This work will address the problems of contemporary accounts of privacy by placing them in a new context of the mythological social dynamic that has constrained the West. This dynamic has driven a trajectory of failed mythological magnitudes – Deity, State, Market and now Technology – by which we have tried to avoid existential reality rather than embrace it. This avoidance is why privacy is vulnerable to the imminent impact of the latest form of that dynamic, neuroscience: while ‘privacy’ comes from early forms of this dynamic, neuroscience is now its most powerful form and will overwhelm that sense of privacy. Privacy needs to be removed from this dynamic, reconceiving it through existential, respectful self-responsibility. It will then survive this challenge and will, counterintuitively, embrace neuroscientific benefits, including their promotion of this new privacy through the technological control of the citizen. We will examine the dynamic, how it produced present notions of privacy through a singular form of normalisation, and how it is being re-formed by the mythological algorithms of neuroscience. To disengage privacy, we will need new ethical principles and reimagined social infrastructure – law, State and Market, these best understood by reconceiving regulation. That will provide the necessary support for self-responsibility.

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.