Private Lives

Ray Briggs
How far does our right to privacy extend?

Josh Landy
Should secrets always remain secret?

Ray Briggs
Don’t some people have a right to know?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Tal,k the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
Except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at PhilosophersCcorner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about private lives.

Josh Landy
What private lives? Ray, I mean, look between companies stealing our data and people sharing every detail of their lives on social media, privacy is pretty much dead.

Ray Briggs
Well, not everyone’s on social media, and hey, people who choose to post there are giving up their information freely. If you don’t want to share something, just don’t share it. Nobody’s rights are being violated there.

Josh Landy
But even if you’re not sharing stuff on social media, you’re still being surveilled. Ever notice how you ask a friend about their shoes or something, and suddenly you’re getting 3000 ads for Nikes. How did that happen?

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on, you wanted those shoes? Yeah, sure. The company figures out they earn the market for new sneakers, and they pitch some ads to you. Where’s the harm in that? Would you rather get ads for, I don’t know, monster truck rallies or something?

Josh Landy
No, but I understand shoe ads. That’s relatively harmless. But what about my banking information, my DNA, my medical history? I don’t think random companies should have any access to that kind of thing.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, I agree about that, but I’m just talking about your hobbies, what you’ve had for lunch, silly cat pics you send to your friends. What’s wrong with people knowing about those things?

Josh Landy
It depends what your hobbies are. Let’s say one of your hobbies is being on a libertarian debate team, or you’re singing the Gay Men’s Chorus. You might have a boss who takes exception, then you could get fired for something that was none of your boss’s business.

Ray Briggs
Well, Josh, are you proposing that we’re supposed to hide our lives from each other. What kind of sad existence would that be?

Josh Landy
Well, it’s the one we already have. None of us share everything with each other. That’s exactly what it is to have a private life. I mean, I, for example, like to…

Ray Briggs
Like to what?

Josh Landy
Never mind.

Ray Briggs
Okay. I won’t pry, but I think you should be more open about who you are. Hiding things about yourself forces you to lead a double life. It’s a sign of shame, and it means the people around you don’t get to know the real you.

Josh Landy
Well, the real me, the real me in the classroom, isn’t necessarily the same as the real me at quiz night on a Tuesday with my friends.

Ray Briggs
Quiz night on a Tuesday with your friends, huh? Wait, wait, was that your secret? Yeah, you got me. Well, I think that as one of your friends, I have the right to know that kind of thing. I mean, what does it even mean to say we’re friends if you don’t share what’s going on within your life with me?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe I should tell you about my pub quiz hobby, but I don’t need to tell the world. And even among friends, there’s such a thing as TMI, isn’t there? Nietzsche put it really well, once and for all, there’s a great deal I do not want to know. Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

Ray Briggs
Look, I just don’t see how knowledge can be a bad thing between people who care about each other. I mean, the better we know each other, the better everything is okay.

Josh Landy
Great. Ray, let me tell you all about the three hour faculty meeting I was just at.

Ray Briggs
Okay, that is too much information. But seriously, Simone Weil says, “We need to know the other person just as they are in all their truth.”

Josh Landy
I still think some things should be kept to ourselves.

Ray Briggs
Oh, I still don’t agree, but I bet our guest will have things to say about that. It’s Lowry Predsley, author of “The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life.”

Josh Landy
But first, we wondered what difference it makes to be surrounded by cameras, whether on our own computers or out in the world. So we sent our roving philosophical reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to find out. She files this report.

The Simpsons
I don’t know if you guys should be talking so loud. Oh Lisa, it’s not like the government is listening to everybody’s conversation.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Back in 2007, The Simpsons Movie imagined what a society without privacy might look like.

The Simpsons
Hey, everybody—I found one! The government actually found someone we’re looking for! Yeah, baby, yeah!

Sarah Lai Stirland
Bart, Marge, and Lisa were fleeing Seattle to tell the world about the EPA’s plans to blow up Springfield, where Homer had just triggered an environmental disaster. The scene ends with the federal government arresting them. The NSA was able to track them down because they were eavesdropping on everyone. But the scenario isn’t just a gag in a sitcom. These days, the NSA amounts to only a sliver of all kinds of spying going on as our electronic devices record more and more information.

Kashmir Hill
We do live in a world where technology is infused in our lives and in which there’s just more data being collected about us than ever before, and we have very little control, because there are very weak laws in the United States that are protecting privacy.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Kasmir Hill is a technology reporter at The New York Times. She investigates our “digital exhaust,” which is what she calls all the data generated by our daily activities. Hill’s work exposes how companies manipulate information they’ve gathered so they can make judgments about us, often without our input or consent. For example, Her 2023 book, “Your Face Belongs to Us,” tells the story of a facial recognition startup that builds massive databases of millions of people’s biometric facial information gleaned from photos on the internet. The ACLU found that its activities violated an Illinois privacy law.

Speaker 2
lf we let technology determine what society looks like. We will live in a world where we would not have privacy or anonymity in public anymore, a world in which the internet would always follow you around and you would never be able to escape your history, who would all be tied directly to your face.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Another of Hill’s investigations revealed how insurance companies jacked up rates on unsuspecting drivers after buying driving habit data that was surreptitiously recorded from cars connected to the internet. These massive information gathering activities give both companies and governments a lot of power.

Daniel Solove
Ultimately, why are they gathering the information? It could be something like, Okay, we just want to deliver ads to people. We want to get people to buy stuff, or we want to induce people to do things.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Daniel Solove is a privacy expert at the George Washington University Law School.

Daniel Solove
Just recently, there was a big exfiltration of data from a lot of the government agencies about pretty much every American citizen. What are they going to do with this data? What’s going on? Nobody knows.

Sarah Lai Stirland
To be clear, lws exist to prevent the government from collecting your information for one purpose but then using it for another. But Solove says…

Daniel Solove
There’s a lot of exceptions that you could drive a truck through.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Even routine collections of information, such as public safety surveillance footage can pose unanticipated risks if it’s not carefully managed.

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
If you’re kind of in the lower part of Manhattan, you can probably be seen by an NYU security camera.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Cassidy Kanner-Gomes is a rising junior at New York University and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine. She notes that NYU operates more than 3000 surveillance cameras on campus. Students also have to use electronic passes to get access into buildings. She says surveillance has changed how protesters strategize.

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
All those students that were like taking over buildings and stuff in the 70s, it’s like you can’t do that anymore, because the school has a much stronger ability to figure out who each person is.

Sarah Lai Stirland
NYU says on its website that surveillance cameras and badges are meant to boost campus safety in the heart of a busy metropolis, but Daniel Solove notes that the federal government might later decide to demand access to this footage. That’s why we need to enforce clear rules and expectations and what we intend to do with all this data.

Daniel Solove
People should know what information is being collected about them, how it’s being used. It should only be stored for the period that it’s needed for use and then discarded. These are the basic principles.

Sarah Lai Stirland
So what are NYU surveillance and data policies? A spokesperson for the university didn’t respond to my questions. For her part, Canna Gomes doesn’t know what those policies are, either, she isn’t even sure what privacy on campus really means anymore.

Speaker 4
I at this point, I’m not entirely sure, because it feels like you kind of don’t have it.

The Simpsons
Can I even have some privacy here?

Sarah Lai Stirland
For Philosophy Talk. I’m Sarah Lai Stirland.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much, Sarah for that super interesting report. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about private lives.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Lowry Presley, professor of political science at Stanford University, and author of the new book, “The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life.” Lowry, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Lowry Pressly
Thank you. It’s a delight to be here.

Josh Landy
So Lowry, I know you’ve been thinking about privacy for some time now. How did you first get interested in the subject?

Lowry Pressly
So like a lot of people, I had a strong sense that privacy was really important in my life, but I had a hard time articulating just why. And at the same time, however, I also really thought that I was an open book, that I was unfiltered, and there was good evidence for both things being true. So I wondered, if this didn’t present a kind of conflict in my understanding of myself, was I deluded about how much I cared about privacy, the role that it played in my life, or Was I mistaken about how open I was with friends and strangers and everyone else? And so I turned to philosophy to come to grips with myself, and it turns out that I did value privacy as much as I thought I did. I just don’t set very much store by secrets, and I’m not particularly reticent.

Ray Briggs
Alright, what is the difference between privacy and having secrets?

Lowry Pressly
So I think one of the biggest errors in the past, say 30 years, of thinking about privacy, is to overlook the vast and wonderful vocabulary we have for talking about different kinds of obscurity and concealment. So two of these, not the only two are, are secrecy and privacy. So to motivate the distinction, think about what we talk about when we talk about the difference between our friends, Secret Life on the one hand, and his private life on the other. So the secret life seems to refer to something particular, like a second family and a fair and embarrassing hobby, is because for something to be a secret, there needs to be some definite piece of information that’s known by at least one person and kept from one other person. So if it turns out that our friend doesn’t have a second family, if he isn’t playing clandestine Dungeons and Dragons or turning into Mr. Hyatt at night or whatever, then the secret life evaporates. It turns out we were wrong to say that he had a secret life, but we can’t say the same thing about privacy. It’s really hard to come up with a counterfactual, according to which our friend’s private life would evaporate in the same way as his secret life, and this is because privacy refers to a type of concealment or obscurity that is fundamentally opposed to the creation of information where before there had been a more ambiguous, you might even say, mysterious form of unknowing.

Ray Briggs
You said that one of the differences between secrecy and privacy is that secrets are known by some people but then concealed from other people. But I think that’s true of some private information too. So what I look like in my pajamas. It’s known to me and my family. It’s not known to the general public, and I kind of don’t want the general public to look at me in my pajamas, but that seems private and not secret. Why is that?

Speaker 11
So I’ll say two things. First is, I would contest the idea that what you’re wearing is information. You know, this is your appearance. So one thing that privacy does is protect against the conversion of human life as it’s lived. There are facts of the matter about our lives, but protects against the conversion of those things into like the discrete evidentiary form of documentation that we call information. But there’s also a difference between privacy and secrecy, both on the inside and the outside of that concealment, so to speak. So the difference of being in private, wearing your pajamas, hanging out with your family, watching a movie or whatever, is very different from if you thought that you had to hide, or if that your pajamas were a secret to being kept from some people that experience is different, and the experience of those outside of this barrier to knowledge, let’s say, like you know, the closed drapes of your living room is also different, whether they regard it as private or a secret, being outside of a secret encourages a kind of attitude of suspicion and a lack of trust. You almost naturally wonder what’s going on on the other side of those curtains, whereas understanding what the limits to our knowledge those outside of your living room as the limits of privacy encourages a kind of social attitude of trustful unknowing.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about private lives with Lowry Presley, author of “The right to oblivion.”

Ray Briggs
What do you share with your nearest and dearest? What do you like to keep private? And when is it wrong to pry into other people’s lives?

Josh Landy
Prying, privacy, and personal preference—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Panic! at the Disco
,

Josh Landy
by the face is closing the door enough to keep your secrets private. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything.

Ray Briggs
Accept your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about privacy with Lowry Presley, author of the right to oblivion.

Josh Landy
Want to go public with your questions about privacy, email us comments@philosophytalk.org or comments on our website, and while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and uncover the secrets of our library of more than 600 episodes. So

Ray Briggs
Lowry at the end of the last segment, you were talking about the difference between privacy and how we associate it with trust versus secrecy, and how we associate it with surveillance. Can you say more about that?

Speaker 4
Yeah, so take an intimate relationship. It could be roommates. I’m going to use my wife, as I like to do, as an example, but in part because there’s a famous saying that there are no secrets in a marriage, and whether that’s true or not, it is the case that from morning to night, every intimate relationship, be it a marriage, domestic partners, that roommates, whatever, is structured just from morning to night by myriad privacy so you know behind the shower curtain, what you’re doing in the bathroom, what you’re thinking at a pensive moment, what you’re texting on your phone, and try to imagine structuring the same relationship, just as thoroughly in all of these moments where our perception or knowledge is blocked, not with privacies, but secrecies, suddenly the sort of respectful unknowing that really is kind of the what lubricates this relationship, the domestic life is replaced with a kind of with the grasping and patience of of surveillance

Josh Landy
that makes sense. I really like this idea that you know, somebody standing outside a a window with closed curtains could either be thinking, what are they doing in there, or just thinking, Yeah, let’s let them have their lives. They let me have my life. I let them have their lives. This is a much healthier situation of sort of mutual respect. But how far should it go in a loving relationship? I mean, I always think about Clarissa Dalloway and Virginia Woolf’s novel and how she deliberately chose one of the most, I mean, even by British Standards, one of the most repressed people in England, to marry because, you know a gulf there must be between two people, even in a marriage, and you’re kind of thinking, Yeah, but how far? How big a gulf? Don’t we want to be in a relationship where not only do we not have secrets between each other, but even the barriers of privacy are a little bit lowered, right? They get to see me my pajamas, and I don’t know they we go to the doctor with each other and things like that. So don’t we want to be in a relationship where we don’t really even have that much privacy anymore, because we have love instead, we have connection with intimacy?

Speaker 4
Yeah. And so I think there’s when we talk about privacy. And I think there’s privacy is almost unique in this, that there’s a tendency to be sort of absolutist about the two terms. But of course, life would be terrible if we were only in private. The goods of privacy depend on sort of opposite counter goods, like goods of publicity, goods of recognition, goods of being known. But I you know, by the same token, the goods of publicity, of being out there, of being intimate and so on, I think would also be terrible, or at least less good or deep without the countervailing goods of privacy. But even in the in the intimate relationship, where, yes, you do have lowered boundaries of privacy, there is still, I think, a role for privacy to be played. One very quotidian. One might be it sort of keeps the romance alive if you keep the door shut when you’re in the bathroom. These are the conversation I had recently. But another one is just going to be that there will always be limits to what you can know about even the person you know best, even yourself, but the person you know best, the person you love and live with and so on. They’re always going to be limits to what you can know about them. And how you understand those limits, as you were saying, the people outside of the curtains, seeing it one way or another, how you that translates to our relationship with other people as well. So how you understand the limits of of knowledge of the people you love is going to be highly significant for your relationship and your understanding of that person. I think love requires not just you know bumping up against the the limits of what you can know, but respecting it and trying. Trying to sort of cultivate a more valuable sense of unknowing.

Ray Briggs
I have a question about this because it partly sounds factual, like I just cannot ever know another person, because that’s not how people are or how other people are. And part of it sounds like about what I ought to do. I ought to not try to know another person. And I wonder, like, if the factual thing is true, why do I need also to tell myself not to try? Like, I don’t need to tell myself not to try to square the circle, because that’s impossible. So, like, why have a value of privacy? It

Speaker 4
does sound factual, but the kind of fact it is about what the limits to our knowledge, what exists beyond the limits to our knowledge, we should say, is a difference between privacy and secrecy. It’s a kind of social fact. So it’s not a fact about us in the same way as sort of our biology is, or the way optics, the physics of optics, work. But it’s a fact in so far as it is a fact that consists of social practices and understanding. So that privacy is what it is distinct from secrecy depends on our understanding of what the limits to our knowledge conceal and what lies on the other side of them, and the sorts of social practices and norms we develop on the base of that understanding. So it’s fragile. It’s a kind of thing that we need to cultivate, not like you don’t need to cultivate the fact that I can’t see through the walls here in the studio, but you do need to cultivate the idea that those barriers are those of privacy or rather than those of secrecy and and so on. So

Ray Briggs
actually, this raises a question for me about, like, cultural differences in rules about privacy, I have definitely like been in places where the rules about what kinds of questions you ask people, like strangers to make small talk are different. Like, do you can you ask a stranger whether they have a partner and whether they have kids? Can you ask a stranger what their job is and how much money they make. So it seems like there’s a lot of like, I don’t know, no fault, disagreement about what is private. How does one navigate across cultural differences? Or like, does your theory of privacy have anything to say about that?

Speaker 4
Right? There’s a wide variety, even within cultures, of what considered the invasive question, the most common response to which is either That’s none of your business or That’s private. Even within a culture, there’s just a wide variance of what kinds of question people consider invasive but what is common across that variance, it’s the thing by which we can see the variance is the idea of the invasive question is the idea of the barrier. So the way in which the theory travels is to the extent that these types of norms, although they vary maybe even wildly, are pretty universal. They’re universal as far as I know. I don’t want to claim to know every human culture of of all time, but they’re not universal across history. Is one thing. I mean, this is a distinctly modern value that we really started talking about in the 19th century. And as you know, we’ve been talking about the sort of elision between the difference between secrecy and privacy. It might be one that’s changing now, and so that’s also another reason for sort of making these normative arguments for a particular view of how to understand these types of limits.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about privacy and secrecy with Larry Presley, author of the right to oblivion. So Larry, I really love this picture that you’re painting for us of sort of two modes of existence, you know, one of which is clearly preferable to the other, this sort of secrecy mode that we don’t really he’s not super healthy. And here I think about some characters in Proust’s novel, he has these hyper jealous characters who are constantly surveilling their partners. What’s going on when I’m not around. And this is not good for anybody. It’s clearly not good for the partners, not good for them. And on the other side, there’s the idea that people are big, beautiful mysteries, and you emphasize the beautiful, right? I mean, I I can appreciate you in part for who I know you are, but also in part for the mystery that is you. And I can kind of leave that alone in a good way. But what do you what do you say about folks who see it differently. I think about the philosopher Diogenes, who thought, do everything in public. I think about hippies. I think about Montaigne, right, another philosopher who thought, you know, he profoundly believed that we change over time. He’s really interested in the inner life, but he wants to lay it all out in a book of, you know, 1000 pages. So are they making some kind of mistake, like, what’s going on with with folks who have a serious commitment to showing as much of themselves they possibly can?

Speaker 4
Well, first, I, you know, at the hazard of misquote. Thing proves to you, because there, there is a scene in the first book of that novel that I think really exhibits the beautiful power of privacy and what privacy gives not just we’re so focused on the individual when it comes to privacy, we’re about controlling and protecting my stuff, but part of my argument is that actually privacy has kind of public goods that radiate to the rest of us, not the one in private. And so there’s a scene in when Charles Swan is walking in the streets, and he looks up at Odette’s window, and it’s got a window screen, but it’s lighted, and it says he sees there the mystery of the human presence at once revealed and concealed by the lighted window. And there are also these pictures by the photographer Todd hito that show the lighted windows with curtain windows of houses at night. And there you get from the exactly as you said, the two kinds of worlds, the worlds in which those what we don’t know there is a secret, and the world which we don’t know is private. In the latter one, you get this kind of radiation of the mystery of the human presence that enriches and deepens our lives, even those of us who are in public, and I’d say for everybody except Diogenes, who slept in a barrel. I mean, he didn’t have no concealment. It was cold. Yeah, I think we are so focused, you know? I mean, he’s Diogenes is a hard case, also from just a different time these concepts weren’t available to him in the same way, it’s a modern idea. But you know, Montaigne is another one we focus so much on publication, on like what we’re putting out in the world. And I want us to remember that privacy plays just a much broader role in our understanding of ourselves, one another, of our daily lives. And I think we’re so focused on publication today in part because we’re thinking privacy through the lens of Internet technologies, of the digital technologies of social media, the so called privacy settings. And my fear is that thinking privacy through that lens is a bit like thinking of freedom through the lens of how we go to websites and visit places and associate and talk and and host online, you know, by analogy and you can it’s just so much easier to see if we were to take those as the core instances of freedom, how diminished our concept of freedom would be. And so what I would like to do is for us to see that we’re in danger. I think of doing the same sort of thing about privacy.

Ray Briggs
So that’s really fascinating, and I’d like to talk more about the internet in a moment. But I also wanted to ask if the concept of privacy versus secrecy could be kind of illuminating about a certain kind of homophobia. Being in the closet is having a secret. But also, I think, like people who say things like, Oh, that’s so disgusting. You know, keep it behind closed doors. Don’t tell me, are kind of demanding a type of secrecy rather than the privacy that straight people get to. You know, have a partner that they’re married to in public, and have part of their life with their partner not be something that the public is entitled to do? You think that that’s an illuminating way of looking at things

Speaker 4
absolutely and so there you all. You get a couple things. One you once again, we see how privacy isn’t just merely about concealing something or having various information. There’s all kinds of ways of describing concealment. Privacy requires, in a way, the participation of the public to treat what they don’t know about you in a certain way. And in cases of homophobia or loves that they’re not speak their name, and the kind of suspicion and even sort of seeking surveillance, persecution that goes with those sorts of things. You can see the typical way of making arguments about the badness of the clauses is about being confined there. But here you have another way of seeing the badness of it is that it’s not the right kind of concealment that queer people in these times were or are denied, the same kind of privacy that straight people get. And so here’s another instance in where we see privacy as a kind of thicker good than we tend to understand it today. It’s not a mere preference, it’s a good that can be subject to questions of justice depending on who does and doesn’t get access to the full good, not just concealment, because everybody’s concealed in this case, but not everybody’s enjoying the full good of privacy. Can we switch

Josh Landy
to a slightly different case I’m thinking now about state intrusions into people’s lives. There was a phrase we heard a lot after 911 if you got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, and this was supposed to legitimate all kinds of government intrusions into our personal business. What’s wrong with that way of thinking? And

Speaker 4
I think there’s a lot wrong with it. For one thing, it’s just It invites surveillance. I mean, you think if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, so to which you would expect the response to be? Well, okay, I have nothing to hide. Well, of course, the government comes back. Says, Prove it. Say No, I don’t want to prove it. And then the response to that is, well, why not? If you don’t have anything to hide, it’s just to invite surveillance. And that no is the no of privacy, not of hiding. If you had nothing to hide, then you wouldn’t really insist on the government not coming in. So we need to be able to explain that no but the more maddening thing about that statement, besides the fact that it’s ill intended and a bit of surveillance propaganda and invites surveillance and so on, is that it’s specious. We heard so many times said, both in Congress and NSA to Google and so on, that privacy is for those who have something to hide. And the way that we respond is, everybody has something to hide. I have nothing to hide, or whatever the responses were always in the terms that were framed by the bit of propaganda. And it just makes me want to pull out my hair that nobody says no hiding is for those who have something to hide. That’s just the obvious response, but it was unavailable, I think, to us, and it tends to be unavailable because we’ve inherited these concepts of privacy that fail to distinguish meaningfully between hiding and privacy,

Josh Landy
between something that’s secret and something that’s private, right? It’s, yeah, I don’t want you poking your nose in my business, not because I have a secret to hide, but because I have a private life. I sit around in my pajamas, and it’s not a secret. But, you know, I don’t want Uncle Sam coming into my house taking pictures of me lounging around watching TV. Makes perfect sense. Let me try a slightly more, I don’t know, devil’s advocate kind of question here, What if it turns out that some of that inner world is troubling, right? I mean, is it is it, is the inner world always a big, beautiful inner world, or can it be a kind of scary inner world? You know, Goya says that the Sleep of Reason produces monsters. Don’t. Some of us have monsters don’t. Maybe even all of us have monsters inside. So should we always be in that mode of have your inner life? It’s wonderful. I’m not going to try to know. Maybe you shouldn’t even try to know. It’s all great. Are there limits to that? Other cases where it’s kind of not great, and maybe, hey, maybe somebody should go to therapy. Figure out what the monsters are. Try to try to tame them a little bit. What do you think

Speaker 4
about that? Yeah, I think it would be false to say that there was anyone who didn’t have monsters. And even, you know, St Augustine camp full of monsters, thinking I’m the most monstrous one, it seems like a pretty good guy. But I think really, what we’re concerned with, when we’re concerned with this question of privacy, isn’t about the monsters we all have. And of course, it’s good to recognize that and maybe to be open about it. This is the therapeutic question, and the question about intimacy, it might hinder your relationship with an intimate friend or partner if you did keep all of your so called monsters inside. But I’m interested in our understanding of what exists beyond the limits to what we can know. So there’s always going to be a limit, and we might understand like the Goya quote implies that what is beyond the limit is monstrous. We might understand that what exists beyond the limit is beautiful and extraordinary, or whatever. And I think what the kind of unknowing that privacy instantiates in our social world, and by analogy, in ourselves in others, is neither of those, it is a way of encountering the unknown in ourselves and others that doesn’t posit something there, that doesn’t assume that there are bad things hidden there, or in a Calvinist way there, is like there’s our predestination is just off stage from us, but rather accepts that it is a source of potentiality and surprise in our lives. And yes, these can be bad surprises. Potential is for good and for ill, but I think you know that it is this ambiguous source of potential in human life is responsible for the sense that we as individuals, our relationships, and you know, the common world of politics and living together is always capable of changing, of evolving in new and surprising ways, and that seems to me to be a really, really valuable resource, both for individuals and relationships and and life in common.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about private lives with Lowry Presley, author of the right to oblivion.

Ray Briggs
What do you do to protect your privacy? Should we have the right to scrub our online data, or should people get to read your embarrassing Live Journal posts from 15 years ago,

Josh Landy
digging up the past or burying it deep, plus commentary from Ian Shoals, the 62nd philosopher when Philosophy Talk continues.

Speaker 11
Off. Think You Are? Put in your cheat to sense in don’t you got nothing to do? Then worry about my friends. Check it

Josh Landy
is what we do in private. None of anybody’s business. Or does someone have a right to know? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except. Accept your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Lowry Presley, author of the right to oblivion, and we’re thinking about private lives.

Josh Landy
So Larry, we’re all living in the digital age. How do we protect not just our secrets but our privacy?

Speaker 4
Well, I think that there are two things we can do at a bigger level of activism and politics and so on. I think we can reclaim a more powerful moral idiom of privacy, and, you know, one that distinguishes it from secrets and data protection and these things which are very important, but that we can protect in, you know, on their on their own terms, and an idea of privacy that isn’t silent about the good stuff of privacy, about what privacy gives us that doesn’t treat it as just a mere personal preference, but really as a fundamental human interest rooted in a view of human flourishing, and that I think would make our efforts to regulate and advocate for it more powerful. And then I think personally, I get this question a lot from my students, because they do, to the surprise of us old folks, they are really concerned with these issues, but they feel a little impotent, because the technological and economic forces are so big that it’s hard to know, what can I do and as an individual, there are limits to what you can do to solve these huge systemic problems. But I think one thing that’s worked in my life is just getting more comfortable with not knowing, not just becoming getting more comfortable with it, but cultivating valuable forms of not knowing. And it’s becoming reacquainted with the pleasures, the things that we get, the positive goods that we get, from limits to what we can know and control.

Ray Briggs
So on the question of limits to what we can know and control, one worrying digital trend to me, at least, is turning everything that a person does into data. 50 years ago, nobody would have thought to be tracking which ads I looked at. That wouldn’t have been technologically possible, nor would it have been conceptually possible. Now, companies are really excited to track which ads I look at and which products I buy. There’s a kind of what is bad about that question, and a what can we do about it? Question? So maybe pick

Speaker 4
one. Yeah, you put your finger on a really novel and serious challenge of our time having to do with tracking. And so it might not necessarily be about privacy, because a lot of this is things we do in public, but I think tracking poses a really serious threat to several goods, but let me give one in particular, which is trust. And by trust, I mean the opportunities to trust and opportunities to be trusted. Be the one who is trusted both are of which are very important. So you can’t trust without some type of limit to what you can know. The Russian saying trust but verify is famous because it’s ironic to the extent that you don’t, or at least it was ironic until Reagan used it literally. But to the extent that you verify, you’re not trusting, and we might think so what’s so bad about that I want to know where my kid is, so I follow them on, find my or whatever, so I can always know where they are. But I would say that we’re losing out in two ways there. One is that the opportunity to trust and really to have to trust others, to disappear into privacy where we can’t keep tabs on them, or to go out into the world untracked, is an important experience for the formation of adults, really, of subjects and of citizens, to have a kind of tolerance with what you can’t control. And also it’s a good resource for viewing the people you’re trusting as CO equals, as human beings worthy of your trust. And you can imagine this is also good for citizens. And the flip is also true that it’s really important for us to have the experience of going off, either out into the world or into a private where no one is keeping tabs on us, for us to get the sense that we are a, being trusted and B, therefore worthy of being trusted, and to have a sense that I’m worthy of being trusted is, in a sense, to say society deems me worry worthy, or my parents, if I’m an adolescent, of directing my life in the way that I see fit. And that seems a really important resource for the development of full fledged human beings that I think we lose to some extent when tracking becomes a ubiquitous normal practice of everyday

Ray Briggs
life. So I like a lot of what you said there, but I want to take exception to one thing you said early on, which is that if I’m doing something in public, it can’t be a violation of my privacy to be paying attention to it. I’m not actually sure that’s true. Like if I’m walking around in public looking like myself, people can notice me, but if they take a picture of me, and I don’t know, post it on the internet or even just keep it for their private collection, you might think that’s a little a little bit worried. Saying, from the standpoint of my privacy, even though, like, I was just out there looking like that anyway, and anybody could have looked at me, the picture is different,

Speaker 4
absolutely. And so this is even one that one of the earliest complaints about privacy is about photography in public, responding to the invention of the snapshot camera in the late 1880s and 1890s and so this has been a central concern about privacy since the beginning. And to go back to our discussion with secrets, you can see what’s happening here. The distinction between looking at someone on the street and taking a picture of them is it turns on the creation of some kind of information, some sort of evidentiary documentation of what happened, or the fixing of the flow of life as it’s lived into something concrete, like a photograph. And the reason I hedged on whether that’s privacy or not, and the reason I titled my book The right to oblivion, is that I think there are various ways in which we draw these limits to the proper reach of information in our lives that are all motivated by the same idea, but they’re not. They don’t all look the same. So I think we run the risk of sort of diluting privacy, on the one hand, by talking about interests of privacy and public and this sort of thing like because it’s just so counterintuitive, but it also sort of obscures the fact that these sorts of norms about taking photographs in public, moral and legal rights like the right to be forgotten, having to do with collective memory and so on, they’re meaningfully distinct in their form, but they’re all animated by this same idea about drawing limits, not to just who knows what, about information, but about the limit to information in human life, that

Josh Landy
makes a lot of sense. And of course, all of that’s under particular pressure. Now you mentioned the advent of photography being a big moment. And now, of course, the cameras are everywhere, and there’s all this tracking technology you mentioned, and facial recognition technology, and you know, these companies harvesting our data and all of that. That’s one sort of aspect of the problem. The other aspect is, is cultural. So it’s sort of becoming, it seems to me, sort of increasingly accepted that if you’re out for breakfast, you really need to take a picture and post it and, you know, and that’s the only the beginning of the kinds of the kinds of things that you you know, you see these posts and your friends, you’re like, ooh, don’t need didn’t need to know that. TMI, the other thing I’ve noticed is this, your silent speaks volumes. Thing on social media where I feel like, hey, people should have the right not to have an opinion on some things. If they have, they feel like they haven’t thought about it enough, they haven’t gathered the data. But no, no, you have to speak about everything all the time. And so what do you think about this, the cultural component, especially in relation to generational differences, that the younger generations are more comfortable sharing more of their lives than older generations or or is that overblown? What’s going on in the culture around changing norms concerning privacy and secrecy.

Speaker 4
I think that your examples are great and extremely evocative. So first, the idea of picks or it didn’t happen, and the second one, your silence speaks volumes. They both for me, what I’m hearing is our previous conversation about privacy is only for those who have something to hide. These all communicate a pressure to expose oneself, to make oneself definitive, either one’s views on a subject and the silence speaks volumes, or to document one’s life. These are the kinds of pressures to turn everyday life into information that we saw in the surveillance state for sure, and they become habits of thought also. And now in this sort of political economy of surveillance capitalism, they’ve become more and more ordinary. So I think they have a long history stretches back at least to certain strains of Protestant Christianity. But I do think that there is something intensifying about our moment now, because we have these technologies that are always on, always on us, always connecting us to publics in which we can participate by publishing and also be reading real time with a massive audience. And this is the kind of thing that you know Previously you would either need something supernatural, so like a deity, just an audience of one, or maybe the host of angels, or your you know your ancestors are watching what you do in your bedroom or something, but now it’s reality in the lives of many, many people. And so I think that those pressures which we tend to associate only either with something supernatural or with the surveillance state, the government, telling you you should tell us if you have nothing to hide, those are becoming aspects of the everyday life of everyone. I mean us too. It’s not just the kids, but I think the kids are all right. I teach classes on privacy and tech ethics at Stanford, and they all come really quite critical of these. Developments. They’re aware of them to a certain extent. They come to me because they’re looking for language, or they take my classes because they’re looking for language to put it into sort of a coherent understanding. And they’re looking for answers of what to do. And so the first part, I think, you know, philosophers were well suited to do. The second part is quite challenging.

Ray Briggs
So Lowry, we’re almost out of time. Do you have one last piece of advice for our listeners? So I’ve

Speaker 4
already mentioned the sort of the big one, try to become reacquainted with the pleasures of not knowing but a practical piece of advice might just be try leaving your phone at home for a day, for your walk to work, your drive to work, and remember what it was like before we carried these surveillance devices in our pockets at all times?

Josh Landy
Well, I, for one, have to become comfortable to all the things I don’t know, because there are so many, but I feel like I’ve learned a bunch from you today. Thank you, Larry, so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Our guest has been Larry Presley, Professor of Political Philosophy at Stanford University, an author of the right to oblivion, privacy and the good life. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, Josh, those are my personal thoughts, and I don’t feel like telling them

Josh Landy
to you. Touche, we’ll put links, I guess, not to that, but everything else we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophy talk.org where you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600

Ray Briggs
episodes. Now a man whose speed is none of your darn business, it’s Ian Scholz, the 62nd philosopher. Ian

Ian Shoales
Scholes, privacy is a tricky concept. We value it and destroy it at the same time, we used to send postcards from vacation. Now we take selfies. We used to have scrapbooks. Now we have Instagram. Pornography used to be private, just sneaking to the theater, or at least I did. Then came video DVDs, porno stars getting famous and paid actual union wages with the internet, amateurs jumped in with homemade porn sold on their own websites. Now we have subscription based porn streaming. Say hi to the object of your desire. Tell them what to do, give them a tip. I don’t know how that works. Venmo, true crime, which I watch a lot, features real people being murdered and murdering and mourning, real cases, real people Judge Judy. YouTube has also created a new category of celebrity where there’s people who have shows about watching other shows. You have your multi level marketing recruitment videos done by Desperate Housewives trying to get other housewives to sell overpriced beauty products, mainly, or rather, as it turns out, to get other housewives to sell overpriced beauty products for them when turned to the same until the whole enterprise collapses under its own weight. It’s called a pyramid scheme, which thrives in a world without heresy. Anyway, those videos are posted on YouTube by haters who gain fame. YouTube fame by showing them and then stop them every few minutes to snark about how stupid they are, kind of like Mystery Science Theater, only no movies just out of focus. Zoom calls the recruitment ladies always prefaced their pitch with their own personal story, which is always the same ad job, quit to have kids. Now, could use some extra income. MLM, here we come. Now you come too. As you can imagine, this was a real growth industry during the lockdown. You can start your own business from the privacy of your own home, which will soon be full of unsold, overpriced beauty products. You can’t unload. Suddenly, we were all on Zoom. You had to shave in private, even though we weren’t even going anywhere. It was also around this time and just before that, that shorthand became a bit mental. For instance, lockdown. Everybody knows what that means, but we weren’t locked down. Were we like Steve McQueen and solitary and The Great Escape we wish and conservative started throwing out the word woke, as if it was the worst thing since Hitler. Somewhat in the same vein, there was a reaction to widespread malignant narcissism. Speaking of true crime, many husbands and true crime shows that often disappear overnight or for a week and then explain to their wives it’s because they’re with the CIA now, most of the time, of course, they’re running off to a cocaine love nest or a second family about to be murdered and buried under the garden shed back of their ranch style home pictures of the garden shed on Instagram. Of course, that’s how they caught him. So more stories as fiction dwindles, an appeal stories shoot up based on a true story. Everything in the media which touches all of us, either directly or indirectly, gets more niche, driven every day. The Marvel Universe popped up from the basement fever dreams of comic book fans, and then went on to destroy movies as we know them before imploding. Take the term Latinx, which I read, was invented by activists, invented as a way to avoid gendering people as Latino or Latina who uses it only media who can’t resist this sort of thing. This makes for lively online discussions only. There are no discussions online, just catch phrases like defund the police, drain the swamp. We wear our once private selves, like a uniform Hillary’s pussy hat, defunct the Maga hat, going strong, kind of like a Stetson makes you a Texas Ranger. Or a red suit makes you a Mountie, a hoodie and mask makes you an ice agent. Shielding their identity as job one privacy issues, even as they invade the privacy of others who may or may not be innocent of any crime, the transition from private citizen to semi public customer might not even be called a transition at all. When we believe something, do we not buy it? You buy that. What are you trying to sell me? Bud, looks like a pig in a poke to me. Of course, that’s just a JPEG, and I understand there’s always some shrinkage in shipping. Nothing to do but delete Amazon from my phone. I guess like that’ll happen. I’ll just keep moving in my self driving car, and maybe they’ll leave me alone. I gotta

Ray Briggs
go Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland. Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is James Cass. The senior producer is Devin strovich. Laura McGuire is the Director of Research,

Ray Briggs
thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates, the views expressed or misexpressed

Ray Briggs
on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders, not

Josh Landy
even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk.org where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening and thank you for thinking

Speaker 12
they pretend like it’s getting to know you, when they’re really just sizing you up. Oh yeah, like we don’t know what Where are you from. Means might as well be asking about our income tax returns. I know you