The Epistemology of Privacy
Laura Hernández

Abstract:
Privacy is ever so important in the digital age. To demand protection against privacy invasions, a necessary preliminary step is to elucidate what privacy is. This thesis aims to investigate the nature of privacy via two main research directions. First, throughout this thesis, I motivate and defend that our intuitions about privacy respond to two separate notions: descriptive privacy and the normative right to privacy. For this purpose, I present, defend, and expand on the Hybrid Account of Privacy by Véliz (2024). Second, I show that insights from epistemology can aid in understanding and formulating more clearly the descriptive and normative definitions of privacy.
On the one hand, for the epistemology of descriptive privacy, defined as a ternary relational state, I discuss relevant positions in the literature to study the epistemological nature of (descriptive) privacy losses. I argue that subject A loses privacy over their personal information p with respect to individual B if three conditions are satisfied: (1) p is true, (2) B believes that p, and (3) B’s true belief is linked by some form of epistemic merit, i.e., it is justified, formed in a reliable process, or has a causal link.
On the other hand, for the epistemology of the normative right to privacy, I present, defend, and expand on the right to robust privacy by Véliz (ibid.), where a subject has a right against privacy invasions in the actual world and counterfactual worlds. Then, I embed this right to robust privacy within an epistemic pathway that analyses the flow of personal information p in three steps: (1) the inquiry, (2) the access, and (3) the use of p. I propose to reformulate a condition protecting the right to robust privacy in step (1) by using the epistemological notion of knowability. Finally, I discuss further research directions to expand on the investigation from this thesis.