The Philosophy of Privacy

The Salzburg Ethics Group (https://salzburgethics.com/) are happy to announce their first online conference on the topic ‘The Philosophy of Privacy’. The conference is organised as part of the research project ‘The Source View of the Right to Privacy’, which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project number P 36226-G.

The event will provide a platform for scholars to present their work in plenary sessions, to share their ideas with colleagues, and to explore the ways that privacy intersects with other areas of philosophy. We’re excited to work alongside not just existing and published scholars in privacy, but also those who might be new to the topic, or those who are working in adjacent areas and who would like to explore ways in which they overlap.

Speakers at the conference will include Asja Ahatovic, Peter Königs, Leonhard Menges, and Elizabeth Ventham.

It will take place digitally, on the 16th and 17th July 2024.

We would like to invite submissions of abstracts of up to 500 words to be considered for the conference.

Possible questions and topics include (but are not limited to):

⁃ What is the nature of privacy itself? Is it a matter of, eg, not having information accessed, or of having control over our information?

⁃ How does informational privacy relate to other kinds, like local privacy or decisional privacy?

⁃ What is the right to privacy?

⁃ How does the right to privacy interact with other rights?

⁃ What does it mean to have privacy diminished?

⁃ Is privacy valuable?

⁃ What kinds of matters are private matters? Do they include things like emotions?

⁃ How do online interactions affect our privacy?

⁃ How does social media affect our privacy?

⁃ Can our privacy be diminished if our information is stolen, even if nobody accesses that information?

If you would like to present at the conference, please prepare an abstract of up to 500 words for blind review and send it in an email to [email protected] by April 21st. We hope to send out decisions soon afterwards.

We are committed to equality along all axes, and submissions from members of under-represented groups in philosophy are especially welcome. If you would like to indicate that you are a member of an under-represented group, please do so in the email, but not in the abstract.