| The problem with privacy as a concept is that it's ultimately just a metaphor. Privacy can exist in the real world, where our perception is limited by physical distance and obstacles. In the digital world, however, information has different barriers. We like to recreate the mechanics of physical information rules, like separating chats into "rooms", where you be in a room and see the information being exposed there, or not. But ultimately, these abstractions only serve us in in terms of usability; they don't share the same implications for information control that they have in the real world. Data in a chat room does not exist only within that room: the "room" itself is ultimately just a view into a much more messy underlying digital data structures. Something you say in a digital closed space can be heard, seen and read by somebody who never once stepped foot into the space. I don't think "privacy" is still a meaningful concept in the online world. The rules of "online privacy" are fundamentally different to those of the physical world and I would prefer using a different word altogether to make this clear. A few fundamental questions we need to answer before we can have any meaningful discussion on online privact: - What is information? - Is there an "atomic" unit of information? - When is a non-atomic unit of information "true" or "false"? - When are two units of information equivalent? - When are two units of information the same? - In what ways can we act on information? - In what ways can information flow through a network? - What legal connections can exist between a unit of information and a legal entity? Many of these questions also lead into topics such as copyright and intellectual property, which makes sense given that these are ultimately also frameworks to control the spread of information, just with a different motivation. Those are my thoughts anyway, and I haven't exactly looked any of that up so there might already be a consensus in philosophy on how to answer some, maybe even all, of those questions. |