Control Yourself, or at Least Your Core Self

There are striking parallels between contemporary privacy angst and technological fears from an earlier era. Like the “information age,” the modern industrial age engendered dystopian visions of out-of-control technology, technology that did not simply herald a new age of freedom but rather brought with it new types of threats to human autonomy, health, communities and the environment. Many first generation philosophers of technology argued — although each in quite different terms — that the significance of modern technology does not lie in specific features of its machinery but rather in a kind of rationality and cultural milieu intimately linked with the project of modernity and the Enlightenment values that animate it but simultaneously threatening to undermine human freedom. Second generation philosophers of technology took an “empirical turn” away from this earlier approach. Privacy theory needs to recover some of the insights of the earlier generation and, in particular, a focus on the idea of the self. Dominant accounts of privacy as control over personal information or privacy as limited access both draw upon ideas of a self who has an “inner core” to be selectively revealed to others and protected from them through social withdrawal. What we need instead is to understand privacy norms as protecting the conditions of social interaction, where those conditions provide the basis for identity formation