not gone far enough, however, to draw conclusions regarding the political relevance of privacy. 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.

Highlights

One of the most influential views in privacy scholarship is that privacy protects individual autonomy
In cases in which privacy conflicts with other values such as public security or freedom of speech, privacy understood as the protection of individual autonomy has little political pull: whereas public security or freedom of speech are perceived by the court as essential interests of a democratic society, an autonomy-based interest in privacy denotes a merely personal interest similar to other individual interests lacking of political relevance such as ‘physical and psychological integrity’ and ‘personal development’
Conceptualized as ‘a right not to participate in collective life’,11 privacy preserves a space around individuals that shelters them from societal and political pressures. We find this early liberal view of privacy in Alan Westin’s classic definition of privacy: ‘Viewed in terms of the relation of the individual to social participation, privacy is the voluntary and temporary withdrawal of a person from the general society’

Summary

AUTONOMY AND PRIVACY IN LIBERAL DISCOURSE

The liberal self that privacy protects is defined in terms of its capacity for autonomy. Cohen’s and Roessler’s views, while significantly different, move away from the early liberal view of privacy, according to which privacy protects an individual’s autonomy by securing individual detachment from social life. What their arguments make clear is that if individual autonomy is socially embedded, it makes no sense to say that privacy protects autonomy by isolating the individual from her social contexts. 27 There is important work in recent privacy scholarship that emphasizes the social dimension of privacy but does not make use of the socialized concept of autonomy Instead, it focuses on, for example, the relevance of context, spaces, bodies and relationships in explaining the social value of privacy, cf Rachels (1975), Regan (1995), Inness (1992), Allen (1999), Nissenbaum (2010), Cohen (2013) and Steeves (2009). Mokrosinska (2014, pp. 371–372). Roessler and Mokrosinska (2013, p. 772)

TOWARD A POLITICAL ACCOUNT OF PRIVACY

POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND THE POLITICAL EMBEDDING OF AUTONOMY

PRIVACY

HOW MUCH PRIVACY DOES POLITICAL AUTONOMY REQUIRE?

AUTONOMY AND THE POLITICAL VALUE OF PRIVACY