A Defense of Privacy as Control
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A Defense of Privacy as Control Leonhard Menges1 Received: 2 March 2020 / Accepted: 24 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Even though the idea that privacy is some kind of control is often presented as the standard view on privacy, there are powerful objections against it. The aim of this paper is to defend the control account of privacy against some particularly pressing challenges by proposing a new way to understand the relevant kind of control. The main thesis is that privacy should be analyzed in terms of source control, a notion that is adopted from discussions about moral responsibility. Keywords Privacy · Control · Source control
1 Introduction Many authors have argued that privacy is essentially a certain kind of control. This is the common idea shared by what I will call control accounts of privacy. Even though control accounts are often presented as the standard views on privacy, there are powerful objections against them. Most recently, Lundgren (2020) combined two independent and well-known challenges for control accounts into one dilemma: he argues that the best attempt to meet the first challenge is incompatible with the best attempt to meet the second challenge. Moreover, he says that accounts that meet both challenges are not real control accounts. The aim of this paper is to defend the thesis that privacy is, essentially, a kind of control by proposing a new way to understand the relevant kind of control. Even though my discussion is structured as a reply to Lundgren’s paper, the result will be of more general interest because he relies on objections and ideas that have been around for a long time. Section 2 will present Lundgren’s objection. In Sect. 3 I will argue that there is room for the idea that exercising a certain kind of control never diminishes one’s privacy. Section 4 is the heart of the paper. In reply to the objection that control * Leonhard Menges [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy (KGW), University of Salzburg, Franziskanergasse 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
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theories are too broad because they imply that privacy is lost in cases in which this is, intuitively, false, I will present and develop what I will call the source control account of privacy. In Sect. 5 I will discuss two possible objections against this account. The upshot is that there is a promising and so-far overlooked version of the control account which meets some famous and pressing challenges. It is important to be clear that this paper is primarily concerned with conceptual, not with axiological or normative issues. From a conceptual perspective we ask what privacy is. From an axiological or normative perspective we can then ask whether privacy, thus understood, is good or bad, whether we have reason to get rid of or support it, and whether we have a right to privacy. The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of privacy. Even though I believe that privacy, understood in the way I will develop below, is, in general, valuable, that we have reas
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