From Public Data to Private Information: The Case of the Supermarket

The background to this paper is that in our world of massively increasing personal digital data any control over the data about me seems illusionary - informational privacy seems a lost cause. On the other hand, the production of this digital data seems a necessary component of our present life in the industrialized world. A framework for a resolution of this apparent dilemma is provided if by the distinction between (meaningless) data and (meaningful) information. I argue that computational data processing is necessary for many present-day processes and not a breach of privacy, while collection and processing of private information is often not necessary and a breach of privacy. The problem and the sketch of its solution are illustrated in a case-study: supermarket customer cards.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  arXiv.org

• Publication date

  2025-03-26

• Fields of study

  Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2504.07121arXiv 2504.07121
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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