The Source View on the Right to Privacy

In the last decade, some of the most widely discussed events concerned how states, institutions, or companies dealt with peoples data. Here are some examples: the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that British and US secret services had ready access to millions of emails and other sources of potentially personal information from many people around the world. In the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, a private company used personal data of about 87 million Facebook users, most of whom did not give consent, to develop, among other things, election campaigns. The Chinese Social Credit System aims at providing a record that enables the government to evaluate the trustworthiness of businesses, institutions, and individuals. It works in part by employing the mass surveillance system "Skynet", which includes cameras, surveillance drones, facial recognition systems, and various mobile phone apps and internet devices. Besides these issues, which have caused a public outcry in many societies, there are countless more small- scale incidents people worry about that involve, for example, smart TVs that record conversations in living rooms, facial recognition systems that uncover protesters or sex workers, or hacked smart speakers (Véliz 2020). These are some examples of many similar events and developments that have at least one thing in common: many think that the involved people`s right to informational privacy is endangered or even violated. In order to find out whether this is so and, if yes, how bad it is, we need a good understanding of what the right to privacy is and how important it is. The core idea of the project is that we have the right to privacy with regard to a certain piece of personal information just in case we have the right that others do not make this piece of information flow unless we are the right kind of source of this information flow. For example, when my boss reads my medical record without having asked me, she learns something personal about me even though I play no role in her learning. Thus, I am not the right kind of source of the information flow, which is why her conduct infringes my right to privacy. The project will develop the hypothesis that "being the right kind of source" should be understood in terms of the agent`s deep self, a notion that is adopted from moral psychology. Thus, the right to privacy protects our deep self as the source of flows of personal information. The goal of the project is to precisely spell out this idea, to show that the right to privacy, thus understood, is justified and that this understanding of the right to privacy helps make sense of how we should respond to actual social issues.