Expanding on Frank :)

This blog post is largely motivated by Frank’s post on the aggregation of data and contractarian understandings of privacy. In this blog post, I want to consider Madison’s view of property rights to privacy and the inescapability of the data market in modern-day society. 


As Deckey presents his argument, Madison believes that property includes a person’s “opinions and the free communication of them” as well as “free use of his facilities and free choice of the objects on which to employ them” (Deckey 26). In this way, Madison advocates for a conception of property that starts with “the property we hold in ourselves” (27). Therefore, he believes, violations of privacy are violations of a person’s right to property in themselves. Given Madison’s view of privacy as highly related to the property right in oneself and the ability of individuals to trade property through contracts, one might conclude that it is acceptable for partisan gerrymandering to rely on big data if that data was gathered with the consent of the individuals whose property in themselves has been traded. 


There are two dilemmas here. The first is that, if Madison sees the right to privacy as deriving from the right to property in oneself, then thinkers like Locke might object to the ability of an individual to sign agreements allowing for the collection of their data. Lockeans would say that, for the same reason one cannot sell oneself into slavery, one cannot sign away the rights to one’s data. Granted, the right to data privacy is substantially less fundamental than the right to freedom from bondage, so data collection is not comparable to servitude. However, both could be considered unacceptable abdications of an individual’s right to property in themselves. 


The second is that the signing of agreements to allow services to collect individuals’ data should not be interpreted as a voluntary choice because that choice is a coercive one. Today, it is unreasonable to expect individuals who are not pleased with the sharing of their data to live without using services that are essential to modern-day life and that require users to sign agreements allowing the use of their data. 


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