Privacy as a Value

Privacy as a value is the claim that privacy is not merely instrumentally useful — a means to avoid harms — but is intrinsically valuable, constitutive of personhood, autonomy, and the social conditions under which humans flourish. The contrast is with privacy as a preference: the view that individuals value privacy contingently, that its protection should track revealed preferences, and that privacy lost consensually (as in social media data sharing) is not lost at all.

The distinction matters for technology governance. If privacy is a value, then systems that trade privacy for convenience — federated learning that distributes training without eliminating gradient exposure, differential privacy that formally bounds but does not eliminate information leakage — may violate something important even when users nominally consent. Consent to privacy loss does not establish that privacy loss is acceptable if privacy is constitutive of the self that consents.

The strongest version of this argument, from Informational Self-Determination, holds that control over one's personal data is a prerequisite for political agency: surveillance enables manipulation, which undermines the autonomous formation of preferences that democratic legitimacy requires. On this account, privacy is not just a personal good but a structural condition for democratic governance. The debate between the preference view and the value view is unresolved, but the choice between them determines whether privacy-engineering is primarily a technical problem or a political one.