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 (under review)
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 explains and makes sense of a common misconception 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 content-based theories because they rely on the content of the interests privacy protects for its definition and its normative justification. But this assumption leads content-based 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, content-based 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 content-based 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 proposing an alternative to privacy as contextual integrity
I engage with Helen Nissenbaum's highly influential theory of contextual integrity, which holds that privacy is preserved when information flows according to contextual informational norms. Contextual integrity has been influential across disciplines, where it has been adopted as a framework for theorists, technologists, and policymakers. I argue that, while the theory brings us closer to a viable account of privacy, theorists and practitioners make a mistake in using contextual integrity as an account of privacy for distinct descriptive and normative reasons. Descriptively, contextual integrity cannot stand in for privacy because its scope is too broad. Calling all questions of contextual integrity privacy leads to an overly expansive and unintuitive conception of privacy. Normatively, contextual integrity relies on conservative arguments that are inadequate to justify the enforcement of its norms. I argue that our best account of privacy preserves insights from contextual integrity, but its scope is more refined and its justification requires us to consider global (rather than merely contextual) normative questions. This view allows us to acknowledge that privacy interests are only a subset of the interests related to the appropriate flow of information and creates the theoretical space to name and defend a diversity of informational interests.
Beyond privacy
In addition to my work 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.