Journal article

Privacy in Public: A Democratic Defense

Published in Moral Philosophy and Politics

Abstract

Traditional arguments for privacy in public suggest that intentionally public activities, such as political speech, do not deserve privacy protection. In this article, I develop a new argument for the view that surveillance of intentionally public activities should be limited to protect the specific good that this context provides, namely democratic legitimacy. Combining insights from Helen Nissenbaum’s contextualism and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, I argue that strategic surveillance of the public sphere can undermine the capacity of citizens to freely deliberate in public and therefore conflicts with democratic self-determination.

Publication details

Date of publication
27 Mar 2020
Publication link
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Volume
7
Issue
1
Pages
73-96
Publisher
De Gruyter

Bibliometrics

OpenAlex

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Citation count
14
Collected 2026-08-22
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
1.08
Collected 2026-08-22
Citation percentile
82.4%
Percentile among comparable publications of the same age and field.

About FWCI: Field-Weighted Citation Impact compares citations received with the number expected for a work of the same type, year, and subfield. A value of 1.0 represents the world average.

Google Scholar

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Citation count
24
Collected 2026-08-16