Introduction

It is no secret that the proliferation of social media platforms alongside the commodification of personal and biometric data has greatly eroded personal privacy. People today share more, express more, and reach more with their messaging than ever before, and institutions, in turn, collect, utilize, and sell the data intentionally or inadvertently made available by our digital and technological footprints. In the clinical context, health data (especially genomic data) is highly sought after for research and commercial purposes, which has opened up an ongoing debate on patient consent to the use of health data or biospecimens. These trends have led some, like Anita Allen, to dub today’s age the “Era of Self-Revelation,” which she characterizes as the “Great Privacy Giveaway.”  

How ought we think about privacy as a value? Both for ourselves and for others? Are there some things we ought to keep private, and others we can (or should) disclose more freely? Do we have moral, as distinct from merely self-interested, reasons for maintaining our own privacy (e.g., dignity, modesty, self-respect)? The conclusions we draw regarding these questions will help determine whether the ever-receding borders of the nonpublic truly signal moral catastrophe, or merely prudential hazard. 

Assigned Readings

Allen, Anita L., “An Ethical Duty to Protect One’s own Information Privacy?” 2013. Faculty Scholarship. Paper 451. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/451 

Thesis: Allen is deeply critical of the cultural paradigm in which we are “indifferent” to infringements on our privacy, and for which disclosure of private/personal information is the default, not the exception. The apparent normalization and ubiquity of lost or otherwise forfeited privacy does not do any normative work for Allen, as “rewriting the rules of privacy or abandoning privacy as a value altogether does not prove that privacy was or is mostly worthless” (Allen, 2013). She argues for a self-regarding duty (a la Kant) to maintain one’s own privacy because she considers privacy a prerequisite to genuine freedom, dignity, and “good character” (Allen, 2013). 

Discussion Questions

  1. Allen writes that duties to oneself include self-care and self-respect, promoting one’s rational interests in safety, security, freedom, and opportunity, as well as to act with self-regard, dignity, and integrity. Duties to others include not gratuitously causing bodily harm, keeping promises, not degrading or deceiving them. What might these proposed duties of self imply for the disclosure of health records or genomic data (e.g., for research or crime solving)? 
  1. Allen argues that the fact that individuals have an obligation to themselves to protect privacy generates a responsibility for laws, governments, institutions, companies, etc. to protect individuals’ privacy (e.g., to mandate that DNA companies like 23&Me have strict privacy policies so that investigators cannot search databases for crime scene matches). Does this follow? And do we need a duty of self-privacy in order to justify the proposed obligations companies and governments have toward individuals’ privacy? 
  1. Allen engages with opponents who either (1) deny that self-regarding duties are actual or even sensical, or (2) deny that privacy is anything other than a prudential good we could self-interestedly benefit from, but not be morally obligated to protect. Do her arguments succeed at rebutting these objections? 
  1. Allen considers that first-order duties to protect others from the harm of our disclosures or indiscretions may enjoin second-order duties to protect our own privacy, but ultimately rejects this argument. What prevents Allen from adopting this view? How does this view differ from her own?