Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)

Claiming that privacy is about transactions and that being private is the recess of information is not immediately clear. Yet, the common logic that something is private so long as it is not published means that what we value and retain as confidential must concern what we can potentially divulge and obtain. The right to privacy and its conflicts are within this order. But to encourage another view – where being private is not tied to any one thing — allows us to consider another way of conceiving how privacy should be respected.

Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)

Outside of the important work to legally refine privacy and our freedoms for information, it is important to improve the sense of what privacy is in itself. If we have a good working notion of what is private and whose expectations are the most important in protecting and sharing private information, we should be able to rehabilitate privacy from its confrontational sense. Legal work needs this domain of privacy-as-discord to develop the concept publicly, but we can also improve the private sense of privacy. If what we regard as fundamentally private is information on our states of being, then describing it outside of any conflict is worthwhile pursuing.

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