“Privacy and Identity.”

Source: (2006) In, Erik Claes, Antony Duff, and Serge Gutwirth. , eds., Privacy and the Criminal Law. Antwerpen-Oxford: Intersentia. PP. 43-57.

“In this paper I would like to explore the gift of privacy in counterpoint to David Archard’s interesting analysis. I will start with some reflection on attempts to define strict boundaries for the concept of privacy (s.2). As privacy concerns the relationships between a self and her environment (other selves), I will emphasize the relational aspect of privacy and the importance of a concept of social/phenomenological/embodied space for an adequate understanding of privacy (s.3). Building on this, I claim that privacy is not merely about the exchange of or access to personal information, but about identity-building and identification. To explore this further, I will use Paul Ricoeur’s study of identity, placing personal identity at the nexus of the two meanings of identity: idem or sameness and ipse or selfhood. Following Varela and Deleuze, I will then problematise the idea that identity has a fixed nature and argue that privacy can best be understood as the virtual and actual space needed to continuously reconstruct the self in the face of every changing contexts (s.4).” (excerpt)