The Particularized Judgment Account of Privacy

Questions of privacy have become particularly salient in recent years due, in part, to information-gathering initiatives precipitated by the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, increasing power of surveillance and computing technologies, and massive data collection about individuals for commercial purposes. While privacy is not new to the philosophical and legal literature, there is much to say about the nature and value of privacy. My focus here is on the nature of informational privacy. I argue that the predominant accounts of privacy are unsatisfactory and offer an alternative: for a person to have informational privacy is for there to be limits on the particularized judgments that others are able to reasonably make about that person.