Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 139

company for which we might or might not pay. But since, from this point
of view, privacy is not a commodity, we cannot use it as a currency. When
we agree to a website's “privacy policy,” we are actually only accepting
that we know about its privacy violation policy. We rely on government to
protect this citizenship right, and when it allows corporations to diminish
our privacy, or when government itself takes away our privacy and security,
it is failing to uphold a fundamental right.
Both of these approaches provide useful ways of thinking about privacy
and security. But they are weak in conveying a sense of what privacy and
security do for us or why we should care deeply about them. For that we
turn to a third perspective that tries to address these points as it provides
the foundation for the strongest private protection. According this view,
privacy and security are signiicant means of providing the space, the
breathing room, or the buffer between our selves and the world that is
necessary for self-development. They offer an essential space between the
individual and the world, including those elements of the world that might
beneit from taking, purchasing, or otherwise carrying out surveillance
that violates this space and makes it more dificult to safely develop a
self and an identity. In this reading, privacy violations are attacks on our
capacity for self-development.
Dissatisied with what they perceive as weak versions of privacy and
security that fail to address why these values are important, a number of
observers and scholars have adopted the self-development perspective.
As writer Jathan Sadowski explains, “Since life and contexts are always
changing, privacy cannot be reductively conceived as one speciic type of
thing. It is better understood as an important buffer that gives us space
to develop an identity that is somewhat separate from the surveillance,
judgment, and values of our society and culture” (2013). Scholars have
deepened this view. For law professor Julie E. Cohen, it means “creating
spaces for play and the work of self-making” (2013, 1911). For Woodrow
Hartzog and Evan Selinger, privacy protection goes well beyond keeping
businesses from gathering information about us for proit; privacy—or,
in their terms, obscurity—is essential for democratic societies because it
guards “autonomy, self-fulillment, socialization, and relative freedom
from the abuse of power” (2013). Finally, for Michael Lynch, privacy is
essential for the growth of human autonomy; putting it in strong terms,
he insists, “However we resolve these issues, we would do well to keep the