Privacy and Digital Life: What Do I Owe My Neighbor

Abstract

Privacy and Digital Life: What Do I Owe My Neighbor Theresa E. Miedema Part I: Introduction With the ever‐increasing proliferation of technology that is “smart” enough to watch us and gather our data, it is easy to resign ourselves to diminishing spheres of privacy. We are told that our privacy is a small price to pay for the convenience and efficiencies that flow from automating tasks and tracking our data. Some of us have the luxury of shrugging off technical intrusions in our lives: we are not among those who are hyper‐surveilled or who are at risk for mis‐identification by law enforcement. Besides, we tell ourselves, the loss of privacy is inevitable. Other times, we may add that we have nothing to hide. If you have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to worry about the proliferation of surveillance and tracking. Concerns about privacy are linked to suspicions of wrongdoing: only the people who are up to no good need to hide their tracks. Ultimately, we may even suggest that there is something inauthentic or dishonest in wanting to safeguard our privacy. We should be the same in our private and in our public lives. Wanting to draw the curtains around our private lives suggests that we are somehow not truly our authentic selves while in the public eye. Again, what are you hiding? Much of the discussion and scholarship around privacy place the individual and their rights at the centre of discussion. There is considerable debate about how we should conceptualize privacy: is it about controlling access to ourselves, the management of personal information, or specific rights like the right to control who can have my information and what they can do with it? What is the difference between privacy and solitude and how do we demarcate private spheres from public ones? Common themes include informed consent; control; contextual integrity; reasonable expectations; security; and integrity of our information. This paper takes a different perspective to the matter of privacy in modern society. It shifts the perspective from asking how privacy is protected to asking what it protects and the interests that are at stake. I argue that privacy is important not because of privacy itself per se, but because privacy exists to protect, foster, and promote basic human dignity. This view of privacy changes how we think of our own individual privacy rights since privacy is about so much more than just my personal information. If privacy is, at its heart, about human dignity, then something is lost at a much more fundamental level when I dismiss my own privacy as irrelevant or unnecessary. Because I understand human dignity to be bound up in the fact that individuals are image‐bearers of the Divine who are invested with moral autonomy, the diminishment of one individual’s dignity is really an attack on the dignity of all humans. Thus, if privacy is about dignity, then the protection of my privacy is connected to my neighbor’s dignity. I therefore shift the discussion of privacy from a question of individual rights to a broader set of issues. An analysis of the effect of digital technology on my personal privacy must become an analysis of how privacy violations affect human dignity and what duties I have to my neighbor as a result. This analysis must also take into account the way that privacy rights are embedded in the social, political, and economic power structures of society. The protection of privacy is not extended in equitable ways in society. The ways that privacy is extended or withheld have material effects on the well‐being and dignity of affected populations, but these populations generally have little agency in determining how their privacy will be mapped. Those with privilege have an obligation to be particularly mindful of how privacy protections are distributed in society. In the context of digital technology, we therefore have an obligation to critically assess how our own decisions to share our own personal information for our own convenience will affect the dignity of our neighbors. I will argue that digital technology does not exist for our convenience at all. Rather, it exists to consume our life...