“The Pretense of Not Knowing”: A Basic Privacy Norm

Studies on information privacy norms have focused primarily on those regulating the collection and disclosure of private information. A society’s privacy norms include another set of requirements that one with knowledge of another’s private information, having even disclosed such information in some circles, invest in creating a pretense that he or she had not known or made use of such information. Such norm, which may be referred to as one for the “pretense of not knowing,” is among the basic ones among a society’s social norms on privacy. Both formal and informal strictures of information privacy rely on such norm to promote the aspirational values typically associated with privacy. The efficacy and the applicability of such norm are subject to limits. In responding to contemporary information challenges in a range of legal contexts, including consumer protection, dataveillance, and more, the norm for “the pretense of not knowing” has already played a role in institutional practices, and it also sheds important light on how information privacy law may evolve and may become reconceptualized.