Privacy as a precondition to social protection: On why there is a need to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective
Mehek Vajawatt Msc, International Migration and Public Policy programme, Class of 2020, London School of Economics and Political Science
Photo by Adrien Olichon on Pexels Photo cropped and modified to black and white ABSTRACT
Concerns about privacy and its ambit have never been higher than they are today, in a post-Snowden and post-Cambridge Analytica world. These concerns bring to mind a quote from Franzen written in 1998 – “On closer examination, though, privacy proves to be the Cheshire cat of values: not much substance, but a very winning smile” (Franzen, 1998). It is interesting that ‘privacy’ as normative value is held as a ‘requisite of freedom’ (Douglas, 1952) and essential for ‘an autonomous life’ (Delaney and Carolan, 2008) while the contents of privacy are dismissed for being chimerical. Thus, the value attributed to the ‘right to privacy’ is far greater than the value attributed individually to ‘contents of privacy.’ This difference in normative values allows intrusions into ‘contents of privacy’ justifiable on grounds of a higher norm such as public interest or national security. Having contextualised the debate, I argue in my essay for an alternative conception of privacy, based on Karl Marx. Marxian ideology allows us to take seriously the critique of individualistic privacy notions as well as critically analyse the power imbalances of control and access of a State vis-à-vis an individual. In this essay, I engage with these chimerical characteristics of privacy; examining in the first half its liberal basis and its limitations. In the second half I present a Marxist critique of liberal notions of privacy and an alternative view of privacy. In this analysis, I examine challenges to building state capacity at global, national and regional levels in data protection and governance. The essay concludes with a renewed call for an examination of the liberal basis of privacy and to redefine privacy as a social, collective right instead of an individual one. [Privacy as a precondition to social protection: On why there is a need to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective]
INTRODUCTION
Concerns about privacy and its ambit have never been higher than they are today, in a post-Snowden and post-Cambridge Analytica world. Headlines bemoaning erosions of privacy have become common, followed most often with politicians declaring renewed efforts to protect privacy (Fuchs, 2011). In this cat and mouse game of erosion and protection of privacy, it loses its substantive meaning while having a winning smile (Franzen, 1998). The implications of loss of privacy have never been greater than today where every aspect of life has become entangled in a digital web of interconnectedness. All too often ‘the right to privacy is neglected as governments around the world (often in tandem with companies) rush to introduce new technologies in social protection systems’ (Collander, 2019). By embedding technology without adequate protection into systems meant to provide socio-economic rights, people at their most vulnerable at faced with a no-choice trade-off. They are to accept increasing surveillance and intrusion into their lives in order to assert their socio-economic rights such as right to food, housing and education and access social security and protection schemes (Collander, 2019). Today, systems and social protection have become reliant on collection and processing of vast amount of personal data and surveillance online and offline. In an automated world, opaque infrastructure and systems are hidden behind other normative ideals that compete with and erode right to privacy. This begs the question – what can be done? Does Marxist ideology help us resolve some key challenges in how we think about privacy as championed in liberal democracies? What does privacy look like in such a world? In this essay, I first engage with these Cheshire characteristics of privacy; the concept of privacy is examined from the perspective of various scholars who have attempted to define and refine the notions of privacy. Second, I analyse the criticism
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of an individualistic notion of privacy and study its limitations. This is done through the purview of consent and surveillance. Consent forms the basis by which individuals use, distribute or divulge personal information about themselves in the public sphere. Surveillance is used to examine the erosion of consent when privacy is weighed against normative values of public good such as safety, security or public good. Subsequently, the second half of the essay examines a Marxist critique of liberal notions of privacy. This approach is especially utilised to uncover the role of exploitation, inequality, class struggles and commodification of the personal information that is pervasive in the liberal notions of privacy. Finally, an alternative view of privacy is put forward based on a social conception of privacy. Wikipedia and WT.Social serve as examples of this alternative view of privacy. Conceiving contents of privacy as a collective right rather than self-possession allows individuals to seize the ‘power’ from states that seek to intrude upon privacy. The intrusion is no longer framed as good-of-one versus good-of-all. Contents of privacy are no longer choppable or parcelled among different rights. It is a single collective right claimed by the members of the society. The essay concludes with a renewed call for an examination of the liberal basis of privacy and to redefine privacy as a social, collective right instead of an individual one. I leave this introduction with words from Mario Savio’s ‘operation of the machine speech’ (Pacifica Radio Archives, 2007) given in support of the Free Speech Movement in 1964:
“Well, I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be—have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product. Don’t mean ... Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the
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government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
THE CONCEPT OF PRIVACY
Academic labour has diverged and converged in defining the concept of privacy. Professor Fuchs provides a comprehensive overview of the dominant ideas in the typology of definitions of privacy (Fuchs, 2011). He begins with the definition advanced by Habermas which modelled privacy as a relation between private and public spheres of a modern society. It was based on the idea that privacy distinguishes between what is visible and what is hidden. Gormley discerns privacy as the ability of an individual to self-determine and regulate information about themselves. Mills argued of privacy as some space in human existence that was sacred and entrenched from authoritative intrusion. Solove further distinguishes privacy as protection from the Big Brother and control over information use. Privacy was to be understood as a matter of pragmatism. These scholars build upon Brandeis and Warren’s famous definition of privacy as the ‘right to be let alone’ (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). Written as a critique against the prevalent tabloid journalistic practices of their time, privacy was meant to be invoked as a protection of the individual from external scrutiny. Right to be let alone was to be an umbrella right of protection against intrusion into the personal. The scale and extent of this protection was dependant on the context, and
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privacy extended as necessary. The normative value of privacy for Brandeis and Warren was greater than the content of personal life it sought to protect. Schoeman, Gavinson, Sewell and Barker, Allen and Burk (Fuchs 2011, 143) conceived privacy as the restricted access and limited control of others in inquiring into personal affairs of an individual. They explicitly linked the basis of privacy to the liberal school of thought. Mills, Brandeis and Warren conceive of privacy as an umbrella or a circle around an individual which is only penetrable at the discretion of the individual. Solove (2002), on the other hand conceives right to privacy as essentially a catch-all horizontal term for different but related practices. While these definitions differ in content and substantive meaning, what is common is that privacy is an individualistic, moral right. It is up to the individual to determine what is personal and private, and what is disclosed and thus, public (Moor, 1997). Privacy can hence be varied by the individual at different times and different places. Fuchs points to the most prominent privacy theory of this kind, which was postulated by Alan Westin. Westin defined privacy as the “claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” (Westin, 1967, p. 7 as cited in Fuchs, 2011). Of course, criticisms of privacy are not absent from academic endeavours. Fuchs refers to criticisms of privacy from the perspective of Etzioni, and Bennet and Raab, who have criticised right to privacy for undermining public health and safety (Fuchs, 2011, p.143). Privacy for them promotes an individualistic agenda at the expense of the common good. But commonly absent from these criticisms is a direct questioning of the liberal basis of right to privacy. It is assumed to be an individual right and criticised only on the extent to which this right exists vis-à-vis other human rights. Restricted access and control theory of privacy is postulated against other normative
288 [Privacy as a precondition to social protection: On why there is a need to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective] rights and common goods. Their criticism of the self-regulated determination of public and private is based on the idea that not all contents of privacy ought to be ‘private.’ Feminist critics (Lyon, 2001) argue that privacy offers protection to domestic abusers and right to privacy allows domestic assaults to become a matter of the ‘home’ instead of a matter for the public. Many scholars in that vein present the example of Sex Offender Registries, which consist of personal information but made public on grounds of normative public good. Tax havens and the financial privacy provided by the Swiss banking model are another example. Here, the connection between private property and privacy becomes crystallised. In countries like Switzerland, with a tradition of financial anonymity and protection of financial privacy, money is seen as an extension of personal right to privacy (Fuchs, 2011, p. 143). In fact, in most countries, profits and assets of private companies that do not trade publicly are treated as exclusionary to intrusion. This can perpetuate tax evasion, black money, and money laundering. It also masks wealth gaps and protects the rich from scrutiny of their capital acquisition practices (Fuchs, 2011, p. 143-144). Financial privacy reflects the classical liberal account of privacy (Fuchs, 2014). In these scenarios, the contents of privacy – namely personal information –are valued less against public interest, which must be balanced against an equally important normative ideal of privacy. This discrepancy in the value accorded to the normative notion of privacy (in law and in literature) versus its contents creates a conflict stemming from an imbalance of control and access (Dawes, 2011). It relates back to the persisting question of balancing individual rights against public common goods. However conceived, criticisms against this balance of the private and public are demarcated on the notion of controlling the extent of intrusion of the public into the private. However, critics of
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the concept of privacy have still assumed liberal individualistic notions of privacy as universal, prevailing and as characteristic of modern societies (Fuchs, 2011, p. 145)
CRITICISM OF PRIVACY AS A LIBERAL VALUE: CONSENT AND SURVEILLANCE
Privacy conceived as a liberal value has dominated much of the ideological debate on privacy and has informed public policy discourse. Following the liberal tradition, the concept of privacy has predominantly been developed as a negative freedom, as restriction of others from the personal and private spheres. This control and limited access paradigm of privacy relies on individual regulation and determination of what becomes known in the public sphere (Sevignani, 2013). The idea that only information we consent to becoming public actually becomes public was challenged by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It highlighted the extent of the commodification of personal information. Liberal notions of privacy conflicts with the need to maintain privacy against users who undermine their own privacy through ignorance, inaction or active publication of personal information. Cambridge Analytica served to underline the constant rift between the ideal of a right to privacy and need for surveillance in capitalist enterprise models where profit is the focus of conducting business. From an ideological standpoint, the liberal notion of privacy is rooted in the idea that there are distinct personal and public spheres (Fuchs, 2011). The autonomy of the private sphere is connected to individual possession and control over personal information. Thus, information can be equated to the right to private property where individual exercise possession over information and have the right to use, distribute or restrict access to their property. As Fuchs (2011) points out, Mill introduced the notion of privacy in relation to private property and spoke
290 [Privacy as a precondition to social protection: On why there is a need to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective] of the necessity of “the owner’s privacy against invasion” (Mill, 1965, p. 232). It necessitates consent to intrude into personal property. However, individuals participate in social and para social relationships and enter into business with other individuals and companies which require some measure of disclosure of personal information. When information becomes property, it becomes a commodity that can be exchanged for use of services online. Because markets are competitive in a capitalist economy, businesses are incentivised to collect as much information as possible in order to enterprise, advise or advertise their product. Competition creates a further incentive to collect information about users across platforms to generate patterns of behaviour and scale and generalise these patterns as much as possible. These scaling operations require intrusion into the personal sphere and consent is either ignored, bought or manipulatively obtained. Consenting agreements are wrought in excessive legalese, crouched in opacity and confusing terms and conditions (Bechmann, 2014). They are also presented as a one-time option to opt-in or out for an ongoing accumulation of information. Significant concentration of economic resources in the hands of few enables corporations to profit from users’ activity by surveilling, compiling and selling their information. By muscling out competition, lobbying, and determining the how and when information is presented, enterprises are able to create bubbles of information and walls within the public sphere that best secures their interests (Hern and Jolly, 2019). They structure attention by selectively displaying information, recommending particular content, highlighting sponsored messages and targeted advertisement and excluding users from profits (Sevignani, 2017). Furthermore, Sevignani (2017) argues that the conflict between the classes creates interdependencies between the users and the platforms they rely on for communication and connection, which can lead to further exploitation in societies with monopolies.
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The individualistic paradigm of liberal privacy relies on users acting by themselves on any violations of privacy. But in a capitalistic economy, personal information is converted into a commodity which has market value and is an economic resource. The process of commodification and marketability of personal information becomes institutionalised in an economy based on liberal, capitalist ideology. There is a paradoxical conversion of privacy as both a universal right to be protected but also something that can sold, exchanged or bought. (Helm & Seubert, 2019). These dynamics depend on compelling people to disclose personal data in order to use services, connect with others or to participate in public sphere. The aim of data collection is primarily to create and analyse profiles and categorise users, and is ultimately dependent on masses of people disclosing personal information (Helm & Seubert, 2019). While liberal privacy is actualised in data protection laws, it is parallelly hollowed out in commercial laws, enterprises and capitalist platforms. Surveillance is also rooted in state mechanisms. It necessitates intrusion into the personal sphere by the state by structuring the conflict between privacy and surveillance as one of individual good versus public good. Because privacy is rooted as individualistic, it legitimises violations of privacy and intrusions as necessary, and for the greater good. The requisite of obtaining consent from individuals is overridden by the requirement to police and govern activities that are contrary to state interests and to safeguard against harm. The normative ideal of privacy is weighed against national security and national interest, which is deemed as essential for the survival of the state and its citizens. In a post-Snowden world, it is evident that a normative promise of right of privacy is blurred and distorted by states for self-interest. Authors also argue that surveillance and erosion of consent can have positive value. (Haggerty 2006; Giddens 1981, 169). It can prevent terrorism and crime, and therefore safeguard
292 [Privacy as a precondition to social protection: On why there is a need to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective] individuals and the public from harm. Economically, surveillance of corporations can bring transparency to business practices and create better regulation, equality among competitors and prevent monopolies (Sevignani 2017.) While the argument is sound in theory, actual economic realities differ. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google, whose profits are larger than GDPs of some countries (Belinchón & Moynihan, 2018), are able to leverage their economic benefits against states and individuals. Their economic advantage feeds into informing public policy in this area by lobbying for further erosion of consent and freedom. The expansion and legitimisation of these tech giants, which are built on violations of privacy, overburdens individuals to enforce their rights (Helm & Seubert, 2019). Where there are entrenched institutional reasons for surveillance and overriding consent, the ideals of a form of liberal individualism becomes increasingly one-sided from a normative perspective. The dynamics between the normative ideal of privacy, on one hand, and socio-economic power structures, on the other, fosters the development of conditions under which commodification of personal communication takes place (Helm & Seubert, 2019). Because liberal privacy discourse is so highly individualistic, prevention and protection against exploitation by companies and states is left up to the individual (Fuchs, 2011). Liberal ideals create ‘responsibilisation regimes’ (Helm & Seubert, 2019) which suggests that if privacy is violated, it is because the user did not protect it effectively or that they participated in its violation by making use of private and state services. (Madden et. al., 2017: 118). Such responsibilisation frames the problem as individual rather than structural, rooted in asymmetric power structures. It neglects the inequality created by effect of skewed distribution of data, power and capacity (Helm & Seubert, 2019). The discussion has shown that the major points of criticism of the modern privacy concept are that privacy frequently takes
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on an ideological character in a liberal narrative and tries to mask negative consequences of capitalism (Fuchs, 2011, p. 226). An individualistic framing of privacy legitimises inequality in capitalist societies and opposes individual good against public good to justify erosion of privacy. As Fuchs (2011) argues, liberal theories of privacy – which do not consider privacy as historical, which do not take into account the relation of privacy and capitalism, or which only stress its positive role –hollow out the notion of privacy. It creates the Cheshire situation where privacy is a universal right but lacking in substance. Given this critical analysis of the liberal privacy concept that highlights its limitations, we turn to a Marxist analysis of privacy.
CRITICISM OF PRIVACY AS A LIBERAL VALUE: A MARXIST CRITIQUE
The dominant ideology in opposition to capitalist liberalism is Marxism. Marx’s work directly relates to exploitation, inequality and skewed power structures and can be utilised to conceive of an alternative notion of privacy. Marx and Engels critiqued liberal, individualistic ideals, and their ideas can be applied to an individualistic conception of privacy (Fuchs, 2011). First, as Fuchs argues, there is no existence in modern societies that is individual. Thoughts, ideas and actions are shaped by social conditioning and each pursuit of private interest is in fact socially conditioned and socially determined. Fuchs advances Marx’s argument that the notion of the private in a liberal political society neglects that all individual actions take place within, and are conditioned by, society (Marx, 1867). Because capitalism presupposes a highly competitive environment, unhindered acquisition of private property results in accumulation of wealth and capital in the hands of few (Marx, 1844, p. 41), who then utilise this capital to further their self- interest. The concepts of privacy and the private sphere thus
294 result in an ideological foundation of the modern class structure. A liberal concept of privacy privileges the rich owning class, who are better able to protect their private property (able to bring a suit against violations, benefitting from tax havens, informing public policy by lobbying etc.) at the expense of the poorer and non-owners of private property in the means of production. This individualistic notion perpetuates class structures and inequalities, while justifying the exploitation of the many by the few (Fuchs, 2011) A second critique of liberal privacy policy arises from the continued demarcation between the public and the private. As Marx (1843, p. 225) says,
“Man: [...] leads a double life. [...] In the political community he regards himself as communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers”
As Habermas argues (Fuchs, 2011), distinguishing between the private (leisure) and the public (work) feeds into a continuous cycle of consumption for the sake of private sphere and reproduction of labour by the exploitable in the public sphere (Habermas, 1989, p. 159). Seen from the lens of privacy, the private sphere isolates and externalises the individual from the public, so that the individual remains exploitable in the public sphere (commodification of personal information) and sole defendant of his private sphere (individualistic notion of privacy and responsibilisation). The liberal ideal of right to privacy is undermined by control of capital and private information by capitalist enterprises like Google or Facebook and not the workers (users) themselves. The distinction between the public and private serves “as a tool to establish an unequal relation of surveillance between Internet users and the owners of the means
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of online communication, such as server farms, software, and platforms” (Sevignani, 2017.) Surveillance as a precondition of targeted advertising in the public sphere is crucial to commercial activity. The commodification of Internet users’ activity reflects the class divide: The wealth of Internet service owners and providers is dependent on users, who in turn profit less monetarily and in terms of network-making power (Sevignani, 2017). Further, by framing acquisition of private property (i.e. privacy) as an individual endeavour, owing nothing to others, the notion of privacy becomes exploitable. Because the individual owes nothing to the society while acquisition in a capitalist world, nothing is owed to him by society while defending this private property. As Marx postulates, capitalism alienates humans from their social role, and is constitutive of the class structure and commodification. In interpreting Hegel, Marx writes “in alienated structures and societies, humans do not control the things, structures, resources and social relations they produce and that they produce with” (Fuchs, 2018). A third critique of liberal privacy develops from the ‘universality’ aspect of the liberal notion of privacy. It is grounded on Marx’s concept of fetishism, which mistakes man- made phenomena such as a liberal right to privacy as “natural and existing always and forever in all societies” (Fuchs, 2011). Declared universal and everlasting, liberal notions undermine the historical as well as anthropological aspects of the concept of privacy. Liberal fetishist thinking creates an illusion that privacy must always be individualistic, and underscores the idea that this is and has always been a universal truth. It dismisses societies where privacy is conceived differently see( Etzioni, 1999) or posited as undesirable in those cases. It also resists change by framing matters of erosion of consent and increasing surveillance in a liberal society as matter of course.
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Thus, there is a need to conceive privacy from a Marxist standpoint, as his understanding of class struggle can inform our understanding of exploitation in digital spheres today (Fuchs, 2011). Today, where commodification of personal information takes on new forms every day, and users’ activity online comes to resemble labour (generating profitable data for companies, actionable data for states) it is important to analyse how liberal notions of privacy contribute to the potential for exploitation. Marxist theories are important to understand this crisis. Marx’s analysis of capitalism and liberal societies highlights how something good (privacy) in the hands of capitalists can make the very thing antagonistic to the ideal. (Marx, 1867)
AN ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTION OF PRIVACY
The liberal notions of privacy have serious limitations. These limitations beget the question whether we must continue to frame the question as one of privacy or data governance, data activism or surveillance accountability (Taylor, 2017; Caplan et al., 2018). As Helm and Seubert argue, the notion of ‘privacy’ has endured and continues to capture the essence and existence of the challenges of the digital today. It informs the mechanisms of control in political structure, mechanisms of access in economic structures and its cultural prevalence. Arguing about alternative conceptions of privacy is essentially a rejection of a specific liberal ideology of individualism (Helm & Seubert, 2019). Understanding the limitations of privacy from its own perspective as well as a Marxist perspective highlights that these criticisms are not just related to capitalist economies. It is also a criticism of the political and ideological mechanisms behind them that enable structural inequality between the individual, the corporation and the state. The exclusionary and individualistic conception of privacy sets platforms ripe for
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exploitation. Thus, an alternative conception of privacy must go beyond these limitations. In this alternative privacy, transparency and collective protection must be the focus of policies (Helm & Seubert, 2019; Fuchs, 2011). This allows for a collective struggle and a social practice that is conducive to protection of a variety of collective autonomy and communicative contexts (Helm & Seubert, 2019) Castells (2008), and Helm and Seubert (2019) also refer to the relevance of privacy to cultivating genuine democracies. Castells highlights the globalisation of public debates and how mediation and coordination has become increasingly dependent on internationally operating but privately-owned platforms. Castells’ arguments become even more relevant today when one recalls the recent protests coordinated by Extinction Rebellion, a decentralised organisation, across the world on online across platforms like Basecamp (FAQs - Extinction Rebellion, 2020) that have an economic interest in users’ data and behaviour and are tools of exploitation and surveillance. They respond to government requests for information even if the individual has not consented for the data to be shared, magnifying the potential for exploitation. Thus, “understood as interdependent concepts, it then again becomes very clear that every crisis of privacy will necessarily go hand in hand with a crisis of the public and hence of democratic life per se” (Helm & Seubert, 2019 p. 16). As Helm and Seubert argue, the struggle of privacy in some of the most relevant political protests today, is not the ‘right to be let alone’ but rather a struggle of political collectives who demand privacy on community basis. In this alternative conception of privacy, privacy is central to political affairs rather than ancillary as is conceived in a liberal thought (Helm & Seubert, 2019) and requires a social conception of privacy to break away from the commodification of personal information (Sevignani, 2013). It requires non-market-based growth. Today, two such examples
298 [Privacy as a precondition to social protection: On why there is a need to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective] can be seen in the model of information site Wikipedia and the social media site WT Social Tribune. Wikipedia breaks away from the dominant business model of ‘free websites’ that use advertisement and selling personal information to sustain themselves. Wikipedia is community organised and sustained through crowd-sourced funding and recurring donations. Here we see an alternative conception of privacy where knowledge is not blocked behind paywalls, collecting personal information or displaying specific content depending on user behaviour and preferences or beholden to shareholders. The notion of privacy is grounded on the social notion of privacy and freedom from commodification of information. WT.Social, or alternatively known as WT Social Tribune, was founded by Jimmy Wales – the founder of Wikipedia –as a direct competitor to the business model of Facebook and other social networking sites such as Twitter. Following a similar business model to Wikipedia, the site is run on donations, with the entire initial investment coming from the founder, and is advertisement-free. Engagement is not prioritised over quality (Sekhose, 2019). It runs on proprietary software (Cuthbertson, 2019) that guarantees privacy based on social membership of a collective group (users of WT.Social) rather than on an individual basis of liberal thought. WT.Social is ad-free and is committed to being so (Kan, 2019). These two examples among many (Brave, Diaspora) highlight the strengths of conceiving privacy as a social right rather than an individualistic one.
CONCLUSION
Oft referred to and ill understood, defining privacy has proven to be chimerical. Liberal conceptions define privacy as a relationship between the private and public spheres. It is a notion grounded on individualism, control and limited access to the
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personal sphere. While actual definitions differ from scholar to scholar, the characteristics remain in common. Most famously, privacy is defined as ‘the right to be let alone’. Privacy is thus conceived as variable by the individual depending on time, person and place. The individualistic nature of privacy has been criticised on the basis of the public common good. By situating right to privacy as an individual right, it is criticised against national and public interests such as public health, security, and economic opacity around tax havens. This discrepancy between conflicting norms forms the basis of criticisms of liberal thought of privacy from its own perspective. Scandals such as Cambridge Analytica have served to highlight the extent of erosion of consent and surveillance. However, liberal thoughts on privacy persist as being individualistic, grounded as right to private property, and critique is aimed at strengthening the individual’s control over their personal sphere. Liberal notions of privacy create situations where consent erodes and intrusions are justified on the basis of good of one versus good of many. Diametric to the liberal ideology is the Marxist ideology. Marx’ work directly relates to exploitation, inequality and skewed power structures in economics and politics and can be utilised to conceive of an alternative notion of privacy. This criticism is highlighted in three points. First, there is no existence that is individual. Humans are shaped by social conditions. Second, a continued demarcation between the personal and the public creates a continuous cycle of exploitation where labour produced is not owned by the producer. From the perspective of privacy, the private sphere externalises the individual from public spaces and is commodified in public spaces where information is sold, but is left alone as the defendant of their private sphere. Third, the criticism is advanced on the ‘universalistic’ aspect of privacy. Crouched in Marx’s notion of fetishism, liberal ideas of privacy are conceptualised as natural and existing always instead of being
300 [Privacy as a precondition to social protection: On why there is a need to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective] a man-made phenomenon. This liberal fetishism phenomenon undermines attempts to postulate alternative views of privacy. The severe limitations of liberal conception of privacy require an alternative notion of privacy that is conceived on the basis of a social and collective right to privacy, instead of an individual one. It goes beyond the limitations of liberal privacy and is directly connected to politics, instead of being incidental to it. This alternative concept of privacy is not absent from the real world. Wikipedia and WT.Social are direct examples where personal information is not commodified, there is a social grounding for the basis of privacy and users own the means of labour and production. Privacy is a pre-condition for social protection (Collander, 2019). Erosion of privacy is an erosion of human rights as well as democratic values (Helm & Seubert, 2019). Data protection and privacy must be built into social protection schemes to ensure access is not conditional and people are not compelled into a trade-off between social rights. Given the limitations and existence of alternatives, there is a renewed requirement to examine our basis and preference for liberal conceptions of privacy.
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