Colin J. Bennett: In Defense of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime

Colin J. Bennett: In Defense of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime

Comment by: Michael Froomkin

PLSC 2011

Workshop draft abstract:

For many years those scholars interested in the nature and effects of “surveillance” have been generally critical of “privacy” as a concept, as a way to frame the political and social issues, and as a regime of governance. “Privacy” and all that it entails is considered too narrow, too based on liberal assumptions about subjectivity, too implicated in rights-based theory and discourse, insufficiently sensitive to the discriminatory aspects of surveillance, culturally relative, overly embroiled in spatial metaphors about “invasion” and “intrusion,” and ultimately practically ineffective.

On closer examination, however, I suggest that the critiques of privacy are quite diverse, and often based on some faulty assumptions about the contemporary framing of the privacy issue, and about the implementation of privacy protection policy.  Some critiques are pitched at a conceptual level; others focus on practice.  There is a good deal of overstatement, and a certain extent to which “straw men” are constructed for later demolition.

The aim of this paper is to disentangle the various critiques and to subject each to a critical analysis. Despite the fact that nobody can supply a precise and commonly accepted definition, privacy maintains an enormous popular appeal, in the English-speaking world and beyond.  It attaches to a huge array of policy questions, to a sprawling policy community, to a transnational advocacy network, to an academic literature and to a host of polemical and journalistic commentary.  Furthermore, its meaning has gradually changed to embrace a more collective understanding of the broader set of social problems. The broader critique from surveillance scholars tends to be insensitive to these conceptual developments, as well as to what members of the policy community actually do.