ABSTRACT

The privacy issue lies at the heart of an ongoing debate in nearly all Western democracies between liberalists and communitarians over the question how to balance individual rights and collective goods. Communitarians typically argue that the community benefits significandy from having knowledge about its members available. According to communitarians, modern Western democracies are in a deplorable condition, and unquenchable thirst for privacy serves as its epitome. Information technology's applications – panoptic technologies, as Oscar Gandy and Jeffrey Reiman call them – ranging from active badges, intelligent vehicle highway systems (IVHS), closed circuit television (CCTV) to database mining techniques, encourage government agencies, public administrators and business firms to pursue the communitarian dream of perfect free-riderlessness. Information-based harm, informational inequality and informational injustice are the three types of moral reasons to protect personal data for both liberalists and communitarians. They are framed in moral terms which should be acceptable to both liberalists and communitarians.