This article addresses the ambivalent interplay between privacy and digitality by illuminating their relevance for discourses and practices of self-determination and relating them to the socio-technical transformations of this interplay. Privacy and digitality are thereby perspectivized as socially co-constituted social forms, assemblages, or communication relations that are permeated by historically changing socio-cultural variables of influence. In order to adopt the outlined perspective, we will first condense the relevant sociological body of knowledge into a cursory presentation of social theoretical perspectives on privacy. We will then turn to sociological research on digitization, which does not leave the conceptualization of privacy untouched. In this context, it will be emphasized that the sociological and socio-theoretical picture of privacy must be expanded to include aspects of the technical and the material. Theoretically adjusted, we will then present an analysis of self-determination under socio-digital conditions, which unfolds in four central problem areas of privacy and digitality: The social premise of visibility; social consequences of digital behavior shaping; the social dynamics of data-economic revenue models; and the implications of all this for users' decision freedoms. In the conclusion of the article, consequences for a democratic and self-determination-oriented design of privacy are named. In this context, there is a considerable need for a policy of shaping and regulating socio-digital infrastructures that promotes a data economy that is open to democratic control, co-determination and, above all, criticism. The central competence of individual and collective self-determination is thus the ability to criticize the normative content and effects of socio-digital infrastructures. This must arise from the socio-digital conditions and practical situations themselves and include the plurality of justificatory orders of modern societies, in order to make the contingency of existing normative orders tangible and alternative infrastructure design paths accessible: Only if the infrastructures ensure that the thread to critical practice does not break can privacy remain a place of self-determination under socio-digital conditions.
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