A valid new sense of privacy would need to be founded on the principles of the existential, respectful self-responsibility of all individuals and the promotion of which would need to be complemented by a reimagined State, Market and technological design principles. This will allow the embrace, not the denial, of the value of technological development, especially in neuroscience. In this context, each individual would have an evolving personal technology strategy with progressive/enhancement and conservative/protection elements. From that, respectful self-responsibility would require both sharing information and acquiring it, all typically under the individual’s control, including through data and algorithms that are designed and applied under their direction. The initiatives undertaken by the IEEE and MyData are moves in the right direction, but they remain prey to mythological interpretation. The principles of this new sense of privacy are then tested by application to standard and well-known privacy dilemmas, including on case law.

In developing a new ethic as a foundation for a non-mythological notion of privacy, we need first to put aside the informational ethics of Floridi, as that is founded on the conception of the individual as, ontologically, information. We demonstrate that this is a mythological position. Capurro has seen the errors of that argument in the dehumanisation of the individual. In moving forward, we examine the value of the full range of the standard ethical qualities on which our relationship with technology is said to be best based and thereby how we should manage its intrusions into privacy. These include dignity, liberty, identity, responsibility, democratic principles, equality, human rights and the common good. However, each of these is shown ultimately to be vulnerable to a range of shortcomings. It is argued that only respectful self-responsibility – that is, responsibility to and for oneself which is respectful of others and which relies on existential values – can act as a solid ethical foundation, although these other principles can be claimed to be of secondary value. We conclude the argument here by pointing out how that principle would not fall prey to bourgeois aspirations.