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The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction Of The Surveillance Economy, Julie E. Cohen
The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction Of The Surveillance Economy, Julie E. Cohen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain — a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a …
What Privacy Is For, Julie E. Cohen
What Privacy Is For, Julie E. Cohen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Privacy has an image problem. Over and over again, regardless of the forum in which it is debated, it is cast as old-fashioned at best and downright harmful at worst — anti-progressive, overly costly, and inimical to the welfare of the body politic. Yet the perception of privacy as antiquated and socially retrograde is wrong. It is the result of a conceptual inversion that relates to the way in which the purpose of privacy has been conceived. Like the broader tradition of liberal political theory within which it is situated, legal scholarship has conceptualized privacy as a form of protection …