Types of Privacy: On the Distinction between Locational and Informational

Abstract

One pressing concern in the world at the moment concerns the gathering and use of personal information in digital contexts. This may be one of the main reasons why so much of the recent literature on the philosophy of privacy focuses on ‘informational privacy’—that which can be explained in terms of information about a person, instead of something like the privacy of a particular location : a bedroom, a lockbox, etc. This paper argues that narrowing the focus in this way has led to some important mistakes about how privacy can be diminished. It is important to remember that there is rarely an easy or clear delineation between informational and locational privacy. In particular, I argue that this wider perspective allows us to see differences in how we treat information—privacy over one’s information is still diminished when that privacy is ‘invaded’ or ‘intruded upon’, regardless of the mental states of the invader. This has both practical upshots in the ethics of mass surveillance by non-humans, and theoretical upshots in the debates about the theoretical nature of privacy itself.