Introduction: Privacy, Secrecy and Epistemology

Abstract

Concerns about privacy pervade human life, especially with the enormous growth of information and communication technologies over the past few decades. Unsurprisingly, the notion of privacy is being studied by a variety of disciplines, ranging from sociology and anthropology, to law and philosophy. Yet, despite all this attention on 'privacy', what exactly privacy amounts to remains less than clear. A similar story can be told for the notion of 'secrecy'. We probably all have our secrets -smaller ones or bigger ones -but how exactly we should understand the notion of a secret remains, again, less than clear.Apart from the question what privacy is and what secrecy is, we might also ask why one might want to protect one's privacy and why one might want to have secrets. Intuitively, one main reason why one might want to protect one's privacy is that one doesn't want certain others to acquire knowledge of certain private facts about oneself. And one main reason why one might want to keep certain things secret is that by allowing others to acquire knowledge of this particular fact, we might come to harm of some sort. We don't want just anyone to know just anything about us: we want to be able to control which persons obtain knowledge of which private or secret facts about ourselves in which contexts. Put differently: we don't want to be known to the same degree by just anyone in any old situation.Despite the intuitive connection between 'privacy', 'secrecy' and 'knowledge', it is interesting to note that in the literature on privacy and secrecy, scholars have thus far not taken advantage of the perspective of the philosophical discipline that studies knowledge (epistemology), and that epistemologists have likewise paid virtually no attention to privacy. An 'epistemology of privacy' and 'an epistemology of secrecy' are non-existent. There thus seems to be a mismatch between the sort of phenomena privacy and secrecy are, namely epistemic phenomena, and the research on privacy and secrecy that does not frame privacy in those specically epistemic terms.The papers in this special issue of Episteme aim to rectify this omission. They all deal with various aspects of privacy and secrecy from the point of view of epistemology. They thus try to connect epistemology to very important topics in our digitalized age. The papers collected in this issue were all presented at the 2012 Episteme conference at Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). I am grateful to all who presented their research on this occasion and who helped made this conference a very exciting event. I am especially grateful to the referees who carefully read and commented on submitted papers and to the editor of Episteme, Alvin Goldman, for encouragement throughout. Episteme, 10, 2 (2013) 99

Privacy and Lack of Knowledge

“…Indeed, most defenders of the knowledge account (e.g. Parent 1983: 269–70; Matheson 2007: 265; Blaauw 2012; Peels 2012) only claim that privacy can be had (or lost) about personal facts .…”

“…Second, several other philosophers (e.g. Parent 1983: 269; Matheson 2007: 259; Blaauw 2012; Peels 2012) have claimed that lack of knowledge is definitive of having privacy. In other words, someone not knowing something is necessary and sufficient for someone else having privacy about that thing.…”

Epistemological Dimensions of Informational Privacy

“…Yet another candidate would be barely justified true belief, by which I mean a propositional state that is sustained with as little epistemic justification as is possible for this state to be a belief-state, rather than some other type of state. (See also Blaauw 2012 and Fallis 2012 for different views. )…”

Secrecy and Conspiracy

“…Jeroen de Ridder (2013) has argued there is nothing inherently wrong with keeping secrets. Finally, there is Martijn Blaauw's work in "The Epistemic Account of Privacy," in which he argues that secrecy has to do with the hiding of facts (Blaauw 2013b). 2 It should be noted that this denition relativizes keeping secrets to S1; S2 might turn out to already know what S1 is attempting to keep secret from them (or may come to know it from S3, and so on).…”

“…Secrets, we might like to think, would be easier to capture. Yet there is, oddly, less philosophical literature on secrecy than there is on conspiracy theories, to the point that Martijn Blaauw in “Privacy, Secrecy and Epistemology,” an introduction to a special issue of Episteme , admits that there is not yet an epistemology of secrecy (2013a). 1 So like the terms “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory,” everyone assumes they know what a “secret” is.…”