Privacy

Privacy is ownership rather than concealment, and every clause of the definition says so. Ownership of a membrane, control over one's own circles of intimacy, the ability to set one's own boundaries, sovereignty over the innermost circle. Nothing is about hiding anything, which is why the usual defence that a person with nothing to hide needs no privacy does not engage with the claim. What is at stake is who decides, and the answer determines whether a person owns themselves. That is why the framework treats privacy violations as transfers rather than exposures. Removal of privacy and will from people to corporations and algorithms is a transference of dignity, since dignity is preservation of ownership over one's own inner circles of self. Torture is a struggle for ownership of the most intimate circle, the one protected by privacy, and if that ownership is lost the self will be sublated. Marsh's examples run from the famous to the ordinary and are the same operation at different scales. Celebrities face attacks on appearance, reputation and relationships alongside violations of privacy, all of which are tools of sublation. Creep shots imply ownership of the woman photographed, and the defence that she should not be ashamed of her body denies what was actually taken. She is explicit that laws are not the remedy, since laws inhibiting privacy violations already exist and only protect the powerful.

Privacy scholarship has moved in Marsh's direction over several decades. Warren and Brandeis framed it as the right to be let alone, Alan Westin as control over information about oneself and Irwin Altman as boundary regulation, which is very close to her formulation. Helen Nissenbaum's contextual integrity treats appropriateness of flow rather than secrecy as the criterion, and the nothing to hide argument has been answered at length by Daniel Solove. Marsh's addition is the connection to sublation, since making privacy the boundary of the innermost circle means its loss is not merely a harm but the precondition for a self being taken over.