Relational Privacy: Where the East and the West Could Meet

摘要

This paper argues that relational privacy can be used as a starting point for conceptualizing privacy in Eastern cultures for it aligns with an Eastern philosophical conception of person. This paper starts with one of the main conceptions of privacy as one having control over personal information, and leverages the criticisms toward control-based privacy and its foundation in individual autonomy, to introduce the concept of relational autonomy from the perspectives of feminist theory and Confucianism. It concludes by discussing the implications for conceptualizing privacy from these two foundations. The paper contributes to privacy research in that it provides an initial suggestion of how the conception of privacy might be characterized by the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions; it explicitly relates the conception of privacy to the conception of the person, and it deliberately phrases the discussion within an intercultural environment.