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, I define descriptive privacy as a relational state, and I discuss relevant positions in the literature to study the epistemological nature of (descriptive) privacy losses. I argue that a 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 of this thesis.