Epistemological Dimensions of Informational Privacy

Abstract

It seems obvious that informational privacy has an epistemological component; privacy or lack of privacy concerns certain kinds of epistemic relations between a cogniser and sensitive pieces of information. One striking feature of the fairly substantial philosophical literature on informational privacy is that the nature of this epistemological component of privacy is only sparsely discussed. The main aim of this paper is to shed some light on the epistemological component of informational privacy.

Inferences and the Right to Privacy

“…31 See e.g. Marmor 2015;Kappel 2013;Persson & Savulescu 2019. See, however, Munch 2021a for a critical discussion of this assumption.…”

An Indirect Argument for the Access Theory of Privacy

“…In itself, it says nothing about whether privacy is valuable, whether privacy rights exist, or what it takes to violate privacy rights if they do exist. (II) According to the CT, B must know f about A in order for A's privacy to be diminished relative to B and relative to f. Recent critics have pointed out that weaker epistemic relations than knowledge are sufficient for privacy to be diminished, and that the stronger the epistemic relation is, the more privacy is diminished (Blaauw 2013;Kappel 2013;Fallis 2013). I find this critique compelling, but I will bracket it for now, since it is fairly easy to see how a weaker epistemic relation can be replaced with 'knows' in the definition without turning it into something that is not a control theory.…”

“…A crucial motivation behind the AT is the idea that control does no work in determining whether someone has privacy or not. All that matters, according to the AT, is whether someone actually accesses f. It has recently been argued that the access in question is best understood as an actual epistemic access, and that the degree to which A's privacy is diminished depends inter alia on how strong the epistemic relation is between B and f (Blaauw 2013;Matheson 2007;Kappel 2013;Fallis 2013). Nothing of importance hangs on whether this specification of the AT is true, but for present purposes, it is helpful to think of the access in question as an actual epistemic access.…”

“…Several theorists have recently endorsed altered versions of this theory. See e.g (Blaauw 2013),(Kappel 2013), and(Fallis 2013)…”

To Believe, or Not to Believe – That is Not the (Only) Question: The Hybrid View of Privacy

“…By contrast, some do endorse a stronger view according to which a privacy loss also requires that the belief is true, cp. (Matheson 2007); (Kappel 2013); (Fallis 2013). By contrast, (Allen 1988: 21-22) maintains that one can lose privacy regarding falsehoods.…”