Here’s a simple fact about life as we live it now: the objects we carry let us know more about the world than ever, faster than ever. But they also let the world know more about us. Knowledge has become transparent. We look out the window of the internet even as the internet looks back in.



Partly for this reason, writers like Jeremy Rifkin have been saying that information privacy is a worn-out idea. On this view, the “internet of things” exposes the value of privacy for what it is: an idiosyncrasy of the industrial age. So no wonder, the thought goes, we are willing to trade it away – not only for security, but for the increased freedom that comes with convenience.

This argument rings true because in some ways it is true: we do, as a matter of fact, have more freedom because of the internet and its box of wonders. But like a lot of arguments that support the status quo, one catches a whiff of desperate rationalisation about it as well. In point of fact, there is a clear sense in which the increased transparency of our lives is not enhancing freedom but doing exactly the opposite – in ways that are often invisible.

Philosophers have traditionally distinguished freedom of choice or action from what is sometimes called autonomy. To see the difference, think about impulse buying. You may “freely” click on the “buy” button in the heat of the moment – indeed, corporations count on it – without that decision reflecting what really matters to you in the long run. Decisions like that might be “free” but they are not fully autonomous. Someone who makes a fully autonomous decision, in contrast, is committed to that decision; she owns it. Were she to reflect on the matter, she would endorse those decisions as reflecting her deepest values.

Totally autonomous decisions are no doubt extremely rare; indeed, philosophers have long worried whether they are possible at all. But it is clear that we value autonomy of decision, even if we can only approximate the ideal. That’s because autonomy of decision is part of what it is to be a fully mature person. And that, I believe, tells us something about why privacy matters. It matters, at least in part, because information privacy is linked to autonomy, and thereby to the concept of personhood itself.

This becomes clear when we think about what goes missing when we lose information privacy. Imagine, for example, that you have a condition that compels you to say out loud every thought that comes into your head, whether you like it or not. Your most basic information – your thoughts – are no longer private; and in an obvious sense, you seem a less than autonomous agent. You are at the mercy of your condition; your decision to speak is not your own; your autonomy has been overruled.

Now imagine that using mind-meld technology, I read your innermost thoughts without your knowledge. Here too I am diminishing your autonomy, but in a very different way. Like the doctor who makes a decision to operate without consulting the patient, I’m diminishing your autonomy by undermining it. I’m making your decision to share or not to share information with me completely moot. I’ve already made that decision for you.

These are imaginary examples, but they point to a connection between privacy and autonomy that is often missed in contemporary debates. When the NSA hoovers up and stores citizens’ data, even incidentally, the worry is not merely “instrumental”. It isn’t just about what might happen to the data. Of course we should be worried about that: it might be used improperly to exploit or manipulate us.

But there is also a more insidious harm here, more insidious precisely because it is not visible. Systematic invasions of privacy are undermining our autonomy in precisely the same way in which the mind-meld case does. The government is not forcing us to make a decision. But it is undermining our autonomy nonetheless, by making certain decisions – decisions about what to reveal to others – moot.

Now governments naturally diminish our autonomy in all sorts of ways. Just participating in a government, as Hobbes stressed, is a trade-off. But there is something different in the case of systematic, unknown invasions of privacy of the sort perpetuated by the security state.

By invading our privacy without our knowledge, governments are making certain invisible decisions for the population. That is different to restricting autonomy by asking people to all go through a scanner at the airport. That is power visible to all, applied to all.

Nor is it like wiretapping a particular person that the courts have decided is a potential danger. Rather, more systematic, unknown invasions of privacy treat the citizenry as a whole in an unhealthy way.

Such programmes treat us less like autonomous subjects and more like objects. Individual choice about what is public or private is being usurped, whether we know it or not. That is an attitude that is corrosive of democracy, one made all the more corrosive by not being visible.

So whether or not the concept of information privacy – like that of a human right – is a creation of the modern age, the source of its value lies at the intersection of autonomy and personhood itself. That is a fact we would be wise not to forget, even if we cannot see the results of ignoring it.

Knowledge may be transparent; but power rarely is.