Andrew McStay (PhD, University of West London) is Senior Lecturer in Media Culture at Bangor University. He is the author of Digital Advertising (2009); The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising (2011) and Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process (2013).

In this book, McStay draws on an array of philosophers to offer a novel approach to privacy matters. Against the backdrop and scrutiny of Arendt, Aristotle, Bentham, Brentano, Deleuze, Engels, Heidegger, Hume, Husserl, James, Kant, Latour, Locke, Marx, Mill, Plato, Rorty, Ryle, Sartre, Skinner, among others, McStay advances a wealth of new ideas and terminology, from affective breaches to zombie media.

Contents: Aristotle, borders and the coming of the social - Liberalism, consent and the problem of seclusion - Utilitarianism, radical transparency and moral truffles - Pragmatism: Jettisoning normativity - Heidegger (Part 1): Concerning a-historical being and events - Heidegger (Part 2): On moods and empathic media - Latour: Raising the profile of immaterial actants - Phenomenology: The rise of intentional machines - The subject: Caring for what is public - Alienation: The value in being public - Spinoza: Politics of affect - Whitehead: Privacy events - Community facts.

What can philosophy tell us about privacy? Quite a lot as it turns out. With Privacy and Philosophy: New Media and Affective Protocol Andrew McStay draws on an array of philosophers to offer a refreshingly novel approach to privacy matters. Against the backdrop and scrutiny of Arendt, Aristotle, Bentham, Brentano, Deleuze, Engels, Heidegger, Hume, Husserl, James, Kant, Latour, Locke, Marx, Mill, Plato, Rorty, Ryle, Sartre, Skinner, Spinoza, Whitehead and Wittgenstein, among others, McStay advances a wealth of new ideas and terminology, from affective breaches to zombie media. Theorizing privacy as an affective principle of interaction between human and non-human actors, McStay progresses to make unique arguments on transparency, the publicness of subjectivity, our contemporary techno-social condition and the nature of empathic media in an age of intentional machines.
Reconstructing our most basic assumptions about privacy, this book is a must-read for theoreticians, empirical analysts, students, those contributing to policy and anyone interested in the steering philosophical ideas that inform their own orientation and thinking about privacy.