Customer Reviews

Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation

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As someone who specializes in privacy rights and has written extensively on the subject, I found this work clearly reasoned, insightful, and interesting. It is not a book, however, for someone who wants an "easy read" or to be spoon fed a simple view.

To take a specific example, Inness' presentation and analysis of J. J. Thomson's views on privacy is perceptive, thought provoking - and by my lights - correct.

Overall, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation by Julie Inness is a welcome contribution to what has become an increasingly important area of philosophical and legal debate.

This book is completely impenetrable to the layman and completely implausible to the privacy expert. In other words, it's useless. Inness' writing is snobbish and heavy; the editor should have scribbled in its margins, "you are using unnecessarily complex sentences and vocab words to obscure your utter lack of an argument."

Her standards of scholarship hover somewhere between a second-grade book report and the undocumented rants found in early '90s femme-grunge zines. For example, I had to suffer through the sentences,

"But is privacy a value-free concept? Both our privacy intuitions and linguistic usage supports the 'valued' nature of privacy. Our ordinary language reflects a predisposition toward treating privacy as a positively valued condition..."

One would think that this would be an opportune time for Inness to actually present pertinent data about our (American? British?) linguistic use of the word "privacy". She presents none. Furthermore, a cultural value ("privacy is good!" or "privacy is bad!") is separate from the word's semantic content: our definition of what is "private" does not necessarily have anything to do with whether we think privacy is good or bad.

Yet Inness assumes this very thing, and it's a dangerous assumption because data does not, in fact, support such a broad conclusion. There is no cultural consensus on whether privacy is good or bad. For example, in the encryption debate, one prevalent sentiment is, "I have nothing to worry about because I'm a law-abiding citizen, so I don't care if the government can read my private email. It'll help the government catch criminals." The counter argument is, "The government has no business reading my email unless they have a really good reason to believe that I've done something wrong." These two sentiments indicate different cultural values: privacy is less valuable than crimefighting versus privacy must be protected at the expense of crimefighting.

Throughout the book, her argumentation is full of the above-mentioned types of circular and flawed logic. In her chapter on why privacy is not separation-based, I found myself replying to every unfounded assertion and illogical conclusion with counterarguments. By the end of the chapter, I had convinced *myself* that privacy was separation-based!

Finally, Inness uses the unbelievably cheap and hokey rhetorical trick of using the first person plural throughout most of the book. "We" think such-and-so and "we" think this-and-that about privacy. But she does not specify who "we" are (or document her assertions), and if she tries to assume that her "we" includes the citizenry of the United States, she assumes far too much cultural homogeneity. Based on what she says "we" think, I would guess that "we" means rather leftish academics. Inness would have been much better off replacing the academicesque (and intellectually offensive) "we" with "I". At least then I would have conceded her the right of making an argument about what she believes, instead of holding her to the more rigorous standard of proof that is required when one makes an argument about an entire population or culture.

Inness needs to get over her intellectual snobbery. I am an academic and I found the book irritating: I spent more time breaking down convoluted sentence after convoluted sentence than focusing on the feeble assertions that pose as argumentation. Then again, perhaps this was Inness' goal -- it certainly fooled the editors at Oxford.