Diminishing our personhood

In an earlier post I described different ways in which States and private corporations surveilled and monitored individuals in order highlight the potentiality that these techniques have for the control and shaping of individuals. In this short essay I will try to unpack the concept of the right to privacy and by describing some philosophical theories show how the interference with it can result in an insidious harm to our agency.

Privacy and Agency

The right to privacy is an important requirement for freedom of expression and freedom of thought. The possibility of communicating anonymously for example, allows people to express themselves freely without the fear of retaliation or condemnation. Furthermore, one could infer that there is no possibility of freedom of thought if there is someone monitoring your moves; and ultimately, freedom could not be possible if someone is always watching.

According to Bernard Harcourt in the 1950s and 1960s, privacy was considered as something we needed for our existence. Moreover, he states that autonomy and anonymity “were viewed as integral parts of our environment and ecology, as essential ingredients necessary for human beings to thrive. We needed a room of our own, space to think and experiment, a place to be left alone”. However, he considers that nowadays privacy has transformed into some type of good that can be sold or bought due to the increase in the commodification of things. Meanwhile, according to Michael P. Lynch traditionally freedom of choice/action has been differentiated from autonomy of decision. He explains this distinction with the example of impulse buying: when we “freely” click on the button to buy something in the heat of the moment without that action or decision reflecting what matters to us after all. Lynch explains that this decision could be considered as “free” but certainly not as being completely autonomous. Someone who makes autonomous decision, is committed to the decision they make- that person owns the decision-. When that person reflects on the decision, she would validate, endorse it as being a reflection of her sincere values.

Lynch states that totally autonomous decisions are undoubtedly very rare (some might question if those are even possible). Nonetheless, for him we clearly value autonomy of decision, even if we only come roughly close the ideal. He states that the reason behind this is “because autonomy of decision is part of what is to be fully a mature person. And that, [he] believe[s], tells us something about why privacy matters. It matters, at least in part, because information privacy is linked to autonomy, and thereby an important feature of personhood itself”.

To better understand these ideas, professor Eben Moglen offers an explanation about privacy; he states that privacy can be understood of comprising three concepts: secrecy, anonymity and autonomy. Secrecy refers to the ability to maintain messages private, so that the content is only known by those who send it and those intended to receive it. Anonymity refers to the possibility of maintaining the identity of those who transmit and receive the message obscured. These two concepts are the ones we most often refer to as being targeted or violated by surveillance. However, as I proposed before probably our autonomy is the aspect of privacy more affected by monitoring and surveillance. Autonomy refers to our “ability to make our life decisions free [of] any force which has violated our secrecy or our anonymity […]. Without secrecy, democratic self-government is impossible. Because people may not discuss public affairs with those they choose, excluding those with whom they do not wish to converse. […]. Anonymity is necessary for the conduct of democratic politics [...]That autonomy is vitiated by the wholesale invasion of secrecy and privacy, that free decision making is impossible in a society where every move is monitored […]. In other words, […] privacy is a requirement of democratic self-government. The effort to fasten the procedures of pervasive surveillance on human society is the antithesis of liberty.”

The intrusions or interferences with our privacy undermine it. Our capacity to control our information and behavior is diminished, either because someone is directly controlling it and shaping our behavior or because they have access to it and decide not to act on it. From the perspective of the “knower” or the monitoring/surveilling party the very existence of the person being monitored shrinks. The relationship between those two is so uneven that the “knower” may eventually cease to recognize her (the individual subject to surveillance) as a full subject. Lynch explains this idea stating that the “knower” will learn the reactions to the stimuli the person subjected to surveillance has, why the person acts the way they do, and that person “may become like any other object to be manipulated even if” the knower decides not to manipulate her. The person being monitored will be dehumanized in the eyes of the knower. When a corporations profits from our information (our activities online for example) they intentionally treat us as objects (“object of profit”).

Conclusion

With State surveillance and monitoring by private corporation our agency is undermined, weakened. The effects these techniques have on our development and growth are not always evident, but they are constantly evolving and plotting against us. The various forms in which we are being molded without often realizing it, are reducing our ability of self-evaluation. We are acting based on what we think are our own desires, but there might always be an intruder in our own mental process. We, or most of us, want our actions and behaviors to be free from interference, most want to be able to autonomously chose which desires will become our will. Most of us don't want to lose our ability to explore ourselves as human beings, don't want to be treated as product or to be molded in order the be controlled. We need to reclaim our freedom.