New APPS

The preprint is freshly posted on SSRN; the paper is forthcoming in a volume on Privacy Resignation (aka privacy cynicism). In it I argue that privacy resignation is usefully understood as an adaptive preference. Here is the abstract:

Adaptive preferences are preferences that change because of the availability of what someone desires. The concept has had considerable uptake in the literature on human development, where it is used to understand how socially marginalized people come to accept their marginal status. Here, I apply the framework to privacy resignation in two ways. On a substantive interpretation, adaptive preferences indicate a normative problem. In the case of privacy, it is with substantive autonomy and the importance of privacy to a number of core human capabilities. On a formal interpretation, adaptive preferences are irrational because they involve changing one’s assessment of something without it having itself changed. Here I argue that this sort of preference-“privacy is unavailable, therefore it is bad”-is a goal of the data industry, which wants to change social norms against privacy to serve its own purposes and to deflect critical thinking away from its practices.