​

Before getting into Lynch’s position, you should know something about his career. Philosophy is a field that’s filled with specialists, and Lynch developed a stellar reputation for work on fundamental problems in metaphysics, logic, and epistemology in books like True to Life: Why Truth Matters, Truth as One and Many, and In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy. But after Edward Snowden’s stunning revelation Lynch was galvanized to start thinking seriously about privacy and writing about the consequences of living in a world where digital technology minimizes the ease by which interested parties can learn an awful lot about us—sometimes with folks having no clue as to what types of surveillance are occurring.

Partly due to conversations with Peter Catapano, the New York Times Opinion Editor, and partly due to a sense that journalists and activists were getting drawn into issues like how much personal information can be revealed through analysis of meta-data, and what kind of requirements the government should satisfy in order to engage in sweeping meta-data collection, Lynch thought something essential was being left out of the national conversation: the intrinsic values violations of privacy can harm.

Although intrinsic value defenses of privacy aren’t new to the world of philosophy— Daniel Solove’s seminal text, Understanding Privacy, lists several thinkers who provide “nonconsequentialist accounts of privacy’s value”—it’s hard to make a case that privacy violations can be wrong in and of themselves, full stop, regardless of how someone, some company, or some institution uses our personal information. Indeed, the easiest type of privacy harm to wrap our heads around involves situations where bad things happen because someone gathered or shared information about us.

Click Here to read more...