Can the battle for privacy be won in cyberspace?
The battle for privacy, waged upon fields of data, will be lost. The reason it will be lost is that, precisely insofar as our social functioning becomes a matter of interacting data, to that degree there is nothing to which a decent concept of privacy can attach. There exists, on the fields of data, neither a self whose dignity and privacy is worth defending, nor a self that a global data processing system is capable of defending. If privacy does not apply, in the first instance, to the socially embedded individual–if it does not first flourish as an ideal in intimate, personal spaces–it cannot flourish in cyberspace. Privacy is inseparable from a certain willingness to lower one’s eyes and to hold sacred what one knows about the other person. When it has become a mere drive toward anonymity, it necessarily vanishes as a meaningful standard for our life together, signaling instead our disconnection.
