Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

a human “right to privacy”. It asks what impact the contemporary transformation of
privacy will have on human rights generally: whether the anxieties that data-gathering
technologies generate justify (or ought to arouse) human rights concerns, and whether
the “right to privacy” helps us adequately to understand and manage such concerns.
Whereas human rights inform this Discussion Paper at a fundamental level, they are
treated circumspectly rather than directly. Human rights other than privacy are considered
at various points in the Discussion Paper, notably the principle of non-discrimination
and the rights to freedom of expression and information. In the Discussion Paper these
rights are not treated comprehensively: that is a task for further research.
Finally, the Discussion Paper addresses informational asymmetry as a cause of anxiety,
a source of possible injustice and a potentially constitutive and ineradicable element of
current social arrangements.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the history of privacy, recalling its conceptual role
as a building block of modern statehood and giving particular attention to the public–
private divide. It draws on detailed accounts provided by Jürgen Habermas and Beate
Roessler and suggests that autonomy and informational control, generally regarded as
the key elements of privacy, are coming under stress due to extensive data collection
and processing today.
Chapter 2 examines the privacy–technology dynamic. It looks at the degree to which
the construction of privacy recounted in Chapter 1 is associated with technological
progress and processes and then draws on Jodi Dean’s seminal work on “technoculture”
to discuss how individuals (as data subjects) construct themselves through interacting
in technocultural data-centric public spaces.
Chapter 3 turns to surveillance. It offers a broad theoretical framework to help make sense
of contemporary developments, using Michel Foucault’s late work on “security”. Foucault
compared disciplinary models of government (exemplified in the panopticon) with security
models that provide conditions for the freedom and well-being of populations as a whole.
Against this backdrop, Chapter 3 discusses the degree to which ubiquitous surveillance
increasingly frames personal identity and how this in turn provokes anxiety.
Chapter 4 opens up a comparative dimension. The bulk of work on privacy, surveillance
and the technological construction of identity has focused, geographically, on the West
(or North), but the issues themselves are by now having an impact in every corner of
the world. With little solid material to work with, Chapter 4 tentatively picks out some
questions of importance to future research.
Chapter 5 turns to the law, in particular the right to privacy, data protection and human rights
laws in Europe and the US. It assesses the degree to which existing legal protections of
privacy address the various anxieties located throughout the Discussion Paper. Chapter 5
suggests that the relevant law is deficient in light of the contemporary predicament.
Chapter 6 focuses on boundaries and borders, and how three such notions (at the
personal, state and international level) are placed under stress by contemporary
developments in an expanding “dataverse”. It ends by returning to the larger question
of the role and capacity of human rights under these conditions of stress.
Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights