Computer Ethics

Privacy and Surveillance

Christopher L. Holland

Saint Louis University

November 7, 2024

Some Concerns

Geofenced Warrants: Legal Power

In 2018, Google received 982 geofence warrants from law enforcement; in 2020 that number surged to 11,554, according to the most recent data provided by the company. Google now gets geofence warrants from agencies in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the federal government.

— Schuppe (2022)

Big Data, Big Money

Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly”

— Keegan and Ng (2021)

Political Power

Google sent political messages to small businesses registered on Google maps against Anti-trust legislation (Amadeo 2021).

*Privacy Not Included

Mozzilla’s Privacy Centered Product Review Blog
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/

Privacy

Control and Access

Access alone

Privacy is the condition in which others are deprived of access to you.

— Jeffery Reiman (1995, 30)

Other authors point out that access definitions can lead to counter-intuitive conclusions. Fried (1984: 209-10) argues that “to refer […] to the privacy of a lonely man on a desert island would be to engage in irony”.

According to Fried, the judgment that a person stranded on a desert island enjoys complete privacy because no one can access her is a meaningless and absurd conclusion because “the person who enjoys privacy is able to grant or deny access to others” (Fried 1984: 210).

For Fried, privacy is an inherently interpersonal phenomenon, something the access definition does not properly capture. In order to remedy this shortcoming,a range of authors, including Fried, include control in their definition.3 The resulting controlaccess definitions state that privacy is about the control one has over access to oneself. With control incorporated into the definition, it immediately becomes clear why the desert island example is, from this perspective, absurd. With no other people being present, there is no meaningful control to be exercised in the first place. But control is often precisely what we care about. Access to ourselves or our information is not undesirable per se; what matters is that we have control over this access. Consider two persons who are involved in a romantic relationship. As a constitutive part of their relationship, they share secrets. Under access definitions, we would have to conclude that they lack privacy due to this practice of sharing intimate secrets. Control-access theorists emphasize that the fact these two romantically involved persons have chosen to grant each other access is an ethically important feature of the situation. From a control-access perspective, then, a breach of privacy occurs when a person is not able to exercise control over access, or when the attempt to exercise control over access are ineffective or ignored.

Control and Access

Access and control

Seen from the perspective of ethics, we should not focus on access per se, but on the question of how access is gained, and to what one is gaining access.

— Marijn Sax (2018)

Three Dimensions of Privacy

Local: control over access to physical spaces or areas
Informational (tort): control over what other people can know about you
Decisional (constitutional): control over our personal decisional sphere

Sax

The local dimension of privacy refers to our control over access to physical spaces or areas. Control over access to our own physical body can also be included in this dimension. It is easy to come up with examples of norms of local privacy. We have locks on our front doors. We put locks on bathrooms and, sometimes, bedrooms. We are not supposed to touch just any part of the body of the person sitting next to us on the bus. In all these examples, it is not the case that access to homes, bathrooms, bedrooms, and bodies should be strictly forbidden in all cases. Rather, we value our ability to determine who gets access under what conditions.

SEP (modified to fit order) The tort/informational privacy is concerned with the interest of individuals in exercising control over access to information about themselves and is most often referred to as “informational privacy”. The constitutional (or decisional) refers to the freedom to make one’s own decisions without interference by others in regard to matters seen as intimate and personal, such as the decision to use contraceptives or to have an abortion.

Sax again:

The informational dimension of privacy refers to “control over what other people can know about oneself” (Roessler 2005: 111). With the fast developments in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), information is often understood as data. Although discussions concerning the collection, storage, analysis, and dissemination of (personal) data can indeed be understood from the perspective of privacy’s informational dimension, it should be emphasized that not all information is necessarily data. Notice that the earlier mentioned example of looking at people in the streets is also about gaining access to information about other persons’ appearances and behavior.

The decisional dimension of privacy refers to our control over “symbolic access” (Roessler 2005: 79) to our personal decisional sphere. Norms of decisional privacy are supposed to grant “protection from unwanted access in the sense of unwanted interference or of heteronomy in our decisions and actions” (Roessler 2005: 9). This dimension of privacy gained prominence after the Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113) decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the decision to terminate a pregnancy a private decision protected by the right to privacy. In line with Roe v. Wade, the decisional dimension of privacy can also be said to include – but not be reducible to – bodily privacy, i.e. control one has over deciding who can (or cannot) do what to one’s body. In essence, decisional privacy can be understood to be about those decisions for which we find it valuable that persons themselves are able to decide on the

The Value of Privacy

Value for individuals
Value for society

Value for individuals

constitutive of personal liberty and autonomy
precondition for the possibility of friendship and love (Fried)
closely related to dignity—respect for privacy expresses respect for personhood
closely related to political freedom
- “public/private distinction is central to liberalism, since it rules our private space (which can be defined somewhat differently by different authors) as off-limits to the state.”

Value for society

privacy norms regulate appropriate information disclosure (doctor, close friend, co-worker)
precondition for properly functioning democracy

Sources

Amadeo, Ron. 2021. “Google Sends Anti-Regulation Propaganda to Small Businesses Using Google Maps.” Ars Technica. November 9, 2021. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/google-sends-anti-regulation-propaganda-to-small-businesses-using-google-maps/.

Hoven, Jeroen van den, Martijn Blaauw, Wolter Pieters, and Martijn Warnier. 2024. “Privacy and Information Technology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Winter 2024. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/it-privacy/.

Keegan, Jon, and Alfred Ng. 2021. “There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data.” The Markup. September 30, 2021. https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibillion-dollar-market-for-your-phones-location-data.

Reiman, Jeffrey. 1995. “Driving to the Panopticon: A Philosophical Exploration of the Risks to Privacy Posed by the Highway Technology of the Future.” Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal 11 (1): 27. https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol11/iss1/5.

Sax, Marijn. 2018. “Privacy from an Ethical Perspective.” In The Handbook of Privacy Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, edited by B Van der Sloot and A De Groot, 143–73. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Schuppe, Jon. 2022. “Cellphone Dragnet Used to Find Bank Robbery Suspect Was Unconstitutional, Judge Says.” NBC News. March 7, 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/geofence-warrants-help-police-find-suspects-using-google-ruling-could-n1291098.