The modern world is awash with privacy discourse. We’re constantly informed that “We (and the 967 partners we intend to share your activities with) respect your privacy”. Bringing new gadgets into the home often raises concerns concerns about data collection. And we have periodic debates about corporate surveillance and government policies that are supposed to protect chidren. However, rarely do we discuss what exactly we mean by privacy and why it is a good thing. This month I’ve been reading The Right To Oblivion by philosopher Lowry Pressly, which attempts to do just this.

Part of the problem is that privacy seems to have different meanings to different people. For some online privacy enthusiasts, privacy seems to mean total anonymity. For Facebook, privacy means controlling who gets to see what on your profile, while many privacy advocates would say being on Facebook at all is a threat to privacy. For others, advocating for privacy raises suspicion — that valuing privacy must mean one has something to hide. Advocates usually counter this by pointing to people who have legitimate things to hide, such as marginalised people (e.g. a gay child of homophobic parents), people living under oppressive governments, and investigative journalists.

What these views all have in common is that privacy is about restricting and controlling who has access to certain information about you. Pressly wants to challenge this conception of privacy, not least because on the “information control” model privacy really does have more value if you have things to hide. However, Pressly’s purpose is to defend the view that privacy is a valuable good for all well-lived lives and decent societies.

The book thus begins with a conceptual analysis of privacy. In philosophy, conceptual analysis is drilling down into exactly what we mean by a concept and distinguishing it from similar concepts. It can be rather dry and academic, but in this case we have the motivation of some real moral distinctions. For example, privacy vs. secrecy: it really does matter to me whether reading my wife’s text messages is off-limits because to read them would disrespect her privacy, or because she’s hiding secrets from me.

Pressly problematises the concept and ethics of privacy with a thought experiment he calls Voyeur. Imagine a hotel manager spies on his guest (this is based on the real life case of Gerald Foos). He does not witness anything incriminating, embarrassing, or secret. The guest just reads for a bit then goes to sleep. The manager doesn’t tell anyone or act on what he has learned in any way — perhaps he even forgets about it. Either way, the guest never finds out and experiences no consequences as a result of this event. The question, then, is why is this bad? We all feel some kind of wrong has been done here, but no one has been harmed in an obvious way. So what’s the issue?

Pressly’s solution is layered like an onion. For him, rather than protecting us from the consequences of specific information getting out or being used to harm us, privacy protects a state he calls oblivion, while oblivion itself protects several other values that are essential for a good life and a good society. Oblivion is not about witholding certain personal information. Rather, it is a state in which that personal information effectively doesn’t exist; there is only ambiguity. What goes on in the houses across the street, for example. My neighbours don’t go to any particular lengths to conceal what they are doing, and I don’t try to find out what they’re doing. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing to learn here. Or perhaps as another example, when someone goes to use the loo, we generally do not try to find out what they are doing, or even allow the event to pass through our imagination. It is rather as if they have simply disappeared for a few minutes. No information about what they are doing — even false information — is created.

To use the bathroom example again (not one of Pressly’s, but it helped me to get my head around the idea). If I (for some strange reason) attempted to find out what they were up to, or even tried to imagine it, we would feel like this were a privacy violation, even if I didn’t succeed in gaining any information. This is also why being asked a personal question feels like a privacy violation, even if we don’t answer it, or give a false answer. The very act of acting like there is information to be learned here violates the state of oblivion.

Now to why Pressly thinks oblivion is a good thing that we all ought to have in our lives. He gives other benefits, but these are the ones that stand out to me:

It is a break from being biographed

Beyond the basic biological facts someone might know about us, our identities are constituted of biographical facts and judgements. When we have oblivion, we are free from our actions generating new biographical facts and judgements. I can, for example, put on some scruffy clothes, without “Sam is the kind of guy who wears scruffy clothes” becoming part of my biography in the minds of people (both acquintances and strangers) who see me.[1]

When in public, we have to confront our existing biographical dimension and decide whether our actions today will affirm or deny that biography. Will I live up to the expectations of other people based on the judgements they have formed about me, or defy them? Either way, this is a burden we sometimes need respite from, which oblivion provides.

It is against fixity and for potentiality

Relatedly, Pressly is very keen on the idea of opposing “fixity” and embracing potentiality. When in public, our biographical dimension binds us in some sense — our public expects us to be a certain way. Oblivion give us space to change, space to try new things, space to be ourselves — or someone completely different.

This is also why Pressly is a strong advocate of the so-called “right to be forgotten”. This is the right to have old information about us removed from the web, for example, old social media posts and profiles. If others — especially new acquaintances — can easily search and make judgements about who we were many years ago, we lose the potential to define how we present who we are now to others. This the right to oblivion, projected into the past.

It builds social trust

Without privacy and oblivion, everything about us can be known, and hence we have no reason to trust one another. In a society with a healthy respect for privacy and oblivion, we are forced to trust the good character of people even when they are unknowable to us.

It creates depth

If everything about a person is known or knowable, then they have no hidden depth. A society without a healthy amount of oblivion available is one of flat persons and characters.

We experience this about our inner lives too — we don’t and can’t know everything about ourselves, and hence we are capable of learning more about and surprising ourselves.

Objections

I agree with Pressly that privacy is a good for all, and that oblivion is a good for all. However, I’m not entirely sure that the protection of oblivion completely captures the concept of privacy, or at least that the concept of oblivion needs some development to bring it up to that level. My objections are closely related, so forgive me if it seems that I repeat myself a little.

Firstly, oblivion as Pressly describes it seems to be an essentially binary state. The way we use the word privacy in everyday speech, however, seems to permit there to be degrees of privacy. And if the good of privacy is to protect oblivion (which I seem to either have or not), then what good is having partial privacy? I am thinking in particular about, say, when I am with only my wife at home. Clearly I don’t have as much privacy as when I completely alone, but it seems wrong to say that I don’t have privacy. However, by the way Pressly decribes it, I don’t seem to have the state of oblivion, since my wife is aware of me and expanding her biographical view of me. So what good is my partial privacy doing here?

This partial privacy thing goes further. I have some things which are private to some groups of people but not others. For example, my personal social life is mostly private to my work colleagues, but obviously and necessarily not private to my personal social circle. This blog, even, is not private to my readers (obviously), but I generally don’t share that it exists with my real-life acquaintances. In these cases, it feels like the way I use the term privacy has more to do with the “information control” model Pressly critiques rather than the “oblivion” model he advocates.

Possible responses to these objections I can see are that Pressly may simply say in some of these cases I’m making a conceptual error. My blog isn’t private from my work colleagues — rather, it’s a secret. Maybe, but that does seem to capture the relation of my social life to my work colleagues. My social life isn’t really secret; it’s just not shared. Perhaps a more promising response is to reframe oblivion not as a general state but as a relation between individuals and/or groups. My wife and I don’t have oblivion about each other when we’re alone together, but the rest of the world is oblivious to us. This has potential, but it does seem to have more in common with the “information control” model than perhaps Pressly would like, since now privacy becomes not about saying “yes” or “no” to certain bits of info being shared about us with different people, but “yes” or “no” about whether people will be oblivious about us in different contexts.

Anyway, this post is getting long enough. It’s a good book, plenty to think about and sharpen one’s ideas about what privacy is and what it’s good for. As Pressly mentions at several points, there is a significant philosophical literature on privacy, so it wouldn’t be wise to base all one’s ideas of privacy on this one book. But this is as good a place to start as any, and I did find real value in the concept of oblivion even if I’m not convinced it provides an exhaustive account of what privacy does for us.

  1. I totally am though. ↩︎