Moor’s and Nissenbaum’s Accounts
Tavani goes on to point out that both James Moor and Helen Nissenbaum have developed accounts of privacy that seek to include these three forms. Moreover, from my perspective, what is most helpful about both Moor’s and Nissenbaum’s accounts is that they move us away from earlier, more spatial and static conceptions of “privacy,” and foreground instead the relational dimensions of privacy and private life – namely, the intuitions developed above that our senses of “privacy” in “Western” societies are shifting toward notions of “partial privacy” and “group privacy.” Again, what we think/feel needs protection are those aspects of our close relationships, as increasingly mediated through (analogue) digital media, that increasingly define our sense of selfhood as more relational than individual. In particular, Nissenbaum’s increasingly influential theory of privacy as “contextual integrity” builds on an explicitly relational conception of selfhood as introduced by the philosopher James Rachels. Nissenbaum thereby shows that what is at stake in our privacy concerns is, first of all, precisely the context of specific relationships within which a given bit of information is exchanged. These contexts or “spheres of life” include education, the marketplace, political life, etc. Each of these contexts entails, first, its own “norms of appropriateness” that “determine whether a given type of personal information is either appropriate or inappropriate to divulge within a particular context” (ibid.). At the same time, each context is further accompanied by its own “norms of distribution [that] restrict or limit the flow of information within and across contexts”
