Privacy is the minimal self-integrity that underlies all cultural constructions

Evidence

Capitalist data relations redraw the boundaries around the subject’s space of action and reflection, dismantling the effective limits on which depends the very possibility of a self that can trust itself and others. When we strip down autonomy to this minimal space whose integrity is necessary for the self to be a self at all, we touch on the roots of the many and varied forms that privacy takes across the world and that human beings have defended throughout history. This is the philosophical and practical core of contemporary debates about privacy. Privacy, according to surveillance expert David Lyon, is “a pivotal concept that helps to throw light on what is wrong with mass surveillance.” Privacy is a matter of the self’s minimal integrity whose necessity persists beneath all cultural constructions. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 505

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions privacy not as a cultural variable but as the invariant minimum needed for selfhood — a strong definitional anchor for the data colonialism frame.
• XREF: This minimal-self-integrity account of privacy maps onto the attention/surveillance school’s critique elsewhere in the reading, while giving the colonialism frame a distinct philosophical grounding. — connects to: Compliance with surveillance regimes can threaten the minimal integrity of selfhood — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 501; Data appropriation threatens the minimal space of the self — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 75

Broader Connections

• Data appropriation threatens the minimal space of the self #complicates (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 75
• Compliance with surveillance regimes can threaten the minimal integrity of selfhood #complicates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 501