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17-07-2018 | Original paper

A practice–theoretical account of privacy

Author: Wulf Loh

Published in: Ethics and Information Technology | Issue 4/2018

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Abstract

This paper distinguishes between two main questions regarding the notion of privacy: “What is privacy?” and “Why do/should we value privacy?”. In developing a social-ontological recognitional model of privacy (SORM), it gives an answer to the first question. According to the SORM, Privacy is a second order quality of roles within social practices. It is a function of who is or should be recognized as a “standard authority”. Enjoying standard authority means to have the right to interpret and contest role behavior and role obligations within a specific practice (first level), as well as evaluate the normative structure, the fundamental practice norms as well as the roles and their status (second level). The SORM utilizes the concept of standard authority to explicate privacy with regard to two categories that capture the relevant phenomena of privacy: decisional and informational privacy. Within a practice, an actor is said to have decisional privacy if she as a BCR does not (or does not have to) recognize bearers of accidental roles as standard authorities. Vice versa, an actor is said to enjoy informational privacy if all other BCRs (and especially data collecting actors) recognize her as a standard authority. Additionally, the requirement of mutual recognition by the practice participants as standard authorities introduces a “weak normativity” into the theory, which can be used to identify deficient privacy arrangements within practices.

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Beate Roessler distinguishes three historical stages or phases of the debate (Roessler 2016). In short, she claims that the first stage centers around the individual dimensions of privacy, the second around the social dimensions (privacy in and for relationships), and the third around the political dimension (privacy as a prerequisite for democracy).

Analogous to Roessler’s distinction, Priscilla Regan distinguishes three types of values that can inform our value judgments about privacy: individual value, public value, and common value (Regan 1995, p. 203).

Following Roessler (2005, Ch. 3.4), I will qualify between a “instrumental/functional value” of privacy, where privacy is valuable for something else (autonomy, authenticity, relationships, democracy etc.) and an “intrinsic value”, where privacy is valued for its own sake (Fried 1984). In this regard, “intrinsic” is used in the sense of “ultimate ends” (Parsons 1949, 75, Fn. 2), not in the sense of the “location or source of the goodness” (Korsgaard 1983, p. 179).

In my opinion, this is the general downside of Floridi’s ontological concept of privacy as informational friction (Floridi 2005). His system-theoretically informed account allows only for a very basic normative argument about reserving some kind of privacy because of informational entropy.

In fact, phenomenon adequacy is a fundamental prerequisite for any valid theory or description of a concept, not just in the realm of privacy. However, I specifically point it out here, as it features prominently in Floridi’s four challenges. More importantly, however, especially a unified theory of privacy needs to ensure phenomenon adequacy, as it cannot capture different phenomena by different explanations as e.g. a cluster theory can. Therefore, it is worth making this prerequisite explicit and to be mindful to lay out the theory such that it adequately tracks the main core of the phenomenon.

For DeCew, this narrow definition is sufficient, since the other areas of decisional privacy are in her conception covered by the notion of accessibility privacy.

And maybe also for the feasibility of the normative demands it makes in the sense of a “realistic utopia” (Rawls 2003, § 1).

This has to do with the comparatively high level of theoretical abstraction that most value theories of privacy are situated at. In referring to abstract values such as autonomy, authenticity, intimacy, democracy etc., those theories capture different aspects of our intuitions about what is valuable and why. The respective normative demands that follow from those principles may be equally coherent in themselves, but not compatible to each other. Therefore, an answer to the question “What is privacy?” (i.e. a general theory of privacy) should be able to accommodate as many value judgments about privacy as possible.

For DeCew’s account, however, I showed above that her three types of interests can be categorized as belonging to either the decisional or the informational domain of privacy.

In contrast, Pierre Bourdieu as one of the main proponents of practice theory famously refrained from giving a positive definition of social practices (Schmidt 2012, pp. 35–36). According to him, beyond empirical descriptions of actual practices it is to him impossible to provide an accurate overall synthesis (Bourdieu 1990, Ch. 5). In addition, he insists that the practical turn in sociology is not to be limited to the object of scientific observation but must include the scientific observation as a practice as well. In this sense, he claims that the internal “logic” of a given practice must not be confused with the “logic” of the practice theory that is used to describe it (Bourdieu 1977).

This characterization contends that goals and values that come with the normative status function of roles should also be described in terms of role obligations. For a different account cf. Raz (1999, Ch. 4). I am indebted to Hauke Behrendt for highlighting this point.

Various accounts of role obligations differentiate between the (generally more uncontroversial) normative status function that comes with a certain role and the ideal of this given role, which is expressed by (oftentimes more contested) “standards of excellence” (MacIntyre 1985, p. 187).

For the opposite claim that an external observer is not in a privileged position to describe the practice norms more adequately than the participants see e.g. Garfinkel 1967; Geertz 1973; Boltanski and Chiapello 2007.

Other answers individuate practices by their particular sequence of actions (Wittgenstein 1998) or by a certain set of norms in the form of role obligations (Searle 2008, Ch. 4.II).

“Fundamental” in this respect means that the motivation is “content-independent” (Raz 1986, p. 35) of the specific practice norms. This provides the participants with reasons to uphold the practice that do not cater to their short-term interests and therefore are not dependent on them. They are, however, also partly motivated to uphold the practice if it furthers their interests. This aspect of their motivation is content-dependent, i.e. it depends on the structure of the practice and the goals that the participants pursue with and in it.

Since in this example we are talking also about legal norms and obligations, the idea of an equal say may have to revert to more institutionalized forms of standard authority, such as public contestation, legal complaints and lawsuits, voting and policy-making etc. As a patient, however, I still enjoy the standard authority to criticize my doctor directly and demand justification for her—in my eyes faulty—enactment of her role as doctor with regard to her role obligations in terms of informational privacy.

Note that such an equal say will typically result in very general interpretations of informational privacy norms. From these, experts then have to determine whether we should e.g. employ the idea of dynamic consent (Kaye et al. 2015), sticky policies in database solutions (Mont et al. 2003), or some combination strategies thereof; which models of user authentication (Cavoukian and Jones 2014), ano- and pseudonymity strategies (Hartzog and Stutzman 2013), methods of data minimization (Tene and Polonetsky 2013), and data segregation between personal and content data (Sun et al. 2014) we should favor. This cannot be the task of the practice participant as a standard authority.

There are, obviously, legal limits to these contestations. However, they can still change a company culture, and within the connected wider practices of labor law and worker protection, also the legal framework of decisional privacy within the practice of work.

For a more systematic exploration into the different notions of social pathologies cf. Honneth 1996, Freyenhagen 2015, or Loh 2017.

Note that the pathological nature of this confusion lies in the systematic way it is embedded within each reproduction of the practice. It is not a mistake within one instantiation of the practice, which would most likely be called out as a misinterpretation of the practice’s structure.

For a more detailed account on the role of the sociologist in the description and explication of deficient or pathological practices see e.g. Bourdieu 1977, 1999; Habermas 1984; Honneth 2014b; Loh 2017.

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Title: A practice–theoretical account of privacy
Author: Wulf Loh
Publication date: 17-07-2018
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Ethics and Information Technology / Issue 4/2018
Print ISSN: 1388-1957
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8439
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9469-1

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