As a former software engineer, my philosophical research is informed by ethical and political questions about how information-flows affect power-relations between individuals and institutions. My current research projects fall under the umbrella of what I call informational justice. The first knot to untie has been the concept of privacy as an individual interest and a social good. I am working on the following papers on privacy:
A paper that offers my account of privacy
This paper argues that privacy should be defined by the role it plays in social and political life. Privacy’s function, on this view, is to protect individuals through reliable barriers to the flow of information about them. What matters are privacy protections – the protections produced by those barriers. To say that someone is entitled to privacy is, on this account, to say that they are entitled to such protections. I show how this functional account helps explain why privacy protections appear disjointed across cultures, over time, and especially in response to technological change. I then argue that an individual’s normative entitlement to a particular privacy protection depends on how that protection relates to informational justice, whose requirements extend beyond the domain of privacy. In doing so, I aim to recast philosophical debates about privacy as part of a broader discussion of what informational justice demands of us.
A paper that diagnoses a fundamental problem in the privacy literature
Dominant philosophical theories of privacy converge on a mistaken assumption: in order to define privacy, we must identify exactly which interest or set of interests privacy protects. I call these theories interest-defined theories because they rely on the interest(s) privacy protects for its definition and its normative justification. But this assumption leads interest-defined theorists to a dilemma and a dead end. If they attempt to define privacy by its ability to protect one particular interest, they are forced to narrow their understanding of privacy harms, excluding intuitive privacy harms. On the other hand, if they don't identify a particular interest or a coherent set of interests that privacy protects, their theories seem ad hoc. In addition, interest-defined theorists disagree about which interests are important enough to justify privacy. As a result, privacy's coherence as a concept is held hostage to the resolution of these disagreements about fundamental political values. I propose that we reject the assumption that interest-defined theorists accept. We shouldn't define privacy by asking what interests it protects. Rather, we should ask what role privacy plays in social and political life.
A paper that engages with privacy as Contextual Integrity
I engage with Helen Nissenbaum's highly influential theory of Contextual Integrity (CI), which holds that privacy is preserved when information flows according to contextual informational norms. CI has been influential across disciplines, where it has been adopted as a framework for theorists, technologists, and policymakers. I argue that CI is not privacy because it is both under and over-inclusive of recognizable privacy violations. Replacing privacy with CI would also be a mistake, as CI gives us no way to register the loss we incur when we sacrifice privacy for other values, like liberty or security. This matters if we care about having the vocabulary to defend privacy's place in a time when barriers to the flow of information are often viewed as inefficient and unjustified.
Beyond privacy
In addition to my research on privacy, I am working on projects with the aim of expanding our normative vocabulary for talking about informational interests and informational harms. This work includes a project on informational intrusions, which occur when an individual is exposed to and required to engage with uninvited information. I am also thinking about the interest we have in publicity – when a person's has a serious interest in her capacity to publicize information about herself. Defining these interests can help us answer normative questions about informational justice that privacy alone cannot address.
I think a lot about AI agency and the social and political implications of taking treating AI systems as human-like agents. I am working on a project with Michigan's interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Equity Research Group. This research involves developing simulation environments to evaluate how LLM-based AI agents can interact in goal-directed ways that are culturally sensitive, socially appropriate, and situationally aware. More information about this project can be found at https://rackham.umich.edu/faculty-and-staff/rackham-interdisciplinary-problem-solving-initiative/artificial-intelligence-ethics-and-equity-research-group/.