Abstract
In this chapter I identify three problems affecting the plausibility of group privacy and argue in favour of their resolution. The first problem concerns the nature of the groups in question. I shall argue that groups are neither discovered nor invented, but designed by the level of abstraction (LoA) at which a specific analysis of a social system is developed. Their design is therefore justified insofar as the purpose, guiding the choice of the LoA, is justified. This should remove the objection that groups cannot have a right to privacy because groups are mere artefacts (there are no groups, only individuals) or that, even if there are groups, it is too difficult to deal with them. The second problem concerns the possibility of attributing rights to groups. I shall argue that the same logic of attribution of a right to individuals may be used to attribute a right to a group, provided one modifies the LoA and now treats the whole group itself as an individual. This should remove the objection that, even if groups exist and are manageable, they cannot be treated as holders of rights. The third problem concerns the possibility of attributing a right to privacy to groups. I shall argue that sometimes it is the group and only the group, not its members, that is correctly identified as the correct holder of a right to privacy. This should remove the objection that privacy, as a group right, is a right held not by a group as a group but rather by the group’s members severally. The solutions of the three problems supports the thesis that an interpretation of privacy in terms of a protection of the information that constitutes an individual—both in terms of a single person and in terms of a group—is better suited than other interpretations to make sense of group privacy.
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Notes
- 1.
(Howe et al. 2008) and (Groves et al. 2013), for a review see (Mittelstadt and Floridi 2016). Most recent analyses of ethical problems in biomedical big data are provided in (Mittelstadt and Floridi forthcoming-b).
- 2.
For a similar position in philosophy of biology see (Khalidi 2013).
- 3.
- 4.
For the sake of simplicity in what follows I shall assume that if members of a set and the set have the same property F this is because the set inherits F from its members. This is not necessarily the case and things become more complicated if we include the case in which both members and their set may have the same property F but for different reasons, that is, if the relation between the F of the members and the F of their set is not one of inheritance but of repeated occurrence. For example, the set of all books without an author is also without an author, but not because of them, but because authorship does not qualify sets of books, only books.
- 5.
California S.B. 568 amends Division 8 of the California Business and Professions Code to add Chapter 22.1, see http://goo.gl/ODqtcO
- 6.
- 7.
See (Fineman and Mykitiuk 1994), and especially the chapter by Elizabeth M. Schneider ‘The Violence of Privacy’ a reprint of her article published in 1990.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Massimo Durante for his most valuable comments on a previous draft of this article; to Ugo Pagallo and the participants in the panel “Open Data and Data Protection: Problems and Perspectives”—organised at the conference Computers, Privacy and Data Protection 2014 (CPDP 2014) Reforming Data Protection: The Global Perspective—for their feedback; to the participants in the workshop on group privacy held in Amsterdam on the 8th of September 2014 for valuable discussions; to David Sutcliffe for his skilful copyediting of the final version and many insightful comments that improved it significantly; and to Linnet Taylor for her feedback on a penultimate draft of this chapter, and some enlightening conversations on the topic of group privacy. Her chapter in this volume makes a strong and convincing case for the protection of group privacy in contexts of geolocated data, especially in LMICs (see also (Taylor 2016)).
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Floridi, L. (2017). Group Privacy: A Defence and an Interpretation. In: Taylor, L., Floridi, L., van der Sloot, B. (eds) Group Privacy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 126. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46608-8_5
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