Everyone talks about privacy.
It’s usually left undefined.
But we still see privacy absolutists, who appear to believe under no circumstances should you share anything with anyone.
We think this position is impractical and philosophically misguided. In this blog we’ll explain why.
Everyone is a privacy rationalist
Everyone talks a big game on privacy.
But the term is usually left undefined. It’s hard to pin down a specific definition.
Today, it seems like rationalist ‘privacy as control’
Privacy is the strategic sharing or shielding of information
prevails. It’s nicely tractable.
It’s reflected commercially, for instance on iPhone
“Apps mind their business not yours”
But you can share your location Always, While Using, or Never.
It’s convenient to have your Uber come exactly where you are, even when you’re not using the app.
Even location sharing aside, hailing a cab with a human driver could be said to violate your privacy. Telling a driver where you’re going could leak information about yourself.
But of course we all hail Ubers and cabs and tell drivers where we’re going. [We tell them the exact address not three blocks away as an anonymization mechanism.]
Most of us navigate privacy choices pragmatically, opting for convenience, expression, and even a Foucauldian 'confession'. [We'll write about that in a future blog post.]
But for its nebulous nature, some take an absolutist stance on the issue.
Absolutely difficult
Sometimes also see a Privacy Absolutism of a form
Everything online should be anonymous.
Don’t get us wrong.
Third party cookies made the internet creepy. It’s kind of weird for many people you’ve never met to have data about you (some of it’s incorrect??) stored in an enterprise CDP. [But it’s definitely privacy preserving!]
At the same time, general anonymity isn’t really possible in most parts of public life. It’s even unclear what a general anonymity really means – that you could go in public and no one would be able to know anything about you??
We’re not sure that’s even possible, particularly for underrepresented or persecuted groups. The way you walk. The way you make eye contact. Whether explicitly stated or otherwise, these are forms of communication and betray an absolutely anonymous self.
Hedge funds even institutionalized this game with alternative data.
Tell me you beat the quarter without telling me you beat the quarter.
Identity is co-created
Privacy Absolutism as state or corporate policy seems to challenge development of a rich identity.
We’re deep into post-structuralist philosophy, and Paul Ricoeur’s theory of the self e.g.,
a narrative propelled by conviction mediated by interpretation
feels intuitive. Our sense of self is not fixed, but constantly evolving through our interactions and interpretations—both our own and others'.
This process of identity formation relies on our ability to share aspects of ourselves and receive feedback from the world around us.
For Paul Ricoeur, in his Oneself as Another,
"selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms."
where for Hegel
"Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two."
For Ricoeur, identity is the emergent synthesis of the self and the other.
Absolutist privacy – other than when desired by the individual, however effective (and particularly when declared by a corporate or the state) – can rob us of emergent identity by restricting exposure to the other and its interpretations of us.
If, per Ricoeur, our selfhood is a narrative mediated by interpretation – that of ourselves and others – if we cannot share aspects of who we interpret ourselves to be, we may fail to find the emergent self we may yet become.
We believe in “privacy as control” for many reasons, but Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another perhaps presents our deepest reason.
To become, we share what we want.
And it’s why we’re building an identity layer for personalized AI to do it.
