Transcript PowerPoint - Rafael Capurro

Privacy in Internet from an
Intercultural Perspective
Rafael Capurro
International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE)
II Congreso Internacional en Ética de la
Comunicación
Universidad de Sevilla, 3-5 de abril 2013
Introduction
Internet Privacy – An Acatech (Deutsche
Akademie der Technikwissenschaften)
Project (2012)
http://www.acatech.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Baumstruktur_nach_Website/
Acatech/root/de/Publikationen/Projektberichte/acatech_STUDIE_Intern
et_Privacy_WEB.pdf
All quotes are taken from my contribution in
Ch. 2 of this report.
For a longer version see:
Rafael Capurro, Michael Eldred and Daniel
Nagel: Digital Whoness: Identity, Privacy
and Freedom in the Cyberworld. Frankfurt
2013.
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R. Capurro: Intercultural IE
Privacy and…

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“The concept of privacy cannot be
adequately determined without its
counterpart, publicness.
R. Capurro: Intercultural IE
…Publicness
Privacy and publicness are not
properties of things, data or persons,
but rather ascriptions dependent upon
the specific social and cultural
context. These ascriptions relate to
what a person or a self (it may also be
several selves) divulges about him- or
herself.” (p. 64)
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Being with others in the
world

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“A self, in turn, is not a worldless,
isolated subject, but a human being
who is and understands herself
always already connected with others
in a shared world.” (p. 64)
R. Capurro: Intercultural IE
Interplay

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“The possibility of hiding, of displaying
or showing oneself off as who one is,
no matter in what way and context
and to what purpose, is in this sense,
as far as we know, peculiar to human
beings, but precisely not as the
property of a subject, but rather as a
form of the interplay of a human
being's life as shared with others.”
R. Capurro: Intercultural IE
Revealing and Concealing

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“This, in turn, implies that the
possibility of revealing and
concealing who one is is always
already concretely shaped within the
rules of interplay of a concrete culture
within a shared world. I understand by
culture the totality of values, customs
and principles on which a society is
explicitly and implicitly based.” (p. 64)
R. Capurro: Intercultural IE
Cultures and …
“Accordingly, the very meaning of
private and public varies depending
on the culture, which does not imply
that these meanings and practices are
equivocal or incommensurable,
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…IT
for they occur in a shared worldopenness constituted by a network of
referential interconnections of
signification. This network of
interrelated signification is today
marked deeply by digital information
technologies.” (p. 64)
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Cyberworld and…
“The distinction public/private in
connection with the cyberworld is a
socially and culturally dependent
difference.
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… Cultural Dependency
Cultural dependency means that
differences in the understanding of
information technologies must be
discussed if an encapsulation of
societies and cultures is to be avoided,
through which a potential ground for
reciprocal trust would be
surrendered.” (p. 65)
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The Ethical Difference
“The distinction between self and thing
or, more precisely, between who and
what, is the ethical difference from
which the difference private/public can
be thought. Therefore we take pains
to spell out what whoness means.” (p.
65)
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Self and…
“The difference between self and thing,
or who and what, already points to the
necessity of working out and
presenting a phenomenology of
whoness in a turn away
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…Thing
from the modern 'matter-of-fact'
subjectivity of a worldless subject visà-vis an objective world, an ontology
which is tacitly presupposed as the
framework for reflecting upon privacy,
identity and freedom in the internet
age.” (p. 65)
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Digital…
“Who are we when we are in the
cyberworld? What does it mean to
have a digital identity? And how can
one's identity wander off into the
cyberworld?
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…Identity
In the debate in information ethics on
privacy in the cyberworld, this
question is understood mostly in the
sense of 'What are we when we are in
the internet?' It then concerns digital
data on individual persons that are to
be protected legally and ethically.” (p.
66)
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Whoness…
“When the question concerning who
crops up in the discussion in
information ethics, it does so usually
in the guise of implicit, and therefore
unclarified, preconception of what
'whoness' and 'personhood' mean.”
(p. 66)
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…in the digital age
“The debate over privacy thus
presupposes and skips over the
philosophical interpretation of what
whoness means in the digital age. It
begs the question.” (p. 66)
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Whoness and…
“The question cannot be answered
through a digital reduction that
equates whoness simply with digital
information about a person, or even
declares personhood itself to be
(ontologically) an informational data
bundle,
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…digital information
for such a reductionism leaves open the
question concerning how 'person' is to
be understood, what the specifically
digital dimension is in a conceptually
clarified sense, and what the interplay
is among these phenomena.” (p. 66)
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Privacy…
“The discussion in information ethics on
the concept of privacy has changed
and intensified over the past fifteen
years due to the broad commercial
and social use of the internet.
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…in Information Ethics
This discussion sometimes assumes an
ideological flavour when privacy in the
internet age is declared to be obsolete
or, conversely, defended in its
traditional sense, frequently without
having understood the unique, new,
existential possibilities and even new,
valuable, systematic, social
formations that are emerging.” (p. 65)
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Cultural Differences…
“Often cultural differences and
specificities are left out of
consideration in favour of considering
human beings simply as apparently
autonomous subjects in the Western
sense.
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…as Ethical…
Analyses in information ethics show, for
instance, that conceptions of privacy
in Buddhist cultures are the complete
opposite to those in Western cultures,
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… Differences
but that nevertheless reasons can be
given for why privacy in Buddhist
cultures still can be regarded as
worthy of protection in an ethical and
legal sense. Such a discussion is still
in its nascent stages, for instance,
with regard to Latin American and
African cultures.” (p. 65)
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Declarations…
“To what extent and in what form can
universalist approaches such as the
Declaration of Principles made by the
World Summit on the Information
Society, or the Internet Rights &
Principles Coalition
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… and so what?
pay regard to the particularities and
singularities of differing cultures, as
well as to concrete 'good practices',
when both global and local cultures of
trust and privacy in the internet are to
be engendered?” (p. 65-66)
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Intercultural…
„Recent research in information ethics
shows that the notion and practices of
privacy vary in different cultural
traditions, thus having an impact also
on digitally mediated whoness and
freedom.“ (p. 113)
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…Information Ethics
„We are still far from a global digital
culture of mutual respect and
appreciation based on trust with
regard to such differences.“ (p. 114)
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Buddhist Cultures
„We with what can be regarded as a
privative mode of whoness, namely
the ‚denial of self‘ in Buddhist and
community oriented cultures.“ (p. 114)
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Latin America
„In a second step, mostly implicit views of
publicness and privacy in Latin America will
be discussed, whose numerous and richt
indigenous cultures, along with various
forms of hybridization with European
modernity, in particular in the way privacy in
the cyberworld is played out, remain still
largely a matter for future analysis.“ (p. 114)
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Africa
„Finally, we take a look at African
traditions, particularly the concept of
ubuntu.“ (p. 114)
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