Beyond the Social Value of Privacy

Abstract Privacy is something that is important to us at least in part because of other people. It can be valuable to help us to regulate our different social relationships, and show different sides of ourselves to our lovers, mentors, friends’ children, etc. In this paper, I argue that this is a good but incomplete account of the value of privacy. Privacy is also important in a non-social way, that doesn’t make primary reference to other people but that instead is about self-understanding and self-expression on one’s own terms. I begin by explaining what the social value of privacy is, and showing that it explicitly and implicitly affects a number of other ongoing debates in the contemporary privacy literature. I then argue for the non-social account of the value of privacy in Section 3. Finally, I look at two particular cases in digital ethics that the non-social account gives plausible verdicts for.