'Distinguishing Privacy Law: A Critique of Privacy as Social Taxonomy' by María P Angel and Ryan Calo comments
What distinguishes violations of privacy from other harms? This has proven a surprisingly difficult question to answer. For over a century, privacy law scholars labored to define the illusive concept of privacy. Then they gave up. Efforts at distinguishing privacy came to be superseded at the turn of the millennium by a new approach: a taxonomy of privacy problems grounded in social recognition. Privacy law became the field that simply studies whatever courts or scholars talk about as related to privacy.
And it worked. Decades into privacy as social taxonomy, the field has expanded to encompass a broad range of information-based harms—from consumer manipulation to algorithmic bias—generating many, rich insights. Yet the approach has come at a cost. This article diagnoses the pathologies of a field that has abandoned defining its core subject matter, and offers a research agenda for privacy in the aftermath of social recognition.
This critique is overdue: it is past time to think anew about exactly what work the concept of privacy is doing in a complex information environment, and why a given societal problem—from discrimination to misinformation—is worthy of study under a privacy framework. Only then can privacy scholars articulate what we are expert in and participate meaningfully in global policy discussions about how to govern information-based harms.
