Inquiry, the Alignment Challenge, the Risk View, and the Right to Privacy

In the privacy literature, epistemic analyses of privacy are quite popular. However, epistemic accounts of the right to privacy face substantial challenges. Epistemic analyses of privacy also suffer from the prima facie puzzling alignment challenge (according to which there are cases when an individual’s right to privacy is violated even if their privacy is unaffected). A recent proposal by Lauritz Aastrup Munch provides a solution to these issues by defending the so-called “inquiry account of the right to privacy.” In this paper, it is argued that the inquiry account of the right to privacy must be rejected and that the project is misguided, as the underlying extensional evidence does not reveal much about the conceptual and normative nature of privacy and the right to privacy. That is, the alignment challenge is surprisingly not puzzling after all, because—as will be argued—it has a simple solution that has nothing to do with privacy and privacy rights as such, but generalizes to other values/interests and the rights thereto. Specifically, I will defend an idea from my earlier work according to which the right to privacy can be violated by actions that (substantially) risk the diminishment of someone’s privacy.