Contribution to Keynote Panel ‘Privacy, Secrecy, and Publicity’

Privacy, as its English usage suggests, is a place and a possession as much as an idea or abstract right – a physical realm supposedly separate from public view. In a world in which technology permeates the personal, the everyday, the intimate, what meaning does this value have? Where privacy is voluntarily surrendered, what is it worth to individuals? And where the internet makes possible mass surveillance, what protections are there for the space, and the experience, of privacy? This conference examines not only the legal arrangements affecting privacy – and the time-lag between law and technological advance – but privacy as a philosophical concept and a cultural tenet. What divisions of activity and status created the idea of ‘privacy’ in the first instance? Is it a disappearing value, or is its erosion a source of crisis? Does the sheer extensiveness of the surveillance enabled by technologies of communication cancel the significance of such monitoring, or generate new forms of persecution?