Normative Paradoxes of Privacy: Literacy and Choice in Platform Societies

Main Article Content

Paula Helm
Sandra Seubert

Abstract

Privacy scholars, advocates, and activists repeatedly emphasize the fact that current measures of privacy protection are insufficient to counter the systemic threats presented by datafication and platformization (van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell 2018: 24). These threats include discrimination against underprivileged groups, monopolization of power and knowledge, as well as manipulation. In this paper, we take that analysis one step further, suggesting that the consequences of inappropriate privacy protection online possibly even run counter to the normative principles that underpinned the standard clause for privacy protection in the first place. We discuss the ways in which attempts at protection run the risk of producing results that not only diverge from but, paradoxically, even distort the normative goals they intended to reach: informational self-determination, empowerment, and personal autonomy. Drawing on the framework of “normative paradoxes,” we argue that the ideals of a normatively increasingly one-sided, liberal individualism create complicities with the structural dynamics of platform capitalism, which in turn promote those material-discursive practices of digital usage that are ultimately extremely privacy-invasive.

Article Details

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Author Biographies

Paula Helm, Goethe-University Frankfurt

Dr. Paula Helm holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies from Philipps-Universität Marburg and wrote a doctoral thesis: “Anonymity and Autonomy – An Ethnography of Addiction-Recovery-Networks”. While writing her PhD Paula Helm has been a fellow of DFG Research Group: “Privacy: Forms, Functions, Transformations” at University of Passau. In 2013 Paula Helm has been a Visiting Scholar at NYU (sponsored by Prof. George Shulman/Political Theory), also being an active member of the Privacy Research Group (under the supervision of Helen Nissenbaum). During her stay in New York, Paula Helm conducted an ethnographic study by gaining access to the Central Archives of Alcoholics Anonymous and by engaging in Participating Observation in various Mutual-Support-Groups ranging from Narcotics Anonymous to Overeaters Anonymous. At the moment Paula Helm is working on a Project on Cultures and Practices of Disconnection.

Sandra Seubert, Goethe-University Frankfurt

Professional Experience:

  • Since 2009: Professor of Political Theory at Goethe-University, Frankfurt a.M.
  • Winter 2008/09: Stand-in Professorship at Goethe University
  • 2000-2001: Visiting Scholar, New School for Social Research, New York
  • 2000 – 2008 Assistant professor, Social Science Department, University of Potsdam
  • 1998 – 2000 Research Assistant to Prof. Gesine Schwan, interdisciplinary project on guilt and transition to democracy, FU Berlin
  • 1998 Teaching Assistant, Political Theory, FU Berlin

 

Education:

  • Habilitation in Political Science, University of Potsdam 2008, subject: “Crisis or chance of political integration? A democratic theoretical analysis of the concept of social capital”
  • PhD degree in Political Science, defended 1998, Free University Berlin, subject: “Justice and Benevolence. A Kantian Approach to Civic Virtues”, Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Axel Honneth
  • M.A. degree in Political Science, Free University Berlin, completed 1993
  • B.A. degree in Political Science, Philosophy and History, J.W. Goethe University Frankfurt/M., completed 1990

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