Unknowableness and Informational Privacy

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.

Section: Epistemic Access: Control and Limitation Theories Of Privacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemological Dimensions of Informational Privacy

Kappel¹

2013

“…Fallis used this example to argue against the 'knowledge account of privacy' -a view I initially had some sympathy for. For defenses of the knowledge account of privacy, see Matheson 2007. 14 Don Fallis also stresses the importance of an epistemic relation between S and P (see his paper in this issue).…”

Section: Eap Advancedmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Epistemic Account of Privacy

Blaauw¹

2013

“…Conjoined with the plausible claim that there is a moral right to privacy, 4 each of the major contemporary accounts of the nature of privacy, understood as accounts of an explanandum of this sort, implies a duty of ignorance. 5 This is perhaps most obvious in the case of the ignorance 6 -theoretic account I have defended (Matheson 2007;cf. Parent 1983;Davis 2006;Blaauw 2012; Le Morvan 2012b 7 ), according to which an individual has privacy relative to personal information about her and to another individual just in case the other individual is ignorant of that information.…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

A Duty of Ignorance

Matheson¹

2013

Self Cite

Conjoined with the claim that there is a moral right to privacy, each of the major contemporary accounts of privacy implies a duty of ignorance for those against whom the right is held. In this paper I consider and respond to a compelling argument that challenges these accounts (or the claim about a right to privacy) in the light of this implication. A crucial premise of the argument is that we cannot ever be morally obligated to become ignorant of information we currently know. The plausibility of this premise, I suggest, derives from the thought that there are no epistemically ‘non-drastic’ ways in which we can cause ourselves to become ignorant of what we already know. Drawing on some recent work in the epistemology and psychology of self-deception and forgetting, I seek to undermine this thought, and thus provide a defense against the challenging argument, by arguing that there are indeed such ways.