Privacy at the margins

Invited speakers:

• Sam Berstler (MIT)
• Lauritz Munch (Aarhus)

Traditionally, analyses of privacy start from hard cases of breach, such as reading other people’s diaries and letters without permission, wiring houses and passing on medical records, and these are well covered, for instance, by the so-called control account of the right to privacy (Marmor 2015, Menges 2024). Yet there are many actions and attitudes which are, as it were, on the margins of privacy, and which either are sketchy or uncouth but not obviously wrong, or are clearly wrong but not obviously a breach of privacy: passing on intimate information but in an anonymised way, novelists using others’ intimate information in writing, gossip, stalking, off- or online, gathering too much public information about a public person, deep-fakes, asking someone questions about their personal life, and the list can go on. Some of these have been recently discussed by philosophers, within or without the context of privacy. The conference thus aims to bring people together in order to discuss these in-between cases, and many other similar ones, and to think:

• To what extent are these practices wrong?
• If so, is it helpful to think of them using the concept of privacy?
• Do we need new concepts in the ethics of information and observation that go beyond privacy in order to cover these cases?