The culture industry revisited: Sociophilosophical reflections on ‘privacy’ in the digital age

Abstract

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices.

How Online Privacy Literacy Supports Self-Data Protection and Self-Determination in the Age of Information

“…Scholars have already noted that negative accounts of privacy fail to grasp the threats of today's technologydriven societal and economic dynamics (Fuchs, 2011(Fuchs, , 2012Seubert & Becker, 2019;Stahl, 2016). One argument is that societal structures that favor the commodification of information (cf.…”

“…Moreover, these structures (and the economic players that build them) are also constituent of what spaces of privacy exist at all and how these spaces can be achieved and protected. More specifically, they cause inner threats to privacy as individuals' everyday practices within these spaces perpetuate these structures of domination (Seubert & Becker, 2019). Fuchs (2011) similarly argues that such a liberal notion of privacy "legitimizes and reproduces the capitalist class structure" (p. 231).…”

Music, Art, Machine Learning, and Standardization

“…Instead of resisting commodification, the internet became a market frontier while simultaneously threatening personal privacy. [38] Machine learning is likely to follow the same trend toward a further consolidation of economic power by incumbent corporations if left underregulated.…”

Should my robot know what's best for me? Human–robot interaction between user experience and ethical design

“…While e.g. legal provisions such as the GDPR or national data protection laws may be silent about or even allow certain datafication practices, from an ethical point of view they may still be objectionable (Floridi 2016;Loh 2018;Seubert and Becker 2019). 2 To secure data autonomy, one of the ethical design guidelines could be to design the interactive behavior of the robot NIKA in a way to enable and facilitate his consent to the datafication, possibly through cascade consent models (Loe et al 2015), privacy by design (Cavoukian 2011;O'Connor et al 2017), and other technical means (systemic data protection).…”