Turning Privacy Inside Out
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Julie E. Cohen
Abstract
The problem of theorizing privacy moves on two levels, the first consisting of an inadequate conceptual vocabulary and the second consisting of an inadequate institutional grammar. Privacy rights are supposed to protect individual subjects, and so conventional ways of understanding privacy are subject-centered, but subject-centered approaches to theorizing privacy also wrestle with deeply embedded contradictions. And privacy’s most enduring institutional failure modes flow from its insistence on placing the individual and individualized control at the center. Strategies for rescuing privacy from irrelevance involve inverting both established ways of talking about privacy rights and established conventions for designing institutions to protect them. In terms of theory, turning privacy inside out entails focusing on the conditions that are needed to produce sufficiently private and privacy-valuing subjects. Institutionally, turning privacy inside out entails focusing on the design, production, and operational practices most likely to instantiate and preserve those conditions.
© 2019 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Privacy Law’s Indeterminacy
- Turning Privacy Inside Out
- Re-reading Westin
- Privacy as Protection of the Incomputable Self: From Agnostic to Agonistic Machine Learning
- Schrödinger’s Robot: Privacy in Uncertain States
- Privacy and Manipulation in the Digital Age
- Grappling with “Data Power”: Normative Nudges from Data Protection and Privacy
- Contextual Integrity Up and Down the Data Food Chain
- A Process-based Approach to Informational Privacy and the Case of Big Medical Data
- The Right to Communications Confidentiality in Europe: Protecting Privacy, Freedom of Expression, and Trust
- Theorizing Privacy in a Liberal Democracy: Canadian Jurisprudence, Anti-Terrorism, and Social Memory After 9/11
- Synthesis and Satisfaction: How Philosophy Scholarship Matters
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Privacy Law’s Indeterminacy
- Turning Privacy Inside Out
- Re-reading Westin
- Privacy as Protection of the Incomputable Self: From Agnostic to Agonistic Machine Learning
- Schrödinger’s Robot: Privacy in Uncertain States
- Privacy and Manipulation in the Digital Age
- Grappling with “Data Power”: Normative Nudges from Data Protection and Privacy
- Contextual Integrity Up and Down the Data Food Chain
- A Process-based Approach to Informational Privacy and the Case of Big Medical Data
- The Right to Communications Confidentiality in Europe: Protecting Privacy, Freedom of Expression, and Trust
- Theorizing Privacy in a Liberal Democracy: Canadian Jurisprudence, Anti-Terrorism, and Social Memory After 9/11
- Synthesis and Satisfaction: How Philosophy Scholarship Matters
