Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices.
In times of digital pervasion of everyday life, the EU has strengthened a normative idea of European fundamental rights, especially by referring to a strong notion of privacy protection. A normative corridor is evolving with the “right to privacy” at its heart, a right that will be instrumental in shaping the European legal architecture’s future structure. In this Article we argue that the constitutional protection of privacy rights is not only of individual relevance but also of major democratic significance: it protects the integrity of the communication structures that underpin democratic self-determination. The debate on privacy protection, however, often lacks a democratic understanding of privacy and misses its public value. Following an interactionist understanding of privacy and a discourse-theoretical model of democracy, our argument puts forward a conceptual link between privacy and the idea of communicative freedom. From this perspective, the substantiation of a European fundamental right to privacy can be seen as a possible contribution to promoting European democracy in general.
Der öffentliche und akademische Diskurs um Privatheit wird seit seinen Anfängen durch technische Entwicklungen vorangetrieben. 1 Auf Diagnosen einer Gefährdung des Privaten wird dabei auf jeder Stufe mit neuen rechtlichen Schutzansprüchen reagiert. Diese Dynamik setzt sich bis in die Gegenwart fort: Der neueste technische Innovationsschub, der unsere Gesellschaften gegenwärtig durchzieht, spiegelt sich in dem vom BVerfG neu geschaffenen Grundrecht auf "Gewährleistung der Vertraulichkeit 1 So führt z.B. die Erfindung der Fotographie und damit verbunden die sich entfesselnde Dynamik der Berichterstattung einer Sensationspresse in den USA zu einer ersten systematischen Begründung eines (ungeschriebenen) Verfassungsrechts auf Privatheit ("right to privacy") durch Samuel Warren und Luis Brandeis (siehe DuD 10/2012, S. 755-766). Die Erfindung des Telefons macht den rechtlichen Schutz einer "Privatheit auf Distanz" nötig, sofern in die direkte Kommunikation zwischen Personen ist nun eine technische Infrastruktur eingeschaltet.
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