Privacy rights and ‘naked’ statistical evidence

Limiting Access to Certain Anonymous Information: From the Group Right to Privacy to the Principle of Protecting the Vulnerable

“…Drawing on the insights of Munch [7], who develops the consequentialist approach to the right to privacy, accessing specific pieces of information about an entity (A) that could provide B with information that enables B to act subsequently in ways that would likely harm A in morally relevant ways violates A's privacy. As Munch emphasises [7], 'violating A's privacy could provide B (or others) with information that enables him (or them) to subsequently act in ways likely to render A worse off in morally relevant dimensions' [7, p. 3786]. Accordingly, the right to privacy, as a right to limit access to certain pieces of information, functions as a means to protect A against discrimination.…”

“…6). 7 It should be noted that Newman advocates for the corporate approach to group rights, yet in Newman [17], he uses the term 'collective' to describe group rights. To maintain consistency with the text, I use the term 'corporate' to describe Newman's theory.…”

“…I am not discussing a case in which data handlers use the information obtained at the group level to infer information about an identified individual (e.g., Anna is a homosexual because of the similarity of her purchase habits with the clustered group). For more information about whether and how putting a person in a group because their information provided is similar to others, and accordingly making inferences about an individual whose data were not used in the training dataset, violates the privacy of that individual, see Mühlhoff[1] and Munch[7]. Additionally, I am not discussing cases in which undisclosed attributes of a user are inferred based on the disclosed attributes of the user's friends on social networking sites.…”

“…In addition to the consequentialist approach this paper takes, I acknowledge other approaches to privacy, such as deontological and political ones. The deontological approach is concerned with autonomy[7], and the political approach addresses institutional or governmental power[13,27,28]. The exploration and discussion of whether deontological and political approaches defend the group right to privacy or view the group right to privacy as a collection of individual right to privacy, which might be violated due to the collection of information, are important but beyond the scope of this paper.…”

Inferences and the Right to Privacy

“…34 Of course, there may be other objections to my argument. One candidate might be derived from the view recently defended by Lauritz Munch (2021b). He defends what he calls the 'symmetry thesis'.…”