Abstract
In this paper, we defend what we call the ‘Hybrid View’ of privacy. According to this view, an individual has privacy if, and only if, no one else forms an epistemically warranted belief about the individual’s personal matters, nor perceives them. We contrast the Hybrid View with what seems to be the most common view of what it means to access someone’s personal matters, namely the Belief-Based View. We offer a range of examples that demonstrate why the Hybrid View is more plausible than the Belief-Based View. Finally, we show how the Hybrid View generates a more plausible fit between the concept of privacy, and the concept of a (morally objectionable) violation of privacy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
n.a. (no data were generated or analyzed)
Notes
The ‘modern’ discussion of privacy is often said to begin with (Warren & Brandeis 1890). For more recent discussion and overview, especially of the philosophical literature, see (Thomson 1975); (Marmor 2015); (Nissenbaum 2009); (Solove 2010). Throughout the paper, we are exclusively concerned with ‘informational privacy’.
It is an open question how much control A must have here to enjoy privacy on such a view, given that control might seem to admit of degrees. One recent proposal by Menges (2021) says that A has control over access to information either when it is true that (1) information doesn’t flow or, (2) if information flows, A is the proper source of this flow. We thank a reviewer for asking us to clarify this.
As an example, consider this quote from the prominent control theorist Beate Rössler: “If privacy in general means being able to control ‘access’ to one’s own personhood, then – as we saw earlier – this must in one respect be understood and interpreted as control over what other people can know about oneself.” (Rössler 2005: 111). Rössler is a good example of a control theorist whose view will be affected by our argument, because she holds that informational privacy is a matter of having control over the access to personal information. She believes that what it means to access some information p about someone else is to know that p. As we shall argue, this is not fully adequate. Although less clear, Marmor (2015: 4), another control theorist, also seems to think that privacy is about having control over the ways in which others come to know things about us. See (Mainz and Uhrenfeldt 2021a) for a helpful overview of control views.
We use ‘relevant’ as a place-holder to capture the point that not all matters seem relevantly ‘private’ or even ‘personal’ (as some would take privacy to be about). We set this important question aside here but see (Manson and O’Neill 2007).
One might drop the “epistemic warrant”-requirement. On such a view, one might say that A loses privacy regarding p and with respect to B if B has a vivid dream and wakes up believing that p albeit without having any justification (what we term ‘warrant’) for this. Few, if any, endorse such a view. By contrast, some do endorse a stronger view according to which a privacy loss also requires that the belief is true, cp. (Matheson 2007); (Kappel 2013); (Fallis 2013). By contrast, (Allen 1988: 21–22) maintains that one can lose privacy regarding falsehoods. Notice also that this formulation is supposed to be neutral on what types of believes that count, so we might interpret ‘belief’ broadly as to both include, say, dormant, occurrent and tacit belief. cf. for instance (Peels 2016). One might also drop the “belief”-requirement. On such a view, one might say that A loses privacy regarding p and with respect to B if B has propositional justification that p but does not believe that p. This seems to be the view that Fallis has in mind when he writes: “Second, there are cases where privacy seems to be diminished even though there is no belief about the fact at all. For instance, it could be that, when Cliff tells him that Norm has a tattoo on his butt, Sam cannot believe his ears.” (Fallis 2013: 165). But note that if one drops the belief-requirement, the resulting view is still underinclusive and needs to be accompanied by a ‘no-perception-requirement’ as we lay out below. In effect, a Hybrid-View close to the one we defend in this paper will emerge – the only difference being that now the belief-requirement is missing.
(Matheson 2007: 259).
Different versions of the Belief-Based View are widely accepted in the literature, although many authors seem only to adopt the view implicitly. For instance, William Parent writes: “[p]rivacy is the condition of not having undocumented personal knowledge about one possessed by others.” [emphasis added] (Parent 1983: 269). We can see that Parent adopts the Belief-Based View, because he thinks that having privacy is a matter of others not having undocumented knowledge about oneself (knowledge is uncontroversially an instance of a warranted belief). Similarly, Ruth Gavison writes: “Our interest in privacy, I argue, is related to our concern over our accessibility to others: the extent to which we are known to others, the extent to which others have physical access to us, and the extent to which we are the subject of others’ attention.” [emphasis added]. (Gavison 1980: 483). Just like Parent, Gavison essentially holds that privacy is a function of other’s knowledge of oneself, and thus she adopts the Belief-Based View. We argue, differently from Gavison, that it is perception, not attention, that is relevant to privacy (it is possible, we think, to perceive something without attentively doing so).
Some of the argumentative building blocks needed to establish the Hybrid View are already present in the literature. For instance, Don Fallis argues that non-belief may not be sufficient for having privacy, and he mentions en passant that perception is sufficient for losing privacy (Fallis 2013: 165). The claim we make in this paper is stronger than the one Fallis makes: We claim that absence of warranted belief and non-perception are each necessary, jointly sufficient conditions for having privacy. Furthermore, and in contrast to Fallis, we explain how our view relates to the control vs. access debate in the privacy literature, and we explain what the normative upshots of this view are.
Some theorists have argued that privacy comes in degrees, such that A’s privacy is diminished relative to the number of people who have access to A’s information, the number of pieces of information others have access to, and the strength of the epistemic relation that others have to the information. For instance, A’s privacy may be diminished more when B knows p, compared to when B merely has a justified belief that p. For the sake of simplicity, we bracket this issue. See (Kappel 2013); (Fallis 2013); (Blaauw 2013).
This case is inspired by a case from (Fallis 2013: 165).
Here one might object that Defeat is not best described as a case where B lacks belief regarding the photo, but that B instead has conflicting beliefs, cf. (Byrne 2016). Notice though, that this analysis presupposes a non-standard account of belief.
A somewhat similar case is discussed by (Powers 1996: 378); (Inness 1992: 63); (Johnson 1989: 161): A illicitly observes B’s nude photo despite knowing beforehand what it looks like. Intuitively, there is a loss of privacy (as well as a violation of privacy), but this is not explainable by belief-acquisition, since no new beliefs are gained.
We thank a reviewer for suggesting this view and asking that we consider it.
A further attraction of the Belief and Justification-Based View is that it can identify a sense in which privacy does not seem to be fully regained if B is presented with a defeater to their justification (and thus loses justification) but retains a true belief. According to this view, this is because a true belief is still a part of B’s mental economy. We thank a reviewer for pointing us to this case. However, a downside of the Belief and Justification-Based View – besides the one we spell out below – is that it implies that A loses privacy with respect to B if B, based on nothing but a vivid dream, forms a true belief about some personal proposition p about A.
One might worry that non-perception does not go far enough. Admittedly, there might be something to like about the view that whether privacy is instantiated depends on purely sub-personal processes that lies prior to perception (e.g., when our optic nerve is stimulated in certain ways, or when the nerve transmits information from the retina). We could call this view ‘non-sensation’ (as opposed to non-perception). We set these possible views aside since we do not believe that if somebody cultivated a number of free-standing but fully functioning optic nerves and placed them in a position where they were stimulated by, say, somebody’s private photos, that privacy would be lost in any meaningful sense.
(Beck 2018).
See (Siegel 2021) for an overview of the perception literature.
Some believe that there are distinctively non-informational senses of privacy (such as ‘decisional’ privacy). Nothing we say here excludes this possibility, and you need not endorse it to endorse our view.
There is an interesting parallel here to those who say that one can lose privacy with regards to falsehoods, such as (Le Morvan 2015). We will set this delicate question aside and say that both proponents and opponents of the idea that privacy is veridical can accept that privacy concerns perception.
It is also important to see that Macnish’ claim doesn’t settle whether privacy turns upon non-perception. This is because many different states can have semantic content (for instance, perceptual states, belief states, emotional states, intentional states) and even if we accept a semantic restriction like Macnish’s, we need to investigate which contentful states that matter to privacy.
See (Elliot and Soifer 2014) for discussion of the case of animals and privacy. Notice, furthermore, that the challenge isn’t uniquely faced by our view. It seems as sensible to ask if animals or some machines have functional equivalents of beliefs that are sufficiently like paradigmatic human beliefs to affect privacy.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging us to discuss this case.
For more discussion, see (Dretske 2006).
(Merikle et al. 2001).
Notice that this claim is compatible with the thought that perception played a role in obtaining some or all of the inputs of the inference. See for instance (Boghossian 2014).
On the Belief and Justification-Based View, there would be a loss of privacy even if cases where B were justified in believing z, but didn’t in fact form the belief.
We cannot do this because we have not shown that there is no such thing as non-informational privacy as some believe (cf. Rössler 2005). But as stated before, we only address the informational component of privacy in this paper.
One may wonder how the Hybrid View could be fitted into an account of privacy as control over access (as some control theorists endorse). If justification is objective (that is, non-perspectival because justification is independent of cognitive states), then it seems possible to exercise control over access by controlling the availability of evidence (e.g., if I do not publish my diary, and nobody acquires it in illicit ways, I could be said to be in control). If justification is perspectival, that is, it depends on the cognitive states of the individual it might seem harder to exercise control over ‘access’ thus construed because we can’t generally control what is going on in other people’s minds and other people can’t generally act in accordance with our will. The most natural response here would be, we think, to concede that the relevant kind of control is indirect. We control people’s beliefs and their subjectively available justification by controlling the availability of evidence. This would in turn suggest that our privacy (construed as control) is crude. But that is in fact recognized by some. Marmor (2015) for instance says that privacy, construed as control over self-presentation, is even in the best case a crude form of control.
See for instance Adam Moore’s “so what”-objection. (Moore 2008: 417).
As before, it seems to us that when considering Sequence, a view including no-perception is also preferable over the Belief and Justification-Based View discussed in Section II. This is because, presumably, we would still want to say that there is a significant violation (and loss) of privacy even if the perceiving subject only acquired a trivial increase in justification. Sequence-type cases establishes this because the justification from perception is not stimulus-dependent (as with belief) and is therefore already present when A x-rays the safe for the nth time. Hence, if someone wants to point to how there was a significant loss (or violation of) privacy when A x-ray’s for the nth time, acquisition of justification doesn’t seem like an apt explanation.
See for instance (Powers 1996: 377–379).
(Davis 2009: 460–461).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this objection to us. See (Davis 2009) for a version of this objection.
References
Allen, A. 1988. Uneasy Access: privacy for women in a Free Society. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Beardsley, E. 1971. “Privacy: Autonomy and Selective Disclosure”, NOMOS XIII: Privacy (J. Pelmock and J. Chapman, eds.). New York: Atherton Press.
Beck, J. 2018. “Marking the perception–cognition boundary: the Criterion of stimulus-dependence”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96(2): 319–334.
Blaauw, M. 2013. “The epistemic account of privacy”. Episteme 10(2): 167–177.
Block, N. 2014. “Rich conscious perception outside focal attention”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18(9): 445–447.
Boghossian, P. 2014. “What is inference?”. Philosophical Studies 169(1): 1–18.
Byrne, A. 2016. “The epistemic significance of experience”. Philosophical Studies 173: 947–967.
Davis, S. 2009. “Is there a right to privacy?”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90: 450–475.
Dretske, F. 2006. “Perception without Awareness”. In Perceptual experience, eds. T. S. Gendler, and J. Hawthorne, 147–180. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fallis, D. 2013. “Privacy and the lack of knowledge”. Episteme 10(2): 153–166.
Fried, C. 1968. “Privacy”. Yale Law Journal 77: 482.
Gavison, R. 1980. “Privacy and the limits of the Law”. Yale Law Journal 89(3): 421–471.
Gross, H. 1971. “Privacy and Autonomy”, NOMOS XIII: Privacy (J. Pennock and J. Chapman, eds.). New York: Atherton Press.
Inness, J. 1992. Privacy, intimacy, and isolation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, J. L. 1989. “Privacy and the judgment of others”. Journal of Value Inquiry 23: 157–168.
Kappel, K. 2013. “Epistemological dimensions of informational privacy”. Episteme 10(2): 179–192.
Le Morvan, Pierre. 2015. “Privacy, Secrecy, Fact, and Falsehood”. Journal of Philosophical Research 40: 313–336.
Lundgren, B. 2020. “A dilemma for privacy as control”. Journal of Ethics 20: 165–175.
Lundgren, B. 2021. “Confusion and the role of Intuitions in the debate on the conception of the right to privacy.” Res Publica, online first.
Macnish, K. 2018. “Government Surveillance and why defining privacy matters in a Post-Snowden World”. Journal of Applied Philosophy 35: 417–432.
Macnish, Kevin. 2020. “Mass Surveillance: A Private Affair?”. Moral Philosophy and Politics 7(1): 9–27.
Mainz, J., and R. Uhrenfeldt. 2021a. “Too much Info: data surveillance and reasons to Favor the Control Account of the right to privacy”. Res Publica 27: 287–302.
Mainz, J., and R. Uhrenfeldt. 2021b. “Privacy rights, and why negative control is not a dead end: a reply to Munch and Lundgren.” Res Publica, online first.
Manson, N., and O. O’Neill. 2007. Rethinking informed consent in Bioethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marmor, A. 2015. “What is the right to privacy?”. Philosophy & Public Affairs 43: 3–26.
Matheson, D. 2007. “Unknowableness and informational privacy”. Journal of Philosophical Research 32: 251–267.
Menges, L. 2021. “A defense of privacy as control”. Journal of Ethics 25(3): 385–402.
Merikle, Philip M., John D. Daniel Smilek, and Eastwood. 2001. “Perception without awareness: perspectives from cognitive psychology”. Cognition 79(1–2): 115–134.
Moore, A. 2008. “Defining Privacy”. Journal of Social Philosophy, 39(3).
Munch, L. A. 2021. “Privacy rights and ‘naked’ statistical evidence”. Philosophical Studies 178: 3777–3795.
Nissenbaum, H. 2009. Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford University Press.
Parker, R. 1974. “A definition of privacy”. Rutgers Law Review 27: 275.
Parent, W. 1983. “Privacy, morality”. Philosophy & Public Affairs 12(4): 269–288.
Phillips, B. 2019. “The shifting Border between Perception and Cognition”. Noûs 53: 316–346.
Powers, M. 1996. “A cognitive Access definition of privacy.”, Law and Philosophy, 15.
Raftopoulos, A., and V. C. Müller. 2006. “The phenomenal content of experience”. Mind & Language 21: 187–219.
Rik Peels. 2016. Responsible belief: a theory in Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
Rubel, A. 2011. “The Particularized Judgment account of privacy”. Res Publica 17: 275.
Rumbold, B., and J. Wilson. 2019. “Privacy rights and public information”. Journal of Political Philosophy 27: 3–25.
Rössler, B. 2005. The value of privacy. Wiley.
Schellenberg, S. 2018. The Unity of Perception: content, consciousness, evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Siegel, Susanna. 2021. “The Contents of Perception”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/perception-contents
Soifer, Eldon, and David Elliott. 2014. “Nonstandard observers and the nature of privacy”. Social Theory and Practice 40(2): 185–206.
Solove, D. 2010. Understanding privacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thomson, J. J. 1975. “The right to privacy”. Philosophy & Public Affairs 4: 295–314.
Tye, M. 2006. “Nonconceptual content, richness, and fineness of grain. In Perceptual experience, eds. T. Gendler, and J. Hawthorne, 504–530. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Den Haag, E. 1971. “On Privacy”, NOMOS XIII: Privacy, eds. J. Pennock and J. Chapman. New York: Atherton Press.
Warren, Samuel D., and D. Louis, and Brandeis. 1890. “The right to privacy”. Harvard Law Review 4(5): 193–220.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Andreas Bengtson for very useful comments.
Funding
Work on this article has been generously supported by a Carlsberg Foundation Young Researcher Fellowship Grant awarded to Jens Christian Bjerring (grant number CF20-0257).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Both authors contributed equally to the manuscript and every part of it.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
There are no competing interests to be declared.
Ethical Approval
n.a.
Consent to Participate
n.a.
Consent to Publish
n.a.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Munch, L., Mainz, J. To Believe, or Not to Believe – That is Not the (Only) Question: The Hybrid View of Privacy. J Ethics 27, 245–261 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09419-8
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09419-8