Tool Without a Handle: Privacy and Moral Hazard

Discussions of privacy tend to focus on the value of privacy.  This post agrees that privacy has value in practical terms, as an important moral principle, and for its contribution to human flourishing.[1]  At the same time, these observations are incomplete.  Privacy, like security and transparency, involves trade-offs.  Indeed, it involves trade-offs with precisely those other qualities – security and transparency in particular.  Privacy, for example, protects data that would reveal fraud, lies, and other wrongdoing. The trade-offs exist, also, within privacy itself.  Certain values that privacy enhances, it can also degrade, depending on factors such as context or on which party to an information exchange you happen to be.  For example, Daniel Solove observes that privacy is important because “in relationships…we depend upon trusting the other party,” and that “[b]reaches of confidentiality are breaches of…

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