Peter Seele & Lucas Zapf 
Behind the Cloud [PDF ebook] 
A Theory of the Private Without Secrecy

Thoughts are free – but they are no longer secret. Today, our data is automatically stored and analyzed by algorithms ”behind the cloud” – where we no longer have control over our data. Our most private and secret information is entrusted to the internet and permanently collected, stacked and linked to our digital twins. With and without our consent. ‘Privacy is dead’, as Mark Zuckerberg put it. 

The question is: How did we get there? And, if the actors behind the cloud know everything: what is still private today, and are there any personal secrets at all when the ‘gods’ behind the cloud possibly know us better than our friends and family?

The book uses a wealth of case studies (e.g. cryptocurrencies, journalism, digital traces of sexual preferences) to develop a typology of privacy in the history of ideas. Furthermore, it shows the areas of life in which big data and artificial intelligence have already made inroads.

This book is a translation of the original German 2nd edition Die Rückseite der Cloud by Peter Seele and Lucas Zapf, published by Springer-Verlag Gmb H Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service Deep L.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.

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Introduction: The reverse side of the cloud.- Part 1: The secret private – introduction and derivation.- ‘Privacy is dead’: How could it come to this?- Part 2: Symptoms of the structural change of the private.- Symptoms of an immanent digital omniscience.- Part 3: Theory of the structural change of the private.- Functional systematics of the structural change of the private.- Summary of the theory or: Thoughts are free – but no longer secret.- Conclusions.- Outlook: Digital authenticity – an immersive consumer experience.

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The Authors
Peter Seele is Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Italian Switzerland, USI Lugano, trained as a philosopher and economist. Twitter: @Peter Seele

Lucas Zapf is a postdoctoral researcher, religious economist, and interdisciplinary humanities scholar working at the University of Basel and the University of Applied Sciences, Brugg (CH).