Privacy in Internet from an Intercultural Perspective Rafael Capurro International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) II Congreso Internacional en Ética de la Comunicación Universidad de Sevilla, 3-5 de abril 2013

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 2 Introduction Internet Privacy – An Acatech (Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften) Project (2012) Acatech/root/de/Publikationen/Projektberichte/acatech_STUDIE_Intern et_Privacy_WEB.pdf All quotes are taken from my contribution in Ch. 2 of this report. For a longer version see: Rafael Capurro, Michael Eldred and Daniel Nagel: Digital Whoness: Identity, Privacy and Freedom in the Cyberworld. Frankfurt 2013.

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 3 Privacy and… “The concept of privacy cannot be adequately determined without its counterpart, publicness.

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 4 …Publicness Privacy and publicness are not properties of things, data or persons, but rather ascriptions dependent upon the specific social and cultural context. These ascriptions relate to what a person or a self (it may also be several selves) divulges about him- or herself.” (p. 64)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 5 Being with others in the world “A self, in turn, is not a worldless, isolated subject, but a human being who is and understands herself always already connected with others in a shared world.” (p. 64)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 6 Interplay “The possibility of hiding, of displaying or showing oneself off as who one is, no matter in what way and context and to what purpose, is in this sense, as far as we know, peculiar to human beings, but precisely not as the property of a subject, but rather as a form of the interplay of a human being's life as shared with others.”

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 7 Revealing and Concealing “This, in turn, implies that the possibility of revealing and concealing who one is is always already concretely shaped within the rules of interplay of a concrete culture within a shared world. I understand by culture the totality of values, customs and principles on which a society is explicitly and implicitly based.” (p. 64)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 8 Cultures and … “Accordingly, the very meaning of private and public varies depending on the culture, which does not imply that these meanings and practices are equivocal or incommensurable,

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 9 …IT for they occur in a shared world- openness constituted by a network of referential interconnections of signification. This network of interrelated signification is today marked deeply by digital information technologies.” (p. 64)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 10 Cyberworld and… “The distinction public/private in connection with the cyberworld is a socially and culturally dependent difference.

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 11 … Cultural Dependency Cultural dependency means that differences in the understanding of information technologies must be discussed if an encapsulation of societies and cultures is to be avoided, through which a potential ground for reciprocal trust would be surrendered.” (p. 65)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 12 The Ethical Difference “The distinction between self and thing or, more precisely, between who and what, is the ethical difference from which the difference private/public can be thought. Therefore we take pains to spell out what whoness means.” (p. 65)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 13 Self and… “The difference between self and thing, or who and what, already points to the necessity of working out and presenting a phenomenology of whoness in a turn away

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 14 …Thing from the modern 'matter-of-fact' subjectivity of a worldless subject vis- à-vis an objective world, an ontology which is tacitly presupposed as the framework for reflecting upon privacy, identity and freedom in the internet age.” (p. 65)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 15 Digital… “Who are we when we are in the cyberworld? What does it mean to have a digital identity? And how can one's identity wander off into the cyberworld?

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 16 …Identity In the debate in information ethics on privacy in the cyberworld, this question is understood mostly in the sense of 'What are we when we are in the internet?' It then concerns digital data on individual persons that are to be protected legally and ethically.” (p. 66)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 17 Whoness… “When the question concerning who crops up in the discussion in information ethics, it does so usually in the guise of implicit, and therefore unclarified, preconception of what 'whoness' and 'personhood' mean.” (p. 66)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 18 …in the digital age “The debate over privacy thus presupposes and skips over the philosophical interpretation of what whoness means in the digital age. It begs the question.” (p. 66)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 19 Whoness and… “The question cannot be answered through a digital reduction that equates whoness simply with digital information about a person, or even declares personhood itself to be (ontologically) an informational data bundle,

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 20 …digital information for such a reductionism leaves open the question concerning how 'person' is to be understood, what the specifically digital dimension is in a conceptually clarified sense, and what the interplay is among these phenomena.” (p. 66)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 21 Privacy… “The discussion in information ethics on the concept of privacy has changed and intensified over the past fifteen years due to the broad commercial and social use of the internet.

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 22 …in Information Ethics This discussion sometimes assumes an ideological flavour when privacy in the internet age is declared to be obsolete or, conversely, defended in its traditional sense, frequently without having understood the unique, new, existential possibilities and even new, valuable, systematic, social formations that are emerging.” (p. 65)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 23 Cultural Differences… “Often cultural differences and specificities are left out of consideration in favour of considering human beings simply as apparently autonomous subjects in the Western sense.

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 24 …as Ethical… Analyses in information ethics show, for instance, that conceptions of privacy in Buddhist cultures are the complete opposite to those in Western cultures,

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 25 … Differences but that nevertheless reasons can be given for why privacy in Buddhist cultures still can be regarded as worthy of protection in an ethical and legal sense. Such a discussion is still in its nascent stages, for instance, with regard to Latin American and African cultures.” (p. 65)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 26 Declarations… “To what extent and in what form can universalist approaches such as the Declaration of Principles made by the World Summit on the Information Society, or the Internet Rights & Principles Coalition

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 27 … and so what? pay regard to the particularities and singularities of differing cultures, as well as to concrete 'good practices', when both global and local cultures of trust and privacy in the internet are to be engendered?” (p )

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 28 Intercultural… „Recent research in information ethics shows that the notion and practices of privacy vary in different cultural traditions, thus having an impact also on digitally mediated whoness and freedom.“ (p. 113)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 29 …Information Ethics „We are still far from a global digital culture of mutual respect and appreciation based on trust with regard to such differences.“ (p. 114)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 30 Buddhist Cultures „We with what can be regarded as a privative mode of whoness, namely the ‚denial of self‘ in Buddhist and community oriented cultures.“ (p. 114)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 31 Latin America „In a second step, mostly implicit views of publicness and privacy in Latin America will be discussed, whose numerous and richt indigenous cultures, along with various forms of hybridization with European modernity, in particular in the way privacy in the cyberworld is played out, remain still largely a matter for future analysis.“ (p. 114)

R. Capurro: Intercultural IE 32 Africa „Finally, we take a look at African traditions, particularly the concept of ubuntu.“ (p. 114)