The Moral Relativism of Privacy and the Social Construct of WhatsApp.

Privacy seems to be interpreted differently by professionals and scholars of different disciplines. This essay suggests the adding the concept of moral relativism to Solove’s description that ‘privacy is a concept of disarray’. This provides an additional parameter. Moral relativism stresses that none of the scholars or professionals who have tried to explain the notion of privacy is right or wrong, but rather they are influenced by the social context they find themselves in. This essay uses this theoretical framework to produce a short case study on WhatsApp Messenger, a free application for cross-platform mobile messaging and available across mobile phone makers and allows encrypted communication between enduser. SCOT (social construct of technology) advocates that social groups understand artefacts differently and pursue shaping them based upon their dissimilar systems of meaning. This essay has identified a particular parallel between the concept of SCOT and moral relativism. Both concepts are influenced by the social context the actors find themselves in.