What to Do When Privacy Is Gone

TL;DR

This paper explores ethical strategies for living in a world where privacy is lost, analyzing total exposure and transient identities through philosophical thought experiments and metaphysics.

Contribution

It introduces two novel ethical frameworks—total exposure and transient existence—for understanding human life after privacy diminishes, using philosophical analysis.

Findings

Total exposure fosters transparency but reduces freedom.

Transient identities enhance freedom but undermine authenticity.

Big data challenges traditional ethics linking authenticity and freedom.

Abstract

Today's ethics of privacy is largely dedicated to defending personal information from big data technologies. This essay goes in the other direction. It considers the struggle to be lost, and explores two strategies for living after privacy is gone. First, total exposure embraces privacy's decline, and then contributes to the process with transparency. All personal information is shared without reservation. The resulting ethics is explored through a big data version of Robert Nozick's Experience Machine thought experiment. Second, transient existence responds to privacy's loss by ceaselessly generating new personal identities, which translates into constantly producing temporarily unviolated private information. The ethics is explored through Gilles Deleuze's metaphysics of difference applied in linguistic terms to the formation of the self. Comparing the exposure and transience alternatives leads to the conclusion that today's big data reality splits the traditional ethical link between authenticity and freedom. Exposure provides authenticity, but negates human freedom. Transience provides freedom, but disdains authenticity.