The Source View on the Right to Privacy

Key data of the project

Description of the project

Some of the most talked-about events of the last decade have concerned the handling of people’s data by states, institutions or companies: The revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that British and US intelligence agencies had 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 company used data from around 87 million Facebook users, most of whom had not given their consent, to develop election campaigns, among other purposes. The Chinese social credit system aims to create a data set that allows the government to assess the trustworthiness of companies, institutions and individuals. It works in part through the use of the mass surveillance system ‘Skynet’, which includes cameras, surveillance drones, facial recognition systems and various mobile phone apps and internet devices. In addition to these issues, which have caused a public outcry in many societies, there are countless other smaller incidents that people are concerned about, such as smart TVs recording conversations in living rooms, facial recognition systems exposing demonstrators or sex workers, or hacked smart speakers. These are just a few examples of the many events and developments that have at least one thing in common: Many see the right to informational privacy of those affected as being jeopardised or even violated. To find out whether this is the case and, if so, 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 in relation to a particular piece of personal information precisely when we have the right not to let others flow that information, unless we are the right source for that information flow. For example, if my boss reads my medical records without asking me, she learns something personal about me, even though I have no role in it. Therefore, I am not the right kind of source of information flow, which is why her behaviour violates my right to privacy. The project develops the hypothesis that ‘being the right kind of source’ should be understood in terms of the actor’s deep self, a concept borrowed from moral psychology. Accordingly, the right to privacy protects our deep self as a source of personal information flow. The aim of the project is to clarify this idea and to show that the right to privacy is justified in this sense and that this understanding of the right to privacy helps us to understand how we should respond to current social problems.