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Article Excerpt
Abstract. The paper outlines a new interpretation of informational privacy and of its moral value. The main theses defended are: (a) informational privacy is a function of the ontological friction in the infosphere, that is, of the forces that oppose the information flow within the space of information; (b) digital ICTs (information and communication technologies) affect the ontological friction by changing the nature of the infosphere (reontologization); (c) digital ICTs can therefore both decrease and protect informational privacy but, most importantly, they can also alter its nature and hence our understanding and appreciation of it; (d) a change in our ontological perspective, brought about by digital ICTs, suggests considering each person as being constituted by his or her information and hence regarding a breach of one's informational privacy as a form of aggression towards one's personal identity.
Key words: information ethics, informational privacy, infosphere, ontological friction, personal identity
Introduction
"'One of these days d'you think you'll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?' Peggy said, getting up." She will not return to her wondering again, in the remaining pages of Virginia Woolf's The Years. The novel was published in 1937. Only a year earlier, the BBC had launched the world's first public television service in London, and Alan Turing had published his groundbreaking work on Turing Machines (Turing, 1936).
Distracted by a technology that invites practical usage more readily than critical reflection, Peggy only half-perceives that new ICTs (information and communication technologies) are transforming society profoundly and irrevocably. The thirties were laying the foundations of the information society. It was difficult to make complete sense of such a significant change in human history, at this early stage of its development. Nevertheless, an evocative phrase concerning the topic of this article appears in an essay on Montaigne, again by Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader, 1925): [we], who have a private life and hold it infinitely the dearest of our possessions [...], will find protecting it ever more difficult in a social environment increasingly dependent on Peggy's futuristic technology.
Today, the commodification of ICTs, begun in the seventies, and the consequent spread of a global information society since the eighties, are progressively challenging the right to informational privacy, at least as westerners still conceived it in Virginia Woolf's times. The problem is pressing. (1) It has prompted a stream of scholarly and scientific investigations, witness this special issue of Ethics and Information Technology; and there has been no shortage of political decisions and legally enforceable measures to tackle it. (2) The goal of this paper, however, is not to review the very extensive body of literature dedicated to informational privacy and its legal protection, even in the relatively limited area of computer ethics studies. Rather, it is to argue in favour of a new ontological interpretation of informational privacy and of its moral value, on the basis of the conceptual frame provided by Information Ethics (Floridi, 1999; forthcoming-a).
Informational privacy and computer ethics
Why have digital ICTs made informational privacy one of the most obvious and pressing issues in computer ethics? The question is crucial (3) and deceptively simple.
According to one of the most widely accepted explanations, digital ICTs exacerbate old problems concerning informational privacy because of the dramatic increase in their data Processing capacities, in the speed (or Pace) at which they can process data, and in the Quantity and Quality of data that they can collect, record and manage. This can be referred to as the 2P2Q hypothesis.
The trouble with any approach sharing the 2P2Q hypothesis is that it concentrates only on obvious and yet secondary effects of the digital revolution, and that it does so from a "continuist" philosophy of technology (more on this later). It thus fails to account for the equally important fact that digital ICTs are also responsible both for a potential increase in some kinds of informational privacy and, above all, for a radical change in its overall nature. ICTs are more redrawing rather than erasing the boundaries of informational privacy. A few examples may help to illustrate the point. Consider
* the "remotization" of information management, such as the ordinary phenomenon of booking, banking or shopping online;
* the growth of anonymous, indirect or non-personal interactions. According to a recent survey by Freever (a mobile-services firm, http://www.freever.com) 45% of Britons had lied about their location by text message; this is privacy as well;
* the much faster and more widespread revisability, volatility and fragility of digital data. Personal records can be upgraded or erased at the stroke of a key, destroyed by viruses in a matter of seconds, or become virtually unavailable with every change in technological standards, whereas we are still able to reconstruct whole family trees thanks to parish documents that have survived for centuries; or
* the various technologies that enable users to encrypt, firewall or protect information (e.g. with passwords or PIN).
In each case, it seems that digital ICTs allow both the erosion of informational privacy and its protection. The following, colourful episode is indicative: "Hong Kong businessmen, for example, once did not dare to leave their mobile phones switched on while visiting sleazy Macau, because the change in ringing tone could betray them. After the ringing tone for Macau was changed to sound like Hong Kong's, however, they could safely leave their phones on, and roaming revenues soared." (The Economist, December 2nd 2004).
2P2Q explains only half of the story.
The new challenges posed by digital ICTs are not only a matter of "more of the same". They have their roots in a radical and unprecedented transformation in the very nature (ontology) of the informational environment, of the informational agents (4) embedded in it and of their interactions. As will be argued in this article, understanding this ontological transformation provides a better explanation that is not only consistent with the 2P2Q hypothesis--now to be interpreted as a mere secondary effect of a far more fundamental change--but also closer to the kernel of the privacy problem in the information society.
Informational privacy as a function of ontological friction
Imagine a model of a limited (region of the) infosphere, represented by four students (our set of interactive, informational agents) living in the same house (our limited environment). Intuitively, given a certain amount of available information (which can be treated as a constant and hence disregarded), the larger the informational gap among the agents, the less they know about each other, the more private their lives can be.
The informational gap is a function of the degree of accessibility of personal data. In our example, there will be more or less informational privacy depending on whether the students are allowed, e.g., to have their own rooms and lock their doors. Other relevant conditions are easily imaginable (individual fridges, telephone lines in each room, separate entrances, etc.).
Accessibility, in its turn, is an epistemic factor that depends on the ontological features of the infosphere, i.e. on the nature of the specific agents, of the specific environment in which they are embedded and of the specific interactions implementable in that environment by those agents. If the walls in the house are few and thin and all the students have excellent hearing, the degree of accessibility is increased, the informational gap is reduced and informational privacy is more difficult to obtain and protect. The love life of the students may be deeply affected by the Japanese-style house they have chosen to share.
The ontological features of the infosphere determine a specific degree of "ontological friction" regulating the information flow within the system. "Ontological friction" refers here to the forces that oppose the information flow within (a region of) the infosphere, and hence (as a coefficient) to the amount of work required for a certain kind of agent to obtain information (also, but not only) about other agents in a given environment, e.g. by establishing and maintaining channels of communication and by overcoming obstacles in the flow of information such as distance, noise, lack of resources (especially time and memory), amount and complexity of the data to be processed etc.
Of course, the informational affordances and constraints provided by an environment are such only in relation to agents with specific informational capacities. In our model, brick walls provide much higher "ontological friction" for the flow of acoustic information than a paper-thin partition, but this is irrelevant if the students are deaf. More realistically, the debate on privacy issues in connection with the design of office spaces (from private offices to panel-based open plan office systems, to completely open working environments, see Becker and Sims (2000)) offers a significant example of the relevance of varying degrees of ontological friction in social contexts.
We are now ready to formulate a qualitative sort of equation, which will be needed to analyze the relation between digital ICTs and informational privacy. Given a certain amount of personal information available in (a region of) the infosphere I, the lower the ontological friction in I, the higher the accessibility of personal information about the agents embedded in I, the smaller the informational gap among them, and the lower the level of informational privacy implementable about each of them. Put simply, informational privacy is a function of the ontological friction in the infosphere. It follows that any factor affecting the latter will also affect the former.
The factors in question can vary and may concern more or less temporary or reversible changes in the environment (imagine three of our students living in a tent during a holiday, while the fourth is left home alone) or in the agents (e.g., two of our students change their behaviour because the other two have quarrelled).
Because of their "data superconductivity", ICTs are well-known for being among the most influential factors that affect the ontological friction in the infosphere. (5) A crucial difference between old and new ICTs is how they affect it.
Ontological friction and the difference between old and new ICTs
In the past, ICTs have always tended to reduce what agents considered the normal degree of ontological friction in their environment. This already held true for the invention of the alphabet or the diffusion of printing. Photography and the rise of the daily press were no exceptions. One can easily sympathize with nineteenth century concerns about the impact on individuals' informational privacy of "[r]ecent inventions and business methods [...], [i]nstantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise [...] and numerous mechanical devices" (Warren and Brandeis, 1890).
All this does not mean that, throughout history, informational privacy has constantly decreased in relation to the invention and spreading of ever more powerful...
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