Dr. Mickey Zar- Politics of Privacy - Book Launch
(the event will be in Hebrew)
- Dr. Mickey Zar* - Politics of Privacy - Book Launch
May 10, 2022, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law
Privacy is political. Emphasizing its political nature, this book examines privacy as an essential human experience, as a social concept and as a legal right. In arguing for a political conception of privacy, the book shifts the grounds of discourse away from the individual’s psychological and intellectual needs, and towards the question of how the individual can find her place, or make room for herself, in society.
The information sphere, including the internet, is a political arena in which struggles over access, control, freedom, and privacy reach their clearest articulation. The book describes and analyzes the social and political conflicts that characterize the contemporary information sphere, conceptualizing them as a technological drama. The major forces in today’s ongoing power struggles are those supporting a prevailing culture of surveillance, pitted against those who pose resistance to surveillance and the practices that facilitate its entrenchment.
The drama unfolds in three acts. In the first act, influential political players promote compliance with the social norms that enable and support surveillance practices, thus delaying or preventing resistance. At the same time, significant oppositional players attempt to hamper the establishment of a surveillance society. These actors operate mostly within existing institutional frameworks while employing “the rules of the game” - through legislation, NGO’s or technology regulation. However, In the next two acts of the drama, less institutionalized players appear on the technological stage. Alongside “negative” tactics such as refusal to submit to biometric identification in the workplace, breaking CCTV cameras, or wearing masks that prevent facial recognition, these actors also employ affirmative strategies such as creating technological systems that enable anonymous online activity, or leaking classified information about governmental and corporate surveillance practices. Underscoring a political articulation of the protection of privacy provides the underpinning for the argument that the resistance to surveillance should be recognized as political, and thus potentially as civil disobedience, rather than as a criminal act.
In direct contrast to familiar claims that privacy serves the individual’s selfish interest in isolation, and against the rhetoric of “nothing to hide” that supports such claims, this book argues that privacy is an essential precondition for vibrant and thriving democracy. Protection of privacy is crucial for the individual’s self-definition, especially so for the individual’s political identity. Privacy protects the human potential for individual freedom of action, and its loss threatens the viability of acting politically.
*Dr. Michey Zar is a former fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (2018-19).
