Privacy and digital modernity: liberal and conservative approaches to technology, personalisation and the individual

Martin Beckstein & David McGrogan (eds.), The Conservative Critique of Liberalism, 89-124

2026

Themes: Conservatism, Digital modernity, Privacy

Category: Book chapter, Peer reviewed

Privacy has traditionally been written about as an issue within liberalism, both as an enabler of and a constraint on freedom. This chapter considers privacy from a different perspective, through the lens of modernity. Privacy emerged as a key aspect of twentieth-century modernity, in which the value of individuality was expressed through individuals’ choices. In this world, privacy furnished the space in which those choices could be made autonomously. The chapter describes the development from modernity to digital modernity, under which individuality is expressed via personalisation, and privacy loses its privileged status. The privacy vectors of association, decision-making and archiving are examined to show how this undermines privacy. The importance of the conservative theory of contextual integrity is evident from this alternative perspective. However, conservatism’s traditional critique of the modern state needs to be supplemented by an account of private sector encroachment on privacy.

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