Having me as an account holder, if it intends, Google can link my name with my photos, career history, and websites I am daily looking at (which I really don’t want to be disclosed). While I kind of trust their ability to maintain my mails and schedules, I am somewhat scared about its recent amendment on its privacy policy – Google broadened the range of surveillance after we are locked up in its services. It surely seems that privacy is formed through the interaction with the context.
It is a very interesting attempt to address legal issues from a postmodernistic viewpoint. The liberalistic notion of self is a moral belief, and to reexamine such assumption with findings from other fields of social science is undoubtedly a legitimate method. Since I am an old type believer in the human autonomy and dignity, and Professor Strahilevitz discussed in his book the relation between privacy (information) and exclusion (further, his paper is mentioned in the book), I was especially intrigued by her argument on privacy.
At first, I was frustrated because I expected something totally different and, reading from such a perspective, could not understand her point. Now I came to understand that she shows us some problems or oversights in the conventional discussion about privacy by using postmodernistic viewpoint with a graphical image of interaction between the society and self, rather than presenting a paradigm shift. Thus Chapter 6 is titled “Reimagining Privacy” rather than “Redefining”.
On the other hand, if such understanding of mine is correct, expressions such as calling liberalists romanticists are too strong. Although she claims that she does not introduce “autonomous selves through the back door”, the very fact that she has to start with that liberal ideal to establish her new image of privacy inevitably means that she does not successfully break off with our romanticism. The boundary management image very well explains the dynamics of intersubjective communication among people and society. However, I do not see any reason why the same model cannot be established on the liberalism. This model looks (to me) somewhat similar to the core/periphery model of Professor Merges, which is exactly a model of property rights, while Professor Cohen criticize rights theory approach to privacy. Perhaps, Professor Cohen does not assume any inviolable core privacy. But how different are they, if we design the core of privacy narrowly enough such that the range of actual protection (periphery) can adjust to the “contexts and places”?
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