Why the NSA didn’t diminish your privacy but might have violated your right to privacy

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Abstract
Many believe that privacy is a function of others not knowing or rationally believing certain facts about you. But intuitively, it seems possible for a perpetrator to violate your right to privacy without learning any facts about you. For example, it seems plausible to say that the US National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) PRISM program could violate the privacy rights of people whose information it collected, even though the NSA mostly just collects the data without examining it, and therefore does not gain knowledge about specific individuals. Taken together, these observations create the challenge of aligning one of the most popular accounts of what privacy is with a suitable account of the right to privacy. Call this the alignment challenge. I criticize two recent responses to it and offer my own: the inquiry account, which holds that privacy rights protect against certain forms of inquiry.
Funding Information
  • Carlsberg Foundation (CF20-0257)

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