Purely relational privacy leaves no entity whose autonomy is protected

Evidence

All values, such as privacy, are socially negotiated. But there is something distinctively complex about privacy and, specifically, the importance of privacy to autonomy (understood as the capacity to “find one’s own good in one’s own way”). We cannot find that path if we lose the “breathing-room” in which to develop as our selves. In what entity or process exactly are these new, more social notions of privacy or autonomy themselves grounded? Some suggest that “the self has no autonomous, precultural core” to be defended, but if values such as privacy and autonomy are entirely relational, containing in themselves nothing essential, then what entity exactly is it “whose” autonomy is to be protected? Today’s new practices and norms of data collection and processing are themselves surely social and cultural contexts too, but that does not mean that something fundamental for human beings is not at stake in the damage data relations do to privacy. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 562

Categorization

• QUESTION: The unresolved grounding problem — if the self has no precultural core, whose autonomy gets protected? — is worth pursuing against the relational-privacy literature.
• DEEPTHINKING: The tension between socially-constructed values and the need to protect something essential in the self is a genuinely difficult position the authors hold in tension rather than resolve.
• XREF: connects to: Relational privacy requires collective maintenance and second-order control over values — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 561; Privacy is fundamentally about decision rights over self-disclosure — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 283; Private reason means entitlement to difference rather than physical privacy — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 43 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Relational privacy requires collective maintenance and second-order control over values #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 561
• Ubuntu personhood defines the self only through communal relation #expands (0.75) — , The Rod and the Child, 4252
• Privacy is fundamentally about decision rights over self-disclosure #corroborates (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 283
• Private reason means entitlement to difference rather than physical privacy #complicates (0.70) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 43