Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the Subject as Object

Abstract

In the United States, proposals for informational privacy protection have proved enormously controversial. On a political level, such proposals threaten powerful data processing interests. On a theoretical level, data processors and other data privacy opponents argue that imposing restrictions on the collection, use, and exchange of personal data would ignore established understandings of property, limit individual freedom of choice, violate principles of rational information use, and infringe data processors' freedom of speech. In this article, Professor Julie Cohen explores these theoretical challenges to informational privacy protection. She concludes that categor ical arguments from property, choice, "truth," and speech lack weight, and mask fundamentally political choices about the allocation of power over information, cost, and opportunity. Each debate, although couched in a rhetoric of individual liberty, effectively reduces individuals to objects of choices and trades made by others. Professor Cohen argues, instead, that the debate about data privacy protection should be grounded in an appreciation of the conditions necessary for individuals to develop and exercise autonomy in fact, and that meaningful autonomy requires a degree of freedom from monitoring, scrutiny, and categorization by others. The article concludes by calling for the design of both legal and technological tools for strong data privacy protection.

Human rights as a topic and guide forLISresearch and practice

“…Interestingly, although the information ethics (IE) literature on information privacy is extensive (Capurro, ; Cohen, ; Himma, ; Introna & Pouloudi, ; Moor, ; Moore, ; Nissenbaum, ; Tavani & Moor, ; Van den Hoven, ), only a handful of articles look at information privacy from a specifically human rights perspective (Banisar, ; Griffin, ; Hosein, ; Moore, ). Moore and Griffin are the only authors who provide a general normative account of the human right to privacy.…”

Transparency in Social Media

“…Autonomy must therefore not be reduced to procedures of informed consent, but concerns the roles that agents assume in social and professional interaction. One can claim, for example, that "meaningful autonomy requires a degree of freedom from monitoring, scrutiny, and categorization by others" (Cohen, 2000). This also calls for a positive attitude toward "semantic discontinuity" which entails more "contextually specific practices of self-definition" in the use and regulation of information systems (Cohen, 2012).…”

Nudging as a Threat to Privacy

“…He would have been unable to stomach the disbelieving interest, the possible comments about his intellectual hubris, the ridicule and the dissuasions of his colleagues (seeSingh 1997).19 Richards (2008), p. 404. 20Cohen (2000), p. 1426-1427.Nudging as a Threat to Privacy…”