The journal Surveillance & Society just published a debate on the value of concept of privacy in surveillance studies and beyond. The debate was initiated by Colin Bennett's essay "In Defence of Privacy", my piece "Autonomy beyond Privacy?" was one of the responses to it. The others were by Pris Regan, John Gilliom and danah boyd.
Here's how my contribution concluded which summarizes the main point I wanted to make:
We should start from the understanding of what privacy is conventionally thought to achieve: individual and social self-determination. We need then to review the contemporary conditions under which this goal can be advanced and assess the role of privacy in advancing it. Today, it requires both the ability to make oneself visible to others in relatively open ettings, as well as means of mitigating the resulting power-differentials between the users who provide personal and those institutions which collect, aggregate and act upon this information. The notion of privacy is of limited use in the context of the first dimension, but remains vital in relation to the second.
