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A Buddhist Theory of Privacy
Abstract
This chapter is the heart of the book. Thus this will be the key chapter in the book. Buddhism
does not recognize the full ontological status of the individual
. Thus there is the question of how a theory that is based on the idea that the self is nonexistent could itself ground such a practical concept as privacy. The main idea is that privacy should be grounded, not on the metaphysical presupposition that the individual self fully exists as a subsistent metaphysical entity who deserves dignity
and respect, but on the idea that, even though the individual is not a fully subsisting metaphysical entity, their privacy should still be maintained because doing so will promote a set of goals and values that are desirable and are conducive to certain ends.
Chapters (3)
The chapter discusses the situation in the world today where privacy is being threatened by the spread of new technologies. As the technology spreads all over the world, it creates a situation where each of the world’s major cultures
has to find its own solution to the problem while maintaining congruity among each other. The chapter presents a rationale for a Buddhist
conception of privacy, which not only offers a solution for a particular culture, but is also intended to provide an alternative to the mainstream theories on privacy.
This chapter reviews the important literature, mostly in philosophy, that discusses privacy. Here the concept “privacy” is analyzed and the various theories laid out to provide a background for the more treatment later in the book. The chapter reviews how the major theories have defined the concept. The analysis of the concept leads to a discussion of privacy in relation with other important philosophical topics, such as autonomy
, privacy, and justice
, as well as the metaphysical problem of privacy and the individual
. The last topic is important because Buddhism
presupposes this view of the individual ultimately as a construct. This is in contrast with the standard liberal theory where normative guidelines on privacy rest on the notion of an autonomous, fully subsistent individual.
This chapter discusses the cultural implications of privacy. The threat to privacy does not restrict itself only to the West, but as the technology is spreading to almost every corner of the globe, so is the threat. The chapter reviews some of the salient research on cultural responses to privacy. How does the Japanese culture, for example, deal with the issue of privacy? And what could the West learn from the Japanese in their responses to the technologies that could imperil their privacy, and what are their attitudes toward the problem?
... His goal is not to criticize the Western philosophical tradition's approach to privacy per se. Rather, he is "looking for a way for privacy to be theorized and justified in the vocabulary of a thoroughly non-Western philosophical system, while maintaining its efficacy for today's globalized world" [34], p. 7). In his prefatory remarks, Hongladarom orients his work within the larger project of developing a non-Western ethics of technology that is simultaneously distinct from, yet compatible with, Western ethical concepts like privacy (2016, pp. ...
... In a similar vein, Hongladarom writes [34], p. 90): ...
Much has been written about artificial intelligence (AI) perpetuating social inequity and disenfranchising marginalized groups (Barocas in SSRN J, 2016; Goodman in Law and Ethics of AI, 2017; Buolamwini and Gebru in Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, 2018). It is a sad irony that virtually all of these critiques are exclusively couched in concepts and theories from the Western philosophical tradition (Algorithm Watch in AI ethics guidelines global inventory, 2021; Goffi in Sapiens, 2021). In particular, Buddhist philosophy is, with a few notable exceptions (Hongladarom in A Buddhist Theory of Privacy, Springer, Singapore, 2016; Hongladarom in The Ethics of AI and Robotics A Buddhist Viewpoint, Lexington Book, Maryland, 2020; Hongladarom in MIT Technology Review, 2021; Lin et al. in Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications fo Robotics, MIT, Cambridge, 2012; Promta and Einar Himma in J Inf Commun Ethics Soc 6(2):172–187, 2008), completely ignored. This inattention to non-Western philosophy perpetuates a pernicious form of intellectual imperialism (Alatas in Southeast Asian J Soc Sci 28(1):23–45, 2000), and deprives the field of vital intellectual resources. The aim of this article is twofold: to introduce Buddhist concepts and arguments to an unfamiliar audience and to demonstrate how those concepts can be fruitfully deployed within the field of AI ethics. In part one, I develop a Buddhist inspired critique of two propositions about privacy: that the scope of privacy is defined by an essential connection between certain types of information and personal identity (i.e., what makes a person who they are), and that privacy is intrinsically valuable as a part of human dignity (Council of the European Union in Position of the Council on General Data Protection Regulation, 2016). The Buddhist doctrine of not self ( anattā ) rejects the existence of a stable and essential self. According to this view, persons are fictions and questions of personal identity have no ultimate answer. From a Buddhist perspective, the scope and value of privacy are entirely determined by contextual norms—nothing is intrinsically private nor is privacy intrinsically valuable (Nissenbaum in Theor Inq Law 20(1):221–256, 2019). In part two, I show how this shift in perspective reveals a new critique of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff in J Inf Technol 30(1):75–89, 2015). While other ethical analyses of surveillance capitalism focus on its scale and scope of illegitimate data collection, I examine the relationship between targeted advertising and what Buddhism holds to be the three causes of suffering: ignorance, craving and aversion. From a Buddhist perspective, the foremost reason to be wary of surveillance capitalism is not that it depends on systematic violations of our privacy, but that it systematically distorts and perverts the true nature of reality, instilling a fundamentally misguided and corrupting conception of human flourishing. Privacy, it turns out, may be a red herring to the extent that critiques of surveillance capitalism frame surveillance, rather than capitalism, as the primary object of concern. A Buddhist critique, however, reveals that surveillance capitalism is merely the latest symptom of a deeper disease.
... In any case, this is only a sketch of an idea that needs to be much developed further . 7 See, for example, Lu (2005) ;Kitiyadisai, (2005); Nakada and Tamura (2005); Capurro (2005); Ramasoota (2000) and Hongladarom (2007Hongladarom ( , 2009Hongladarom ( & 2016 local cultures themselves to see if there is anything that can be used to support the right to privacy . In the case of Thailand where I am from, this would be to look at Buddhist thought and see if there is anything there that proves applicable . ...
Discussions in intercultural information ethics often focus on the problem of the universality of values, an understandable focus since cultures, when face to face with one another as a result of globalization, are bound to conflict over differing values. As information technology greatly facilitates the movement of thoughts and ideas, these clashes happen at an exponentially increasing rate. Such discussions usually occur between those who believe in a set of universal values and those who oppose the idea. Such discussions and debates thus often find themselves in a stalemate; they show every characteristic of an arcane philosophical dispute that does not seem to go anywhere. The following chapter argues for the rejection of the sterile and politicized debates that define the above stalemate. Instead of looking towards which set of values are universal and how are they are going to be justified, or how a set of values can be defended against others values claiming to be universal, the following paper instead proposes that talk of universality and cultural distinctiveness be discarded altogether in favor of asking which set of values serve the existing goals and fit with the desires of the people for a particular period of time and place more than other values. In short, the following paper argues for an abandonment of the question of which values are true and asks instead which values are useful.
This chapter lays the groundwork for an ethical approach to privacy in service design. It begins by identifying a gap in current service design and human-centered design research regarding informational privacy, and critiques Value Sensitive Design and its practical implications. The author argues that privacy legislation, such as in the EU, is insufficient due to loopholes and its inability to challenge surveillance capitalism. Privacy by Design is also critiqued for its compliance focus without addressing deeper privacy needs in service design. The second part emphasizes the importance of ethics over legislation for protecting informational privacy in service design. The author identifies the need to integrate privacy into service design practice and sustain it through ethics. They explore various moral approaches, ultimately advocating for Luciano Floridi’s information ethics due to its ontological link between information and human identity. This view, supported by intercultural information ethics, positions privacy as a universal human need, culturally specific yet universally relevant.
This study investigates how privacy as an ethical concept exists in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and American English. The exploration relies on two genres of corpora from 10 years: social media posts and news articles, 2010–2019. A mixed‐methods approach combining structural topic modeling (STM) and human interpretation were used to work with the data. Findings show various privacy‐related topics across the two languages. Moreover, some of these different topics revealed fundamental incompatibilities for understanding privacy across these two languages. In other words, some of the variations of topics do not just reflect contextual differences; they reveal how the two languages value privacy in different ways that can relate back to the society's ethical tradition. This study is one of the first empirically grounded intercultural explorations of the concept of privacy. It has shown that natural language is promising to operationalize intercultural and comparative privacy research, and it provides an examination of the concept as it is understood in these two languages.
Like many others, I believe that the information revolution is a constitutive moment in human history, and not only because of the development of technologies that change our habits and improve the quality of our lives. More than anything else, it is because the information revolution profoundly and dramatically changes our self-concept. That revolution is changing our understanding of the place we occupy in the universe (the erosion of anthropocentrism), forcing us to rethink our uniqueness as human beings and our human essence. I believe that the preconditions of our existence are changing dramatically nowadays, and consequently, our notions of belonging and identity require revision.
The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice (ADJRP) project aims to widen the lens of current thinking around data justice and to provide actionable resources that will help policymakers, practitioners, and impacted communities gain a broader understanding of what equitable, freedom-promoting, and rights-sustaining data collection, governance, and use should look like in increasingly dynamic and global data innovation ecosystems. In this integrated literature review we hope to lay the conceptual groundwork needed to support this aspiration. The introduction motivates the broadening of data justice that is undertaken by the literature review which follows. First, we address how certain limitations of the current study of data justice drive the need for a re-location of data justice research and practice. We map out the strengths and shortcomings of the contemporary state of the art and then elaborate on the challenges faced by our own effort to broaden the data justice perspective in the decolonial context. The body of the literature review covers seven thematic areas. For each theme, the ADJRP team has systematically collected and analysed key texts in order to tell the critical empirical story of how existing social structures and power dynamics present challenges to data justice and related justice fields. In each case, this critical empirical story is also supplemented by the transformational story of how activists, policymakers, and academics are challenging longstanding structures of inequity to advance social justice in data innovation ecosystems and adjacent areas of technological practice.
The debate on the ethics of privacy has been mainly dominated by Western perspectives, to the exclusion of broader ethical theories and socio-cultural perspectives. This imbalance carries risks; transplanted ethical norms and values can collide with those of the communities in which they are deployed. The consequent homogenization might also represent a missed opportunity to enrich and develop the current paradigm of privacy protection so as to effectively face new technological challenges. This article introduces and discusses the sub-Saharan philosophy of Ubuntu and argues how its conception of the self helps to reinterpret some of the emerging issues revolving digital information technologies. To begin with, a general overview of the debate on the ethics of privacy is provided by distinguishing between individual and relational privacy. Also, the challenges of 'group privacy' are discussed. Then, we introduce basic principles of Ubuntu focusing on how these may have affected privacy conceptions and related legal practices. By outlining opportunities and risks of intercultural information ethics, we argue how Ubuntu—similarly to other communitarian moral philosophies—strengthens the development of the concept of relational privacy and, in particular, of group privacy.
This chapter maps data privacy systems in Africa by providing insights into the nature of privacy concept in the African society generally, law reforms in the continent and enforcement. The chapter is organised in six sections. The first section provides an overview of the development of data privacy regulation as a result of the rise of new technologies. The second provides the context of the African society-its political history and culture. This section lays down foundation for Sect. 1.3 which deals with the notion of privacy in an African cultural context. Section 1.4 gives an overview of the international data privacy policies and their influence in the development of privacy policies in Africa. The general state of national privacy laws is presented in Sect. 1.5. Section 1.6 concludes the chapter.
Soraj Hongladarom is Director of the Centre for Ethics of Science and Technology and associate professor of philosophy at Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. His research interests include epistemology, philosophy of language, logic, as well as problems arising from the relationship between philosophy and literature. One of Prof Hongladarom's major concerns at the moment is the problems arising from the interplay between modern science and Thai culture. Dr Hongladarom is active in promoting awareness of bioethics throughout the Asian region through his writing and teaching.
1. Nie and Campbell (2007) claim that Eastern thought should not be identified with communitarianism alone, nor Western thought with liberalism or individualism. I agree with this statement. My proposal, however, is that positions such as liberalism or communitarianism should stand or fall on their own merits, and not merely through their identification with either the West or East.
2. My contention is different from that of Widdows (2007), who claims that virtue ethics in the West shows that there is essentially no difference between Western and non-Western ethics. As the case for Buddhism shows (which I do not have enough space to discuss in detail here), conceptual tools can come from either the West or East, not the West alone.
3. Research for this paper has been partially supported by grants from the Thailand Research Fund, the Centre for Innovative Nanotechnology, Chulalongkorn University, and the Thai Commission on Higher Education. I would also like to thank Alastair Campbell and Leonardo de Castro for their encouragement and support.
The perspective of various Buddhist traditions offers an illuminating insight into the nature and justification of the concept of privacy in information ethics. This chapter begins by outlining the major literature in the West that deals with the issue. What has emerged in the literature is a common assumption of a separately existing individual whose privacy needs to be protected. Then I present the thoughts of two Buddhist thinkers, Nagasena (1894) and Nagarjuna (1995), who are representatives of the two major traditions: Theravada and Mahayana, respectively. The two Buddhist saints agree that the concept of privacy is a construct, since it presupposes the inherently existing individual, which runs contrary to the basic Buddhist tenet of no-self. However, this does not mean that there can be no analysis and justification of privacy in Buddhism, because there is the distinction between two views regarding reality-the conventional and the ultimate views. Both are indispensable.
Privacy is a basic human need. It is anthropologically and psychologically rooted in the sense of shame and the need for bodily integrity, personal space, and intimacy in interpersonal relationships. Especially in modern Western cultures, it is understood as a necessary condition for individual autonomy, identity, and integrity (Altman 1975; Westin 1967; see also Margulis, this volume, Chap. 2). The desire for privacy is historically variable and has increased noticeably throughout the process of modernization. As Jürgen Habermas (1962) has shown in his seminal study The Transformation of the Public Sphere, this process led to the emergence of the private sphere as a corollary to the public sphere: the private sphere offers the protection and freedom necessary for the undisturbed growth and self-fulfillment of the modern subject, who then, as a citizen, can participate in exchanging opinions and forming public discourse in the communicative space of the public sphere.
While the Internet can be viewed as a global network of networks, many elements of Internet law remain delineated by sovereign nations, creating the potential for regulatory conflict and spillover. In particular, national governments have different views on the regulation of private information, and to whom it should be available. Concerns arise about how personal data and identifiers should be handled on the Internet. The U.S. and EU are each other's largest trading partners yet follow vastly different approaches in their respective attempts to regulate personal information and the digital economy. This article explores the cross-border variation in privacy policy in the U.S. and EU and discusses how differences in countries' values, social norms, and interests account for the variance in regulation. Distinct regulatory approaches and priorities between the U.S. and EU profoundly affect numerous industries in both regions. The article analyzes the example of passenger name records in the travel industry as a case study in this privacy policy contrast. The digital networked age is characterized by the increasing availability and pervasiveness of electronic communication products and services. These advancements, epitomized by the Internet, can greatly increase the speed and efficiency of transactions to catalyze productivity and economic growth. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) states, "The Internet plays an important role in the economy, as an engine for productivity growth and cost saving" (FCC Policy Statement, 2005).
I trace the development of an emerging global Information and Computing Ethics (ICE), arguing that ethical