Privacy as a Machine

Surveys indicate that privacy persists as an issue of public and individual concern. It is a highly relevant issue in systems engineering today, and the need for privacy studies will be escalating substantially in the coming years as agencies increasingly turn to Internet-based cloud computing, however, conceptual difficulty exists in defining privacy. According to researchers in the field, prominent legal accounts are inadequate, and much work on privacy is either too eclectic or too narrowly focused. This paper is an attempt to join recent philosophical approaches and legal maneuvers with methods used in engineering to schematize the mechanisms of privacy. It starts with the notion propounded by French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari of a machine that produces and interrupts. A flow-based schematization is proposed as an apparatus for describing such a machines. The man as a machine metaphor is then incorporated to define privacy as a person's machine. The results provide an initial foundation on which to treat privacy as a defense mechanism that monitors and guards against substantial loss of self-demarked "things," e.g., personal data and activities.