Privacy As Justice Hugo Black wrote, “ ‘Privacy’ is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept” (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, p. 509). Any commentary on the approach taken by the Supreme Court in regard to the notion of “privacy” must begin by acknowledging the truth of Black's insight. There is no simple grouping of cases that allows one to discern a particular doctrine of “privacy” that has been adopted by the justices or that can be easily conveyed. Instead, one discovers that “privacy” and associated words, such as “private,” refer to a variety of notions, only loosely linked together, that have proved to be an enduring source of controversy in regard to the degree of constitutional protection afforded them.

Definitional Dilemmas.

Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate the protean qualities of the notion of privacy is through reference to some of the standard ways words like “private” and “privacy” are used in ordinary language. Contrast, for example, the quite different implications of the terms “private property” and “invasion of privacy.” To be sure, they are related to one another, but they nonetheless point in substantially different directions and have elicited quite different reactions from the Court.

Privacy and Political Liberalism.

Though the notion of private property clearly goes back to ancient times, it is especially resonant in the liberal tradition out of which so much American political thought has developed, and it is appropriate to begin by looking at it more closely. The first thing one might notice is that “private” is an adjective. The word “property” is not always preceded by that adjective. The standard contrasting term to “private” is “public,” and we often use the term “public property” to refer to property owned by the state, such as roads, parks, and government buildings. The sharp division between “public” and “private” is central to the liberal political tradition, especially as represented in the thought of someone like John Locke, and the term “private property” is central to the maintenance of this division.

What is “public” is, almost by definition, within the realm of government regulation; one of the purposes of governments is to regulate the conditions of public life. Further, one of the central roles of the Constitution is to place limits on what the state can do in the name of the public. Thus the First Amendment prevents the state from offering public property only to political groups whose views it supports, even though the owner of a private auditorium is free to use political criteria when renting the hall.

The point of terming something “private” is to suggest that it is, in important ways, protected against governmental interference. The strongest defense of government, especially in the more libertarian versions of the Lockean heritage, is to establish certain mechanisms, including police forces and courts for the enforcement of contracts, that will serve to safeguard the basic natural rights of “life, liberty, and property.” The basic value underlying the protection of such rights, according to most contemporary political theorists, especially those who come out of one or another version of the Kantian tradition, is autonomy, that is, individuals’ ability to choose for themselves how to live their lives.

According to those who emphasize individual autonomy, the state should, as much as possible, serve only to facilitate the choices made by private citizens, at least so long as those choices do not conflict with the rights of other individuals. Indeed, many contemporary theorists who reject any Lockean notion of a “natural right” to private property nonetheless support recognition of a legal right to private property on the grounds, as argued by Aristotle nearly twenty‐five hundred years ago, that its possession is necessary in order to allow the practical realization of freedom and autonomous choice. Egalitarians might object to a particular distribution of property within which too many poor people are without property and thus without effective means to realize their autonomy, but this distributional critique does not in the least entail a rejection of the basic importance of a realm of “private” rights protected against state negation.

Defending Minorities.

Emphasis on a protected “private” realm can serve as a way of defending unpopular minorities against the power of a majority tempted to use the apparatus of the state to regulate those it dislikes. Examples are legion, and each probably generates a different emotional resonance in the reader. On the one hand, there are those parents who wish to send their children to a “private” school that teaches the tenets of their religion, against the effort by the state to outlaw such schooling and require every child to attend a “public” school that inculcates in the child the state‐mandated way of looking at the world. (Just such an effort was made in the 1920s by the state of Oregon, then under the sway of the Ku Klux Klan, only to be rebuffed by the Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925.) Or one can think, for example, of a privately owned restaurant that chooses to serve only whites; although a traditional notion of “private property” included the right to exclude anyone from one's property on whatever basis one wished, the Supreme Court had little trouble, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964) and Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), unanimously upholding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its prohibition of such exclusionary practices (see Segregation, De Jure). At the very least, these two examples should illustrate not only the complexities attached to notions such as “minority rights” and “majority imposition” but also the varying reactions of the Supreme Court to such claims.

Privacy versus Secrecy.

One must recognize that there is nothing at all “secretive” about “private” property and many other autonomy‐enhancing rights that have been judicially placed within a notion of “privacy.” Thus, a property owner often announces his or her status to the world. One can find similar examples in other realms. Most religious people, for example, are proud to proclaim their allegiance to their faiths’ tenets. No one reads the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment as protecting only “out‐of‐sight” religious practices. To be sure, even such limited protection would be better than the totalitarian denial of all freedom of religion, but the basic cases in the constitutional canon treating freedom of religion all deal with “public” practices, such as handing out religious literature or even vigorously attacking the “false doctrines” of another church deemed to represent the forces of evil (see also Religion).

In this context, it is useful to consider the institution of marriage. Even though many might consider marriage to be the most obvious symbol of private life, most people who marry proclaim their status publicly. As shall be discussed further in this essay's conclusion, problems arise when one tries to define notions such as property or marriage as “private” rather than “public,” but it should at least be clear that there is no necessary linkage between assigning a particular activity—whether it has to do with land development or love—to the realm of the “private” and viewing that activity as something to be kept out of the public eye.

This element of secrecy, however, is precisely what is important in the concept of “invasion of privacy.” To be sure, one cannot make sense even of this notion without recourse both to the value of autonomy and to some version of the public private distinction noted above. The “privacy” protected against invasion, however, relies for its force not so much on the formal distinction between the domains of the individual and of the state but rather on a widely shared perception that some aspects of life should be protected not only against public regulation but, far more importantly, against uninvited public observation. The definition of a secret suggests that one should be able to disclose it only to those one trusts. A standard example is the release of what is often termed “intimate” information about oneself. Thus the marital partners who invite the public to observe their exchange of vows certainly do not invite the guests to witness the sexual consummation of those vows.

These are not meant to be hard‐and‐fast distinctions. But they are intended to aid the understanding of the very different meanings attached to the overall concept of privacy and, as well, to the understanding of why the cases decided by the Supreme Court under that rubric often seem so confusing. The Court, over the last twenty years, has used the notion of privacy especially, but not exclusively, in cases involving contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. If one realizes that such cases much more often invoice privacy‐as‐autonomy—a realm of conduct protected against invasive state regulation—rather than privacy‐as‐secrecy—a realm of life that should be protected against the intrusive observation of others—then at least some of the confusion can be dissolved. The remainder of this essay will therefore be organized by reference to these two quite different conceptions of privacy.

Autonomous Choice.

Although it is commonly argued that the Constitution lacks any specific textual reference to “privacy,” that argument overlooks the text of the Fifth Amendment, which states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The text makes no sense unless the framers of the Constitution believed, first, that the institution of private property already existed and, second, that there was something important about this institution worth protecting. That is, private property had a purpose, the most plausible purpose being that possessing private property helps one to become the master of one's own fate.

It is within this context that one should understand “The New Property,” an influential 1965 article by then‐Yale professor Charles Reich, which argues that the same kinds of constitutional protections accorded “old property,” such as land, should be accorded “new property,” such as social security, because of the latter's equally vital role in preserving individual autonomy. The deep paradox of Reich's article, however, lies precisely in the fact that the Supreme Court, throughout the twentieth century but especially following the so‐called constitutional revolution of 1937, has been increasingly disinclined to give strong protection to the “old property” against state regulation. Among the seminal cases in this regard is Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926), in which the conservative Justice George Sutherland, speaking for the Court, upheld a local zoning ordinance that severely restricted the development opportunities available to landowners. Although such zoning significantly reduced the practical market value of the land in question, it was deemed not to be a taking requiring compensation under the Fifth Amendment, which had been applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Regulation of Private Property.

Certainly one of the central characteristics of what has come to be called the modern regulatory, or administrative state is its propensity to regulate the use of “private” property. The post‐1937 Court has expressed almost no concern about the constitutionality of such regulation. Only a few, exceptional cases have found regulations to constitute takings that require compensation (see Regulatory Taking). For better or worse, the protection of private property and the values attached to its ownership has increasingly been left to the vagaries of the ordinary political process, with judicial scrutiny limited to a bare minimum.

Post‐1937 constitutional theorists, then, were left with the task of explaining the withdrawal of any strong judicial regard for private property. Did it result from a general notion that the Court, as an arguably undemocratic (or at least antimajoritarian) institution, should defer to legislative decisions? Or, on the other hand, was it the consequence of a more limited notion—that the protection of private property, far from enhancing individual autonomy, tended to lessen it insofar as it served to prevent the redistribution of economic resources from those who had a great deal (and thus maximum autonomy) to those who had too little (and thus little, if any, practical autonomy)? Post‐New Deal constitutional theorists could be divided broadly into two camps, depending on which of these two rationales was emphasized to justify the diminution of protection given to traditional rights attached to the ownership of private property. These camps faced off when “privacy” reemerged as a major topic of litigation in the 1960s.

Contraception.

The modern debate about the constitutional protection accorded privacy derives from Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). In Griswold the Court declared unconstitutional a Connecticut law that both prohibited the use of contraceptives and prevented anyone from encouraging the use of contraceptives through, for example, medical counseling. Connecticut prosecuted the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League for giving information to married persons about contraception. The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice William O. Douglas, reversed Mrs. Griswold's conviction on the basis that it violated her (and her clinic's patients’) rights of privacy. Ignoring the Private Property Clause of the Fifth Amendment, Douglas noted that a general right of privacy is nowhere explicitly set out in the constitutional text, in contrast, say, to the right to free exercise of religion acknowledged in the First Amendment or the right against self‐incrimination set out in the Fifth Amendment. But, said Douglas, the real point of many of the “various guarantees” of the Constitution was precisely to “create zones of privacy” protected against state interference (p. 484).

Douglas pointed to cases interpreting the First Amendment, which had recognized the “freedom to associate and privacy in one's association”; to the Third Amendment, which prohibits the quartering of soldiers “in any house” in time of peace without the owner's consent; to the Fourth Amendment and its explicit affirmation of the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”; and to the Fifth Amendment's Self‐Incrimination Clause (p. 483). Douglas also took note of several cases from the 1920s involving private education. In 1923 the Court, in Meyer v. Nebraska, had invalidated a state ban (sparked by anti‐German feeling during World War I) on teaching German in private schools. Two years later, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court struck down Oregon's Klan‐inspired attempt to prohibit private schooling entirely.

Similarly, Douglas said, Connecticut's law could not survive, for it “concern[ed] a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees” (p. 485). In particular, it attempted to regulate one of the most intimate aspects of marriage—the circumstances under which the partners would relate to one another sexually. To prosecute someone for violating Connecticut's “use” prohibition would require extraordinary state intrusiveness. “Would we allow the police,” Douglas asked rhetorically, “to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?” He responded, “The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship” (pp. 485–486).

Griswold was a surprisingly controversial decision, though not, certainly, because of any judicial sympathy with what one dissenter, Justice Potter Stewart, called “an uncommonly silly law.” Instead, for the dissenters, Hugo Black especially, the decision recalled an earlier era of the Court in which it used similar concepts, though denominated “freedom of contract” rather than “privacy,” to carve out a protected realm of conduct against almost any regulation by the state. This earlier era was symbolized by the decision in Lochner v. New York (1905), in which the Court interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to hold unconstitutional a New York state law that attempted to limit to sixty the hours that a baker could work each week. According to the five‐justice majority in Lochner, this statute unconstitutionally interfered with the autonomy rights of the baker and his employee to negotiate as equals over the terms of employment.

Lochner occasioned perhaps the most‐quoted dissenting opinion in American judicial history, by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

I think that the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law. (p. 76)

An entire generation of scholars and lawyers used Holmes's opinion almost as an anthem in behalf of judicial deference to majority rule and as a rejection of the doctrine of substantive due process. To be sure, Justice Black, who dissented in Griswold, vigorously opposed state regulation of speech, but he based this philosophy of judicial overruling of majority will on the specific text of the First Amendment, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment (see Incorporation Doctrine). “I like my privacy as well as the next one,” wrote Black, “but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision” (p. 510). Black was squarely in the camp of those who viewed the message of 1937 as counseling general deference to legislative enactments unless explicitly prohibited by the constitutional text. Griswold was in his judgment as pernicious a decision as Lochner.

That Griswold and successor cases were written using the language of “privacy” was due primarily to the desire to avoid direct comparison with Lochner. These cases could have been decided using a different rhetoric, one more self‐consciously libertarian and focusing on the centrality of such decisions in achieving one's own life plans. What prevented the use of such a neolibertarian rhetoric was much less its intellectual deficiency than its evocation of the earlier era of Lochner, based as that case was on a highly libertarian conception of the limits of government. Thus Holmes had reminded his colleagues that the “Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics” (p. 75); Spencer's book was one of the most libertarian tracts of the nineteenth century. Given the bad repute of such overtly libertarian rhetoric, the Court was attracted to the purportedly different rhetoric of privacy. Because of the way legal argument operates, “privacy” became the catchword for a host of cases that would be better understood had they been analyzed under a more frankly libertarian, autonomy‐oriented theory.

Regardless of this rhetorical point, it is fair to say that if the “right to privacy” had been confined to the circumstances of the Connecticut contraceptive ban, it is unlikely that the notion would have become particularly important, except among specialists in constitutional law: Connecticut was in fact the last state to ban contraceptives. Moreover, Griswold could have been fit within what were termed above the “invasion of privacy” cases designed to protect certain conduct, in this instance the use of contraceptives, from public gaze. The issue in Griswold could have been confined either to the prohibition of the “use” of contraceptives or to use plus the giving of relevant medical advice, in order to protect institutions like Planned Parenthood. Moreover, one could have maintained the emphasis on the particular circumstances under which contraceptives are in fact used, thus accounting for the power of Douglas's reference to the “sacred” marital bedroom.

It is worth noting, however, that no one seriously argues that the police are without power, assuming they have the probable cause required by the Fourth Amendment to obtain a search warrant, to search “sacred” bedrooms for evidence of ordinary crime. A thief would not purchase immunity from search, for example, by hiding the loot under the sacred marital mattress! The fact that most of Douglas's examples are open to this kind of attack has led many observers to criticize his opinion, at least insofar as he attempted to derive the “right of privacy” from what he called the “penumbras and emanations” of the text of the Bill of Rights.

Although Douglas's opinion was joined by a majority of the Court, two important separate concurring opinions, written by Justices Arthur Goldberg and John M. Harlan, attempted to sketch out other bases for the “right to privacy.” Harlan alluded to an opinion he had written in an earlier case, Poe v. Ullman (1961), in which the Court had refused to address the legitimacy of the Connecticut law it struck down in Griswold. In Poe, Harlan had emphasized that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment legitimizes the Court's attempt to discern “the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society” (p. 542). Examining the American (and, indeed, English‐speaking) past, Harlan concluded that the Connecticut law “involves what, by common understanding throughout the English‐speaking world, must be granted to a most fundamental aspect of [liberty,] the privacy of the home in its most basic sense” (p. 548). Goldberg focused attention on the Ninth Amendment, with its reminder that the specification of certain enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights should not be interpreted as “disparaging” the existence of additional, unenumerated rights. Privacy, Goldberg argued, was just such a right—one that should be understood as being protected by the Constitution even though unenumerated.

In any event, Griswold did not remain an isolated case, and its import soon extended far beyond Harlan's “privacy of the home” or the particularity of the “sacred” marital relationship. The Court, in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), struck down a variety of state prohibitions on the sale or distribution of contraceptives first to single adults and then, five years later, invalidated, in Carey v. Population Services International, a New York law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to minors under sixteen and forbidding anyone not a licensed pharmacist from selling even nonprescription contraceptives to persons of any age. As suggested above in the discussion about “private property,” there is nothing secret about offering contraceptives for sale, much less advertising them. Once again, it is crucial that one separate the kind of privacy interest that is being protected in access‐to‐contraception cases—enhancement of individual autonomy—from the different aspect of privacy organized around the notion of secrecy. But even the liberation of contraceptives from state control would scarcely have caused significant public controversy, given the great changes that were taking place in sexual behavior and the use of contraceptives by a majority of the American public.

Abortion.

The case that brought “privacy” to the forefront of national consciousness was Roe v. Wade (1973), which struck down laws in all fifty states that prohibited most (and in some cases all) abortions. “The right of privacy,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in behalf of the Court, “whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty … or … in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” (p. 153). To be sure, even this important “right of personal privacy” could be curbed by the state if it presented a “compelling interest,” but the import of Roe, with some exceptions, has been to limit such state power. Roe is surely on anyone's list of most important opinions, both in terms of the changes it brought to American life and the controversy it stirred up. Although it did not, as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) was alleged to have done, spark a civil war, it almost certainly contributed, because of the identification of the antiabortion position with right‐wing politics, to the defeat of many Democratic senators in 1976 and 1978, the capture of the presidency and the Senate by the Republican Party two years later, and to the ultimate defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Once again, it should be clear that abortion is centrally linked with autonomy concerning the conditions of one's life—thus the adoption of the term “pro‐choice” by its adherents. Many persons read the sequence of cases from Griswold to Roe as supporting, under the rubric of “privacy,” a general right to what might be termed “sexual autonomy,” that is, freedom of choice in regard to one's sexual identity, including its reproductive aspects.

Homosexuality.

This claim of a right of sexual autonomy was most dramatically tested in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, which involved an attack by a gay Georgia man upon a state law that criminalized sodomy. A bitterly divided Court upheld, by a 5‐to‐4 vote, the constitutionality of the law. Justice Byron White, who wrote the majority opinion, declared that the right to privacy encompassed by the Constitution did not include a right to engage in “homosexual sodomy.” (His opinion ostentatiously refused to indicate whether the Constitution would tolerate the criminalization of heterosexual sodomy—with sodomy defined as including oral sex—which is apparently practiced by many Americans, including married couples.)

Although Bowers concerned bedroom conduct, what was ultimately at stake in the case was the integration of gays and lesbians into all aspects of American public life. Thus, had the decision gone the other way, it might have been increasingly difficult to maintain the prohibition of gay and lesbian marriage, for example, and other “public” acts that would signify the true emergence of gays and lesbians from the closets to which the American legal order has tended to condemn them. Justice Lewis Powell, who provided the fifth vote upholding the Georgia law, declared after his retirement that he regarded the decision as a mistake. Issues of gay rights continued to percolate in a variety of contexts and issues, however. These included debate over the ban by the armed forces on service by openly gay and lesbian members (“don't ask, don't tell”), civil unions (in Vermont), and most recently gay marriage. Bowers itself was overruled in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas, when the Supreme Court held that government could not prohibit or punish private consensual sex engaged in by either same‐sex or heterosexual persons.

Moreover, it is certainly not unthinkable that Roe itself will be overruled, though there appears to be no serious support for overruling Griswold. As has already been suggested, however, limiting the constitutionally protected right to privacy (as autonomy) to the use of contraceptives would scarcely be of any great significance so far as the general public is concerned. In any event, in the early 2000s it is hard to imagine that there will be any great extensions of this branch of the right to privacy in the foreseeable future.

Information Control.

In a highly influential 1968 article, Harvard professor (and later solicitor general) Charles Fried offered the definition of privacy as “the control we have over information about ourselves.” Fried related such control to central aspects of our lives as flourishing human beings, including “love and friendship.” Although a rich philosophical literature on privacy exists and not everyone accepts Fried's specific views, there is certainly general agreement—and not only among philosophers—that a central component of privacy is precisely the capacity to maintain aspects of one's life apart from public awareness.

Lack of Constitutional Foundation

Although there may be widespread agreement that a decent society is one in which individuals possess significant control over the release of information about themselves, it is difficult to find much protection for such a right in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. As Lucas Powe has written, “Privacy has never done as well in the courts as in the legal journals.”

Consider in this context the constitutional tests most often cited by proponents of privacy, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Recall the Fourth Amendment's protection of the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” and the Fifth Amendment's prohibition of any person's being “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” both of which were quoted by Douglas in his Griswold opinion. As suggested above, though, these texts can as easily cut against proponents of privacy as work in their favor.

The Fourth Amendment, for all its evocation of the privacy of the home, nonetheless clearly allows searches of the home and the seizure of private papers so long as a search warrant has been issued, based on probable cause to believe that the search will provide evidence relevant to a criminal investigation. And warrants can serve as the predicate not only for invasions of marital bedrooms but also for tapping telephones or emplacing other hearing devices that allow the investigator to overhear the most intimate of conversations.

Limits on Privacy.

In a series of cases during the mid‐1960s, the most important of which, Hoffa v. United States (1966), involved a prosecution of Teamsters’ Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, the Court refused even to require a warrant for the infiltration of “private space” by undercover investigators (see Search Warrant Rules, Exceptions to). Thus it is perfectly constitutional for the state, without the slightest showing of probable cause, to use agents to insinuate themselves into the “private lives” of targets such as Hoffa. According to the Court, we are all at risk that those we choose to welcome into our private domain will later prove untrustworthy, and therefore we deserve no special protection against the possibility that a new “friend” might in fact be a member of the secret police. It should thus come as no surprise that the Court, in United States v. Miller (1976), refused to place any Fourth Amendment barriers in the way of state investigators who wished access to the “private” bank records of persons they were investigating.

Similarly, in Ullman v. United States (1956) and Kastigar v. United States (1972), the Court read the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self‐incrimination as being limited to the prohibition of compelled testimony that could later be used as evidence in a prosecution of the witness being compelled to testify. The Court ruled that this did not limit the right of a state to confer an often unwanted “immunity” on a witness—an immunity that promises that nothing said by the witness will later be used against him or her. A beneficiary of such immunity will receive no judicial support for the claim that this violation of his or her ability to control the release of information constitutes a violation of whatever “privacy” rights are implied in the Fifth Amendment. Thus witnesses can be asked the most embarrassing and intrusive questions, so long as they are relevant to the case at hand, and can be punished for contempt of court if they refuse to answer. (The best‐known examples of such immunity grants have arisen in congressional investigations, where refusal to testify has led to citation for contempt of Congress; see Congressional Power of Investigation.)

Many critics of “immunity baths” adopt Douglas's view that they violate the right to privacy ostensibly protected by the Fifth Amendment, but these critics have not prevailed. Instead, the Court has defined the purpose of the Fifth Amendment as safeguarding individual autonomy by limiting the state's incentive to “solve” crimes not through independent investigation but through the far easier means of forcing, through torture or other mistreatment, accused defendants to confess to crimes that they may not have committed. Since, by definition, testimony given under immunity cannot lead to convictions, the state must still pursue its own investigations and gather independent evidence in order to convict those who have received immunity.

Close associates of criminal defendants, including, on occasion, close family members, are common sources of independent evidence. Although the state often recognizes certain “testimonial privileges” by which specific confidential communications can be protected against disclosure, it is highly debatable whether these privileges are constitutionally required or are instead simply granted by the state (perhaps in recognition of the moral claims articulated by Fried). Probably the most common examples of such privileges are those between lawyer and client and between spouses. In most contexts, a client does control the release of information and can prohibit his or her attorney from disclosing even information crucial to the interests of third parties. Similarly, many states still allow a defendant to prevent the introduction of testimony offered by even a willing spouse (or, often, ex‐spouse) that refers to confidential communications made during the course of the marriage. But no such protection extends to close friends or other family members, although some judges have read Griswold as protecting a child who does not wish to testify against a parent, or vice versa.

News Media.

The examples above involve the state's attempts to elicit information, but what about the equally common circumstance in which a private party investigates someone or discloses conduct that that other person would wish to keep secret? Does the Constitution allow strong protection against such invasions of privacy?

Given the complexities of the American legal system, it is hard to offer any summary answer, but it can be said that the Supreme Court has offered scant comfort to those who have brought suit claiming such “invasions.” The most common cases have involved newspapers that have published truthful, albeit highly intrusive, information about the suing party. (The publication of false information would constitute not invasion of privacy but “defamation” and would be handled through the law of libel.)

Standard issues in cases involving claimed invasions of privacy include printing the names of victims of sexual assaults or of juvenile offenders who, some think, are more likely to reform if not publicly stigmatized as delinquents. No matter how much sympathy such claimants may elicit, they have consistently lost before the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly declared that the First Amendment prevents sanctioning newspapers who publish such information. Thus, in Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1989), the Court set aside an award of monetary damages for the publication of the name of a rape victim because the newspaper had obtained the information by looking at government records. (The Court has refused to accept the argument that there is a difference between making information available to members of the public who are able to travel to a specific locale—such as City Hall—and publishing identical information in a newspaper read by many thousands of readers.)

Newspapers have been awarded protection not simply because of the text of the First Amendment but, more importantly, because of the recognition that it is often impossible to draw any clear lines between those secrets that one should be entitled to keep and those that are of legitimate interest to the public. Consider in this context the Miami Herald’s trailing, in 1987, of then‐presidential candidate Gary Hart, a married man who had recently denied that he was a “womanizer,” to his Georgetown townhouse in the company of Donna Rice, a woman who was not his wife. Though debate raged concerning the ethics of the Herald’s conduct in placing one of its reporters in the bushes outside Hart's home, few people argued that the information gained thereby was irrelevant to the public interest, or that it spoke merely to the public's prurient interest, or that the newspaper had no right to publish it.

It is clear that the Constitution protects newspapers that publish truthful information, however “private,” about “public figures”—including candidates for office. Whether or not such figures entirely surrender any “right to privacy” they might otherwise have, as a practical matter newspapers and other media need not worry that they will face legal sanctions if they reveal indelicate truths. No Supreme Court decision supports privacy claims of public figures seeking political office who object to the disclosure of information that some voter might find relevant to their fitness to serve in office. Recognition of any such privacy rights would disserve the democratic process itself by depriving the public of salient information. “[T]he candidate who vaunts his spotless record and sterling integrity,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has reiterated, “cannot convincingly cry ‘Foul’ when an opponent or an industrious reporter attempts to demonstrate the contrary,” even if the demonstration involves scrutiny of what might be regarded as one's “private” life (Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 1988, pp. 46, 51, quoting from Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy, 1971).

The practical loss of privacy rights by public officials turns out also to extend, by and large, to ordinary people, at least if one looks at most of the decided case law. A famous case from half a century ago is exemplary: The New Yorker profiled a former child prodigy in a manner described by a state court as “merciless in its dissection of intimate details of subject's personal life” and a “ruthless exposure of a once public character who has since sought … the seclusion of private life” (Sidis v. F‐R Publishing Co., 2d Circuit, 1940, pp. 806–807). It would be hard to imagine a more sympathetic setting for recognition of a right against invasion of privacy, but even here the magazine was protected because of the “newsworthiness” of the subject. “Newsworthiness” is largely a circular term, standing for public curiosity that may itself be provoked by the newspaper's dredging up material from the past. (It is unlikely, for example, that any of The New Yorker’s readers had been curious about Mr. Sidis, the ex‐prodigy, or had written demanding that the magazine find out what had happened to him.)

That there seems to be little constitutional protection of privacy‐as‐information‐control does not, obviously, negate the force of Fried's argument. It simply points out the Constitution's limited scope. Privacy could be protected in many ways through legislative enactments (though such laws might run into constitutional problems if they attempted to limit the power of the press), but the point is that such privacy rights have come to be viewed as matters for legislative decision making rather than judicial determination.

Privacy as a Public Matter.

It is tempting to believe, and the discussion of property began by assuming, that there is a clear demarcation between the realms of “public” and “private.” But even the brief discussion of the constitutional revolution of 1937 should illustrate how much the two are intertwined. As pointed out by theorists identified with “legal realism” or “critical legal studies,” such as Morris R. Cohen and Robert Hale in the past or Gary Peller in the present, what is conceptualized as “private” is the result of an essentially public decision. Even to think of “private property,” for example, requires one to think at the same time of a completely public realm of law that recognizes (and some would say establishes) an assignment of legal rights, to be protected by public force if need be, to certain people who will be called the “owners” of private property. And one of the central meanings of “1937” as a crucial event in American constitutional law is that these assignments are subject to significant changes, as the owners of private businesses discover that they can legitimately be forced, under certain circumstances, to bargain with trade unions or to sell to customers they would prefer not to deal with. To put it mildly, contemporary expectations as to the meaning of private property differ radically from those likely to have been held by property owners a hundred years ago, and there is no reason to believe that private property will have the same social meaning a hundred years from now.

This point can perhaps be made most clearly by reference to a case that explicitly turns on the notion of “expectations.” In Katz v. United States (1967), the Court extended the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement to wiretaps of telephone conversations; American citizens, the majority declared, had a “legitimate expectation” that their conversations would remain private, and violation of this expectation would require the demonstration of probable cause necessary to get a search warrant. As many commentators noted then and since, the Court was not entirely clear about the foundation of the “expectations” that were so important to its decision. Could the government, for example, defeat any such expectations by announcing that no one should, as a practical matter, expect a telephone conversation to be free of being overheard by third parties? Perhaps “expectation” refers instead to what most people believe ought to be the case about their privacy rights, so that the hypothetical government announcement could be defeated by showing that most people do have the expectation suggested and would be outraged if the government began promiscuously to listen to its citizen's telephone conversations. But what if public opinion changes? Consider the widespread calls for drug tests and tests for the HIV (AIDS) virus, which many view as significant invasions of privacy and presumptively unconstitutional without some showing of specific probable cause. The Court, in two 1989 cases (National Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab, which dealt with customs agents, and Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association, which involved railroad engineers), upheld drug tests even without such probable cause. In both cases the Court focused on specific reasons to be especially concerned about the use of drugs by persons in such occupations.

If, however, the public in general comes to believe that the “war on drugs” requires, say, the frequent submission of urine samples, by America's more than fifteen million public employees, could one then speak of an “expectation” against such governmental intrusion? No one believes that an individual's idiosyncratic expectation should automatically be recognized. Inevitably, one discovers that the individual's right of privacy depends on a complex set of social interactions that defeat any easy separation of the public and the private. To the extent that “the public” continues to expect a strong recognition of a “private” realm cut off from ordinary public gaze, that realm will be protected; to the extent that, as with the “traditional” indices of private property, recognition of the claimed privacy right is thought to be too socially costly, then “privacy” will in all likelihood be redefined to exclude the too socially burdensome aspect.

American constitutional jurisprudence is deeply embedded in the liberal political tradition. This assures that the public‐private distinction will continue to be a central part of our constitutional schema. There will always be a constitutional “right to privacy,” whoever the members of the Supreme Court might be or whatever the particular intellectual trends of a given political moment. But its meaning and scope will always be in flux.

See also Fundamental Rights; Natural Law.

Bibliography

Ruth Gavison , Privacy and the Limits of Law, Yale Law Journal 89 (1980): 421–471.
Jennifer Nedelsky , Private Property and American Constitutionalism (1990). Ellen Frankel Paul and Howard Dickman, eds., Liberty, Property, and Government: Constitutional Interpretation Before the New Deal (1989). J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Nomos XIII: Privacy (1971).
Alan Ryan , Property and Political Theory (1984).
Ferdinand Schoeman, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy (1984).
William B. Scott , In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (1977).
Alan Westin , Privacy and Freedom (1967).

Sanford Levinson

PRIVACY

Inconstitutional law, the right of people to make personal decisions regarding intimate matters; under thecommon law, the right of people to lead their lives in a manner that is reasonably secluded from public scrutiny, whether such scrutiny comes from a neighbor's prying eyes, an investigator's eavesdropping ears, or a news photographer's intrusive camera; and in statutory law, the right of people to be free from unwarranted drug testing andelectronic surveillance.

The origins of the right to privacy can be traced to the nineteenth century. In 1890, Samuel D. Warren and louis d. brandeis published "The Right to Privacy," an influential article that postulated a general common-law right of privacy. Before the publication of this article, no U.S. court had expressly recognized such a legal right. Since the publication of the article, courts have relied on it in hundreds of cases presenting a range of privacy issues.

In olmstead v. united states, 277 U.S. 438, 48 S. Ct. 564, 72 L. Ed. 944 (1928), Brandeis, then a Supreme Court justice, articulated a general constitutional right "to be let alone," which he described as the most comprehensive and valued right of civilized people. For the next half century, the right to privacy gradually evolved. Today, every jurisdiction in the country recognizes some form of constitutional, common-law, or statutory right to privacy.

Constitutional Law

The constitutional right to privacy protects the liberty of people to make certain crucial decisions regarding their well-being without government coercion, intimidation, or interference. Such crucial decisions may concern religious faith, moral values, political affiliation, marriage, procreation, or death. The federal Constitution guarantees the right of individuals to make these decisions according to their own conscience and beliefs. The government is not constitutionally permitted to regulate such deeply personal matters.

The right of privacy protected by the Constitution gained a foothold in griswold v. connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S. Ct. 1678, 14 L. Ed. 2d 510 (1965), in which the Supreme Court struck down a state statute forbidding married adults from using birth control because the statute violated the sanctity of the marital bedroom. Acknowledging that the Constitution does not mention the word privacy anywhere in its text, the Court held that a general right to privacy may be inferred from the express language of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as from the interests protected by them.

The Court said that the first amendment guarantees the right to peaceably assemble, which includes the liberty of any group to associate in private. The third amendment prohibits the government from quartering soldiers in a private home without the consent of the owner. The fourth amendment forbids the government from performing warrantless and unreasonable searches of any area in which a person maintains a reasonable expectation of privacy. The fifth amendment safeguards the right of criminal suspects to keep secret any incriminating evidence that might help the government obtain a conviction against them. The fourteenth amendment prevents states from denying its citizens certain fundamental rights that are deemed essential to the concepts of equality or liberty, including the right to autonomy, dignity, and self-determination.

The holding in Griswold was later used to strike down a Massachusetts statute that made illegal the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried persons (Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 92 S. Ct. 1029, 31 L. Ed. 2d 349 [1972]). In striking down this law, the Supreme Court articulated a broader view of privacy, stating that all individuals, married or single, enjoy the liberty to make certain intimate personal decisions free from government intrusion, including the decision whether to bear or sire a child. This rationale was extended in roe v. wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 (1973), which established the right of women to terminate their pregnancy at any time before the fetus reaches the stage of viability. Roe has subsequently been interpreted to proscribe the government from passing regulations that unduly burden a woman's right to abortion.

In Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 110 S. Ct. 2841, 111 L. Ed. 2d 224 (1990), the Supreme Court again enlarged the constitutional meaning of privacy by declaring that competent patients have a right to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment, including artificial nutrition and hydration. A 1997 Supreme Court case presented the issue of whether competent but terminally ill patients may hasten their death through physician-assisted suicide (washington v. glucksberg, 117 S. Ct. 2258). Representatives for the terminally ill patients argued that the right to physician-assisted suicide represents an essential liberty interest in controlling one of life's most significant decisions, whereas the state of Washington argued that this liberty interest is outweighed by the need to protect vulnerable individuals from irrational, ill-informed, and coerced decisions to end their lives. The Supreme Court held that the right to assistance in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by the due process clause of the Constitution, and a state's ban on assisted suicide is constitutional.

The constitutional right to privacy does not protect all forms of conduct that are pursued behind closed doors. Adults have no constitutional right to inject intravenous drugs, solicit prostitutes, or view child pornography. Nor do members of society have a right to be insulated from every potentially offensive activity. For example, the government may not forbid a movie theater from displaying nude scenes on a large outdoor screen that is visible to passing motorists. In Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205, 95 S. Ct. 2268, 45 L. Ed. 2d 125 (1975),

Protecting Your Privacy

By using computer technology, companies can legally collect information about consumers, including what they buy, what medications they take, what sites on the internet they have visited, and what their credit history is. Computer software can organize this data and prepare it for sale and use by direct marketing companies, lending institutions, insurance companies, and credit bureaus.

Although it may be legal to collect this information, individuals may legitimately take steps to protect their privacy. Here are some common ways that companies collect information and some steps consumers can take to prevent this from happening:

• Shopper's cards. Some grocery stores and other retail businesses offer discounts or premiums when consumers use their shopper's cards. All purchases are scanned into a computer, allowing the store to compile a list of each individual's buying habits. The store may use this information to target certain customers or may sell it to companies seeking specific types of potential customers. Consumers can protect their privacy either by not using such cards or by persuading the company to limit the distribution of the information.
• Financial data. Credit bureaus compile credit histories filled with personal information, which are sold to anyone without restriction. Although these credit reports are supposed to be sold only to those companies with a legitimate business interest, this is not always the case. Consumers are entitled to review their credit reports and correct any errors. If someone the consumer does not know has requested a report, the consumer can ask the credit bureau to investigate the legitimacy of the request.
• Motor vehicle data. An individual's motor vehicle registration is public information in most states. In many states, driver's license data (weight, age, address, driver's license number) are also public information. Automobile dealers and insurance companies collect such information. An individual can request the state motor vehicle department not to release his or her name and address to individuals or companies.

The federal communications commission has issued regulations restricting companies from certain forms of telephone solicitation, which has developed into a common annoyance in U.S. households. Under these regulations (47 C.F.R. § 64.1200), a company may not initiate a telephone call by using an automatic dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice without prior consent of the party called. Likewise, a company may not make such a call to a service for which the called party may be charged, such as a paging service or a cellular telephone service. A company is also restricted from sending an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine without prior permission.

A telemarketer is restricted from calling a residential telephone subscriber before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. local time of the party being called. Telemarketers must institute procedures for maintaining a do-not-call list in order to conduct telemarketing. If an individual requests that the telemarketer place him or her on the do-not-call list, the telemarketer must comply. The telemarketer must satisfy a number of minimum requirements, including the development of a written policy detailing the procedures that must be followed if a person asks to be placed on the do-not-call list; training of personnel to place persons on the do-not-call list; and ensuring that the person who requests to have his or her name on the list is placed on the list. If a telemarketer fails to honor the do-not-call list, it is liable to a party on the list that is contacted by a telephone solicitor employed by that telemarketer.

further readings

Bruening, Paula J. 2001. Consumer Privacy in the Electronic Marketplace. Washington, D.C.: National Legal Center for the Public Interest.

"Code of Federal Regulations Title 47: Restrictions on Telephone Solicitation." Available online at <www.ornocall.com/ced73687.html> (accessed July 15, 2003).

cross-references

Consumer Credit Protection Act; Consumer Fraud.

the Supreme Court said that the First Amendment right to show such films outweighs the privacy interests of offended passersby who can protect their sensitivity by averting their eyes.

Common Law

The common law of torts recognizes five discrete rights of privacy. First, the common law affords individuals the right to sue when their seclusion or solitude has been intruded upon in an unreasonable and highly offensive manner. Second, individuals have a common-law right to sue when information concerning their private life is disclosed to the public in a highly objectionable fashion. Third, tort liability may be imposed on individuals or entities that publicize information that places someone in a false light. Fourth, the common law forbids persons from appropriating someone's name or likeness without his or her consent. Fifth, the common law prevents business competitors from engaging in unfair competition through the theft of trade secrets.

Intrusion upon Seclusion One who intentionally intrudes upon the solitude or seclusion of another is subject to liability for common-law invasion of privacy. An invasion may involve a physical intrusion into a place where a person has secluded herself, such as the nonconsensual entry into someone's home, office, apartment, or hotel room. Nonphysical intrusions may also give rise to liability when they involve the use of electronic surveillance equipment, including wiretaps, microphones, and video cameras. Alternatively, a person's seclusion may be impermissibly interrupted by persistent and unwelcome telephone calls, or by the occasional window peeper. By imposing liability in such instances, the law seeks to protect a person's tranquility and equilibrium.

Not every intrusion is actionable under this common-law tort. The intrusion must be considered highly offensive to a reasonable person. Creditors are allowed to take action to collect delinquent debts but must do so in a reasonable fashion. Landlords are permitted to demand late rental payments but must do so at reasonable times. A judge or jury determines what is reasonable according to the facts of each case. Individuals have no expectation of privacy in matters that are public. Thus, businesses may examine public criminal records of prospective employees without fear of liability, and photographers may take pictures of movie stars in public places.

Publicity that Discloses Private Information The common law protects individuals from publicity that discloses information about their private lives. Unlike libel, slander, and defamation actions, this common-law tort may give rise to liability for truthful publicity, as long as the information is published in a manner that is highly objectionable to a reasonable person and the information is of no legitimate concern to the public. Disclosure of private sexual relations, disgraceful family quarrels, humiliating illnesses, and most other intimate personal matters will normally give rise to liability for invasion of privacy, even if such disclosures are completely accurate. By discouraging the publication of such private and personal matters, the common law places a high value on the right of individuals to control the dissemination of information about themselves, including the right to filter out embarrassing and harmful facts that might influence the opinion of others.

Liability is not usually imposed for alleged injuries relating to matters that are intended for public consumption. A person's date of birth and military record, for example, are both matters of public record that may be disclosed without invading his or her privacy. Commercial proprietors that regularly deal with the public receive little protection from disclosures that relate to the price of their products, the quality of their services, or the manner in which they conduct business. Under the First Amendment, business proprietors receive less protection of their privacy interests because the U.S. Constitution seeks to promote the free and robust exchange of accurate information to allow consumers to make informed decisions.

False-Light Publicity The common-law tort of false-light publicity protects individuals from the public disclosure of false information about their reputation, beliefs, or activities. The information need not be of a private nature nor must it be defamatory, as must libelous and slanderous statements, before liability will be imposed. Instead, a misleading publication will give rise to liability for false-light publicity when it is placed before a large segment of the public in such a way that a reasonable person would find it highly offensive. However, publication of an inaccurate story to a single person, or a small group of people, is not considered sufficiently public to constitute publicity.

A newspaper photograph printed in close proximity to a caption suggesting criminal activity on the part of the person photographed is a classic example of false-light publicity. On the other hand, a misleading photograph, such as one that has been retouched, may not give rise to liability for false-light publicity if the photograph is accompanied by a caption that clearly explains how it has been distorted. An esteemed poet may successfully sue for false-light publicity when an inferior poem is published under the poet's name. A war hero may assert a cognizable claim for false-light publicity if a story is aired that inaccurately portrays the soldier as a coward.

Public officials, such as politicians, and public figures, such as professional athletes, rarely recover for false-light publicity. Before a public official or public figure can recover for false-light publicity, the First Amendment requires proof that a story or caption was published with knowledge of its falsity or in reckless disregard of its truth, a principle that has become known as the actual malice standard (new york times co. v. sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 84 S. Ct. 710, 11 L. Ed. 2d 686 [1964]). In most instances, public officials and public figures have thrust themselves into the public spotlight. As a condition to accepting the benefits that accompany public recognition, the law requires that such persons accept a diminished level of protection of their privacy interests. Because the First Amendment confers less protection on public persons than it does on private individuals, the Constitution encourages the media to freely disseminate information about candidates for office, government officials, and other figures who influence or shape the course of events.

Appropriation of Name or Likeness One who appropriates the name or likeness of another person is subject to liability for invasion of privacy. All individuals are vested with an exclusive property right in their identity. No person, business, or other entity may appropriate someone's name or likeness without permission. Nonconsensual commercial appropriation of a person's name or likeness for advertising purposes is the most common type of conduct giving rise to liability under this common-law tort. By forbidding the nonconsensual use of a person's name or likeness, the law allows an individual to license his or her face, body, reputation, prestige, and image for remuneration.

Not every appropriation gives rise to liability for invasion of privacy. Liability will attach only when a person's name or likeness has been appropriated to obtain an immediate and direct advantage. The advantage need not yield a financial gain. However, the mere incidental use of someone's name or likeness is not a compensable appropriation.

For example, the print and electronic media may publish photographs, drawings, and other depictions of a person's name or likeness as an incidental part of their legitimate news-gathering activities without violating the common-law right to privacy. However, if a nonprofit organization uses a person's name or likeness to promote its philanthropy, it may be liable for the appropriation. The right to sue for wrongful appropriation is a personal right. Parents cannot recover damages for breach of their children's privacy, and family members cannot sue after the death of the person whose name or likeness has been misappropriated.

Theft of Trade Secrets Wrongful use, disclosure, or theft of a trade secret is actionable under the common law. Although the U.S. economy is generally governed by free-market principles, the common law requires businesses to compete fairly and forbids business rivals from stealing one another's intellectual property for commercial advantage. Although it is difficult to formulate a comprehensive list of what constitutes the improper acquisition of a trade secret, the common law generally makes it unlawful to engage in fraud, misrepresentation, or other forms of deception for the purpose of obtaining confidential commercial information.

Independent analysis of publicly available products or information is not an improper means of acquisition. Through a process known as reverse engineering, a competitor may lawfully purchase a rival's product, disassemble it, and subject it to laboratory analysis for the purpose of unlocking valuable information, such as a secret formula or process. However, aerial photography of a competitor's plant constitutes tortious interference with commercial privacy. Courts have reasoned that the law should not force commercial entities to expend additional resources to conceal their interior from every possible form of exterior exposure. Conversely, commercial entities may patent many of their valuable trade secrets before placing a product on the market where it can be analyzed by a competitor.

Legislation

In addition to the constitutional and common-law principles that offer protection of privacy interests, a host of statutes and regulations have been passed to define privacy in a variety of contexts. State and federal legislation regulates the circumstances under which information from financial, educational, and government records can be revealed. State and federal legislation also prescribes the conditions under which employers may subject their employees to drug testing. Federal laws strictly limit the use of electronic surveillance in both the public and private sectors.

Congress passed the fair credit reporting act of 1970 (15 U.S.C.A. § 1681 et seq.) to prevent unreasonable and careless invasions of consumer privacy. The law permits employers, lenders, and other persons to obtain a copy of an individual's credit report for a legitimate business purpose. However, businesses may not request a credit report unless it is related to a transaction initiated by the consumer, such as a job interview or bank loan.

Commercial entities may not use credit reports for the purpose of marketing. Nor may a person or entity obtain a credit report through the use of false pretenses, fraud, or misrepresentation. The statute authorizes consumers to review the information contained in their own credit reports and challenge inaccuracies. Credit bureaus have an obligation to correct any inaccuracies within a reasonable amount of time after learning of them.

The privacy act of 1974 (5 U.S.C.A. § 522a) requires the federal government to use fair practices in the collection and use of information about U.S. citizens and is designed to prevent federal agencies from disclosing certain personal information contained in their records. In general, federal agencies may not release government records without first obtaining consent from the persons who are referred to in the records. Every individual maintains the right to inspect federal agency records, correct mistakes, and add important details. In the event that an individual's right is infringed under this law, he or she can sue the federal government for money damages or a court order directing the agency to obey the law.

Do DNA Databases Violate Privacy?

All 50 states and the federal government maintain DNA databases of certain convicted criminals. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the chemical that reveals a person's genetic makeup. A database containing the DNA of convicted criminals helps law enforcement find and identify repeat criminal offenders. Prior to 1998, the federal DNA database and the state databases were not completely integrated, so sharing DNA information between the states was not an easy task.

In October 1998, the federal bureau of investigation (FBI) began operating a nationwide DNA database called the National DNA Index System, under the DNA Identification Act of 1994 (Public Law 103 322). The system consists of the DNA databases from all 50 states and the FBI's own DNA database. As of 2003, it contained approximately 1.3 million DNA samples. The national database makes it possible for law enforcement officials in one state to compare DNA found at a crime scene with DNA samples that exist in the DNA databases of other states. When the national DNA database was installed, FBI director Louis Freeh predicted that it would be of great value to city, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies if they work together to apprehend violent criminals.

The national DNA database in the United States is similar to the one that has been used in England since 1995. In Great Britain, the empire-wide DNA database includes DNA samples from crime scenes, from anyone convicted of a crime, and from persons who are suspects in unsolved cases. The Police Superintendents Association in England has even proposed obtaining DNA samples from every person in England. There is no plan in the United States for such widespread DNA gathering.

Who, then, should be required to provide a DNA sample? This question comes up again and again concerning the use of, DNA databases. Almost all states require that persons convicted of serious sex offenses give a DNA sample upon their conviction. However, the states differ on whether to mandate DNA profiling of all violent felons, persons paroled from jail, and juvenile offenders. And what about an individual who is on parole for a past crime? Should he or she be required to retroactively provide a sample? A national DNA database may be a boon for law enforcement personnel, but it raises concern over protection of privacy.

In March 1999, U.S. Attorney General janet reno requested that a federal commission look into the possibility of requiring all arrested persons to give a DNA sample. In 2003, the george w. bush administration backed the proposal. The administration also pushed to require DNA samples from juvenile offenders. The notion that a person may be required under federal law to give a DNA sample based on the mere suspicion of criminal activity is chilling to civil libertarians. The FBI, however, insists that dna evidence is the future of law enforcement and that the national database has already resulted in a number of successes. As of 2002, over six thousand DNA samples had been matched to unsolved crimes. The FBI is also quick to point out that the DNA database is a secure system, and that all users, including researchers, are required to undergo background checks.

Other proponents of the national database herald the coming of a national DNA database for its exculpatory potential. A person may easily be eliminated as a suspect through DNA evidence and, in some cases, DNA evidence can prove a convicted defendant innocent, which results in freedom and true, albeit tardy, justice. Opponents of a comprehensive national DNA database concede that DNA evidence can be exculpatory, but groups such as the american civil liberties union (ACLU) are gearing up for a legal battle that will almost certainly reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

further readings

Kaye, David, et al. 2001. "Is a DNA Identification Database in Your Future?" Criminal Justice 16 (fall).

Puri, Allison. 2001. "An International DNA Database: Balancing Hope, Privacy, and Scientific Error." Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 24 (spring).

Webster, Warren R., Jr. 2000. "DNA Database Statutes and Privacy in the Information Age." Health Matrix 10 (winter).

Similarly, the freedom of information act (5 U.S.C.A. § 552 [1996]) contains limitations on the disclosure of agency information when such disclosure would constitute a "clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." In most other instances, the Freedom of Information Act guarantees the right of Americans to request a copy of any reasonably identifiable record kept by a federal agency. However, the U.S. government may refuse to disclose certain sensitive information that relates to national security, foreign policy, or other classified areas. Persons who have requested information and been denied may challenge the decision in court. The Freedom of Information Act serves the twin purposes of protecting private and classified documents from disclosure while requiring the uninhibited exchange of all other information that is consistent with an open society and a democratic government.

In 1974, Congress enacted the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 U.S.C.A. § 1232g), which gives parents the right to examine the scholastic records of their children. The act broadly defines scholastic records to include all records, files, documents, and other materials containing information directly related to a student that are maintained by an educational agency or institution. The act permits only certain individuals to have access to student records, including other institution officials who have a legitimate scholastic interest in the records, such as teachers, principals, and student loan officers. Otherwise, a school must obtain consent from the student or parent before disclosing any information contained in an educational record. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act applies to all public schools, including colleges and universities, and to private schools that receive federal funding.

The Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978 (12 U.S.C.A. § 3401 et seq.) entitles bank customers to a limited expectation of privacy in their financial records by requiring that law enforcement officials follow certain procedures before information can be disclosed. Unless a customer consents in writing to the disclosure of his financial records, a bank may not produce such records for government inspection unless ordered to do so by an administrative or judicial subpoena or a lawfully executed search warrant. Other formal written requests for bank records may be granted if they are made for a legitimate law enforcement purpose. The Right to Financial Privacy Act applies to credit unions, trust companies, and savings and loan institutions.

The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (18 U.S.C.A. § 2510 et seq.) governs the use of electronic surveillance in both the public and private sectors. In the public sector, the act outlines detailed procedures the federal government must follow before conducting any form of electronic surveillance. Pursuant to authorization by the U.S. attorney general or a specially designated assistant, federal law enforcement agents must make a sworn written application to a federal judge that specifically describes the location where the communications will be intercepted, the reasons for the interception, the expected duration of the surveillance, and the identity of those persons whose conversations will be monitored. The judge must then review the surveillance application to ensure that it satisfies each of the statutory requirements and establishes probable cause to justify electronic eavesdropping.

The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act governs the use of electronic surveillance in the private sector as well. The act prohibits any person from intentionally using or disclosing information that has been knowingly intercepted by electronic or mechanical means without the consent of the interested person. Nearly 70 percent of all reported wiretapping involves divorce cases and custody battles. Often, divorcing spouses, attempting to obtain embarrassing or discrediting information against one another, plant recording and listening devices throughout the marital home. Although most federal courts have ruled that the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act applies to interspousal electronic surveillance, some courts have created a spousal immunity from civil liability under the act in an effort to preserve any remaining remnants of marital harmony.

The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act also governs the use of electronic surveillance in the area of employment. A number of employers videotape employee movement throughout the workplace, search employees' computer files, monitor their telephone calls, and read their electronic mail. Courts have generally permitted employers to engage in such surreptitious snooping so long as it serves a legitimate and significant business purpose.

In the rest of the private sector, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act applies to information intercepted from telephone satellite unscrambling devices, cellular telephones, and pagers, as well as from traditional forms of electronic surveillance, such as telephone taps, microphones, and other bugging devices. However, the act does not cover information intercepted from pen registers, which record the telephone numbers of outgoing calls, or caller identification devices, which display the telephone numbers of incoming calls, because neither captures conversations of any sort. In addition, the act does not apply to information intercepted by videotape. In a 2001 decision, Commonwealth v. Rekasie, 778 A.2d 624 (Pa. 2001), a Pennsylvania court held in a 4–3 decision that a defendant does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a telephone conversation from his home with a confidential police informant; therefore, the Commonwealth was not required to obtain a determination of probable cause before tape recording the conversation.

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is a federal program sponsored by the department of defense (DoD) designed to detect, classify, and identify foreign terrorists—and decipher their plans—and thereby enable the United States to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts. To that end, the TIA program states its objective as creating a counter-terrorism information system that: (1) increases information coverage by an order of magnitude and affords easy future scaling; (2) provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed; (3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks; and (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning, and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test, and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.

Critics of this program have been outraged that the government has implemented it. The DoD claims that it recognizes American citizens' concerns about privacy invasions and that it has certain safeguards in place to prevent this and to ensure that data are protected and used only for lawful purposes.

The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (usa patriot act, or USAPA), Pub. L. 107-54, 115 Stat. 272, introduced a plethora of legislative changes which significantly increased the surveillance and investigative powers of law enforcement agencies in the United States. The act does not, however, provide for the system of checks and balances that traditionally safeguards civil liberties in the face of such legislation. Legislative proposals in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were introduced less than a week after the attacks. President george w. bush signed the final bill, the USA PATRIOT Act, into law on October 26, 2001. The act was a compromise version of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 (ATA), a far-reaching legislative package intended to strengthen the nation's defense against terrorism. The ATA contained several provisions vastly expanding the authority of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor private communications and access personal information. The USA PATRIOT Act retains provisions appreciably expanding government investigative authority, especially with respect to the internet. Those provisions address issues that are complex and implicate fundamental constitutional protections of individual liberty, including the appropriate procedures for interception of information transmitted over the Internet and other rapidly evolving technologies. The american civil liberties union and various library and booksellers' organizations filed suit in October 2002 under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) seeking the disclosure of information concerning implementation of the controversial USA PATRIOT Act. The lawsuit covered some of the information the justice department withheld from the House Judiciary Committee in response to a set of detailed questions. A court ordered compliance with the FOIA; however, the government withheld many documents claiming national security interests. As of 2003, this controversy continued.

Genetic privacy has also been at issue in recent years. Cloning is a process by which cells are isolated from an organism through a biopsy and cultured under laboratory conditions. They grow and divide, producing new cells identical to the original cells. With the exception of sperm and egg cells, cloning from even a single cell of a mammal is possible because every cell in the organism contains a complete set of genes necessary to make an identical copy. Unlike artificial fertilization and other modern methods of conception, cloning requires just one parent. In July 2001, the House of Representatives passed the Weldon-Stupak bill, which criminalizes cloning in humans, whether for reproductive or research purposes. This bill was introduced in the Senate as the Brownback-Landrieu bill and was endorsed by President Bush. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) reintroduced legislation in 2003 that would ban all human cloning, including somatic cell nuclear transfer, also known as therapeutic cloning. The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003 reintroduces language from Brownback's prior bill that ended in a Senate stalemate in the 107th Congress.

Alcohol and other drug testing is another form of employee surveillance that raises privacy questions in both the public and private sectors. Many legislators consider drug testing by urinalysis to be intrusive, and the practice has been regulated in at least 18 states. Three states require employers to demonstrate probable cause of illegal drug use before they can compel an employee to submit to urinalysis. Six states specify that employers can instigate drug testing only if they have reason to suspect an employee of illegal drug use. In general, however, no pervasive public policy against mandatory employee drug testing exists in either the public or private sector.

Drug testing in the workplace gained momentum in 1986 following a presidential commission report on drug abuse (America's Habit: Drug Abuse, Drug Trafficking, and Organized Crime). The commission recommended drug testing in both the public and private employment sectors. Based on this recommendation, President ronald reagan ordered drug testing for federal employees in positions that require a high degree of trust and confidence (Exec. Order No. 12,564, 3 C.F.R. 224 [1986]). Guidelines promulgated by the department of health and human services established scientific and technical requirements concerning specimen collection, laboratory analysis, and interpretation of test results for the federal drug-testing program.

In response to this federal impetus, employers have dramatically increased drug testing of employees. Many state laws now encourage private employers to periodically test their employees for illegal drug use, and many private employers have asked their state legislatures to pass drug-testing laws. In the public sector, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that random drug testing of government employees constitutes a "search" that must comply with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment before it may be deemed legal (National Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab, 489 U.S. 656, 109 S. Ct. 1384, 103 L. Ed. 2d 685 [1989]).

The meaning of the term privacy changes according to its legal context. In constitutional law, privacy means the right to make certain fundamental decisions concerning deeply personal matters free from government coercion, intimidation, or regulation. In this sense, privacy is associated with interests in autonomy, dignity, and self-determination. Under the common law, privacy generally means the right to be let alone. In this sense, privacy is associated with seclusion. Under statutory law, privacy often means the right to prevent the nonconsensual disclosure of sensitive, confidential, or discrediting information. In this sense, privacy is associated with secrecy.

The privacy issues associated with genetics have led to various legal disputes. The lawsuits over genetic research and testing concern matters such as the taking of the blood or tissue; the use of the blood or tissue; the distribution of the blood or tissue; the use of previously acquired samples of blood or tissue to conduct new tests; and whether a gene can receive patent protection. One of the more emotional issues associated with genetic testing is the testing of persons without their consent. In Norman-Bloodsaw v. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a research lab under the U.S. department of energy was sued for secretly testing certain employees.

Norman-Bloodsaw began in 1994 when Marya Norman-Bloodsaw, a forty-one-year-old clerk in the accounting department of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, asked to see her medical records. When she inspected her records, Norman-Bloodsaw recognized the code for syphilis testing. Norman-Bloodsaw did not recall being told that she was being tested for syphilis, nor did she recall requesting such testing. At Norman-Bloodsaw's urging, several other employees consulted their own medical files and found that they too had been tested for genetic defects and other medical conditions without their knowledge or consent.

The secret testing seemed to establish a pattern of discrimination. Although the lab had tested all new employees for syphilis, African Americans and Latinos were re-tested for the disease. The lab also tested and re-tested its African American employees for sickle cell anemia, and women were tested regularly for pregnancy. White men were not re-tested for any diseases, except for white men who were married to black women who secretly tested for syphilis.

The lab testing by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory allegedly constituted illegal discrimination and the violation of privacy rights. Vertis Ellis, a 47-year-old African American woman, for example, had been tested for sickle cell anemia and for pregnancy, but she had never requested the tests, authorized the tests, or received results from the tests. "I felt so violated," Ellis told U.S. News & World Report. "I thought, 'Oh, my God. Do they think all black women are nasty and sleep around?'" Norman-Bloodsaw, Ellis, and five other employees of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories filed a class action suit against the lab, alleging violations of privacy and civil rights.

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the oldest research lab in the country, argued that it was not liable because the employees had all agreed to receive comprehensive physical examinations. A defendant in the case, Thomas Budinger, a former medical director of the lab, defended the testing of African-Americans for syphilis. "[T]hat's where the prevalence of the disease is," Budinger explained to Hawkins. "How come only people over a certain age would get an EKG? See the logic?" The laboratory also denied that the testing was done in secret. According to attorney Douglas Barton, the lab posted test results on a wall in the exam room. The plaintiffs in the case disputed that assertion, and they argued that they had not agreed to repeated testing without their consent, but the federal district court in San Francisco dismissed the case. According to Judge Vaughn Walker of the federal trial court in San Francisco, the tests were administered as part of a comprehensive medical examination to which [the employees] had consented.

The plaintiffs appealed the dismissal of the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In February 1998, the federal appeals court reversed the ruling and remanded the case for trial. Norman-Bloodsaw v. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 135 F.3d 1260 (9th Cir. 1998). According to the appeals court, the testing violated constitutional privacy rights if the employees had not given their consent and there were no reasonable medical or public health needs that justified the testing. The testing also violated Title VII of the civil rights act of 1964 if the testing was conducted based on race and gender-specific traits. The appeals court put a stop to the testing and ordered the lab to delete all of the secret test results from the personnel files of the employees.

The Norman-Bloodsaw decision is important because it places some limits on the use of genetic testing of employees. Every year, genetic researchers are discovering new genetic predictors for diseases, and insurance companies may begin to base eligibility for their medical and life insurance policies on a person's genetic predisposition to diseases. If, for example, a person seeking insurance is genetically tested and found to have a predisposition for a fatal disease, the insurance company may wish to deny coverage.

State departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) require drivers and automobile owners to provide personal information, which may include a person's name, address, telephone number, vehicle description, social security number, medical information, and photograph, as a condition of obtaining a driver's license or registering an automobile. Finding that many States sell this information to individuals and businesses for significant revenues, Congress enacted the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994 (DPPA), which establishes a regulatory scheme that restricts the States' ability to disclose a driver's personal information without the driver's consent. In Reno v. Condon, 528 U.S. 141 (2000), South Carolina and its attorney general brought suit alleging that the DPPA violates the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Concluding that the DPPA is incompatible with the principles of federalism inherent in the Constitution's division of power between the States and the federal government, the district court granted summary judgment for the State and permanently enjoined the DPPA enforcement against the State and its officers. The Fourth Circuit affirmed, concluding that the Act violates constitutional principles of federalism. The Supreme Court ruled that the DPPA is a proper exercise of Congress' authority to regulate interstate commerce under the commerce clause, U.S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 3. The motor vehicle information which the States have historically sold is used by insurers, manufacturers, direct marketers, and others engaged in interstate commerce to contact drivers with customized solicitations. The information is also used in the stream of interstate commerce by various public and private entities for matters related to interstate motoring. Because drivers' personal, identifying information is, in this context, an article of commerce, its sale or release into the interstate stream of business is sufficient to support congressional regulation.

further readings

Dworkin, Ronald. 1996. Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Garrow, David. 1994. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. New York: Scribner.

Grant, Jeffrey R. 2000. Surveillance Society. Toronto, Ontario: Frontier Research.

Kennedy, Caroline, and Ellen Alderman. 1995. The Right to Privacy. New York: Knopf.

Posner, Richard. 1981. The Economics of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Restatement of the Law Second, Torts. 1987–2001. New York: American Law Institute.

Warren, Samuel D., and Louis D. Brandeis. 1890. "The Right to Privacy." Harvard Law Review 4.

cross-references

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; Consumer Credit; Death and Dying; Drugs and Narcotics; Employment Law; Libel and Slander; Parent and Child; Penumbra; Privileged Communication; Quinlan, In re; Search and Seizure.

PRIVACY.

The volume of studies on privacy has increased tremendously since the 1970s, especially in the United States, and their geographical spread has become wider. These studies address new topics, including celebrity privacy for political and other public figures and privacy rights in international human rights law. Developments in advanced technology, such as electronic storage and DNA testing, have added increasing urgency to the debate, while overt and covert surveillance has become the major concern of Internet sites on privacy issues.

Debates on privacy are conducted on all levels. Personal, governmental, and commercial interests are all engaged, and academic arguments are informed by perspectives from almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, politics, geography, law, economics, sociology, social policy, anthropology, literature, language, and history. Journalists and the general public profess an intuitive understanding of what constitutes privacy, but decades of research suggest that there is a wide range of meanings even within a nation-state or common language. Within given communities, variations in attitudes can be related to age, gender, economic and social standing, and ethnic origin, but significant variations can also be found among individuals where these factors are roughly the same. Nevertheless, modern societies share an understanding that privacy is intelligible as a concept among the population at large and, as such, should be explicitly protected by law or custom as a valuable or even essential attribute of civilized life.

Privacy also appears in popular journalism and academic studies as a component of subjects that range across human experience, such as a sense of self; gender and body; private space and family life; intimacy and exclusion; and the impact of globalization on local and communal identity. Privacy studies tend to focus on one or more of the following aspects: (a) a sense of privacy, as experienced by people from different countries, times, and backgrounds; (b) distinctions between public and private realms; (c) rights of privacy in national and international law; (d) the role of advanced technology in privacy protection and intrusion; (e) the functions and values of privacy.

A Sense of Privacy

The existence of a sense of privacy across different cultures and times is frequently asserted or denied on little evidence. One of the most influential studies to encourage the belief that a sense of privacy is specific to the modern Western world was The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (originally published as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation in 1939) by Norbert Elias (1897–1990). Elias did not take privacy as his subject, but his comments on shame, embarrassment, delicacy, and modesty are frequently quoted by writers on privacy. His work examines the process by which a code of polite manners was formulated and disseminated between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, starting with the publication of De civilitate morum puerilium (On civility in children) by Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) in 1530. Erasmus dealt with the changing etiquette of familiar and social life, ranging from snot (how to handle a handkerchief before and after blowing one's nose) to urination (someone inadvertently seen urinating should not be greeted).

A large part of polite manners focused on how to accord personal space (physical or mental) to individuals (or groups of people) in which to carry out desirable or necessary activities without embarrassment to themselves or to onlookers. Elias did not assume that privacy as a goal of etiquette was unique to Europe; commenting on how meat is served and eaten, he notes that the concealment of carving behind the scenes was effected much earlier and more radically in ancient China than in the West.

Critics whose knowledge was largely confined to European and American history regarded a sense of privacy as peculiar to a specific Western economic and cultural environment. In a 1965 essay, "Literature and Post-History," the American literary critic George Steiner (1929–) related the rise of the Western novel and its audience to the domestic privacy, leisure, and reading habits of the mercantile class of the eighteenth century, claiming that printed fiction and individual privacy were alike products of the typographical revolution. If typography is a measure of impersonality and privacy, then it would be reasonable to regard late imperial China, where moveable type was invented and where printed fiction flourished, and Korea, the first country in which moveable type passed into common use, as founders of the sense of privacy in the modern world. Historians of English literature nevertheless continued to site the development of a sense of privacy alongside long prose fiction in the eighteenth century. Works such as Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (1999) by Cecile M. Jagodzinski and Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (2003) by Patricia Meyer Spacks also identified privacy as a special attribute of women, a theme that appears in many cultures under different guises, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, produced evidence that privacy is a universal human condition whose expression is not necessarily verbal and is adaptable to specific circumstances. Interest in the existence of universal traits in human behavior peaked in the early 1980s, when conventional assumptions on cultural differences that formed research methodology from the 1920s onwards were undermined by new research in the late 1960s and 1970s that showed the differences had been exaggerated and similarities had largely been ignored; new research in linguistics and in brain-mapping gave added support.

A summary of this debate and of traits that can be categorized as universal are contained in Donald L. Brown's Human Universals (1991). Among the characteristics of what Brown calls "Universal People" (UP) are standards of sexual modesty, sex generally in private, and discreetness in elimination of body wastes. Universal people possess a concept of the person: "They distinguish self from others, and they can see the self both as subject and object.… They know that people have a private inner life, have memories, make plans, choose between alternatives, and otherwise make decisions" (p. 135). Most but not all of the lists of universal characteristics compiled by anthropologists since 1945 and summarized by Brown include privacy.

Privacy and Popular Fiction

Habermasian concepts were so much part of British cultural life by the 1970s that readers of middle-brow fiction were deemed to be a knowledgeable audience for the novel The History Man (1975) by Malcolm Bradbury, whose protagonist Howard Kirk is writing a sociological treatise called The Defeat of Privacy. Throughout the novel, Kirk repeatedly attacks the notion of privacy as outmoded while in the last resort guarding his own privacy in his writing and sexual life. A hugely successful satire on academic sociology in contemporary Britain, The History Man was repeatedly re-issued throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The academic sociologists and social psychologists who take part in one key scene in The History Man, a departmental meeting, are described by the author as "sophisticates of meetings, readers of Goffman." Although the Canadian writer Erving Goffman restricts himself in works such as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) to discussing "Anglo-American" behavior, his analysis of the psychological functions of privacy or "backstage behavior" are widely applicable.

The anthropologists' evidence became part of the background to discussions on privacy in the 1980s and 1990s. Still the belief persisted among non-anthropologists that a distinctively modern sense of privacy was an attribute of post-industrial societies. Even a philosopher as sensitive to ethnocentricity as Charles Taylor in 1981 and again in 1985 identified a sense of privacy as a defining characteristic of a specifically modern (and by assumption therefore Western) concept of self-identity. In premodern societies, according to Taylor, "One's life was led before everyone else, and hence shame and its avoidance played a big role in people's lives. There was no space, not just physically but psycho-socially, to withdraw into the privacy of one's own self-estimate, or the opinions of a circle based on affinity.… With the rise of the modern identity, this intensely public life withers. The community retreats, and the nuclear family achieves privacy" (pp. 261–262). In modern societies, Taylor concluded, privacy has become a requirement for the good life, a space for family affection and individual fulfillment.

Barrington Moore's Privacy (1984) was a unique contribution to the debate in examining four widely different types of premodern societies: primitive societies, classical Athens, Hebrew society as revealed in the Old Testament, and ancient China. Much of his discussion about ancient Greece and China is on the mutual obligations of government and the populace at large, and he records the Confucian distinction between the separate realms of the state (public) and the family (private), as well as information in early texts on courtship, the family, and friendship. Starting from a narrow definition of privacy, Moore found that rights to privacy in early Confucian China were weak in comparison those enjoyed in fourth-century b.c.e. Athens. He concluded that privacy of communication was possible only in a complex society with strong liberal traditions and that in the absence of democracy, private rights are either few or undeveloped.

The spread of globalization and the inclusion of privacy rights in international law has rendered almost irrelevant the argument about Western and non-Western or modern and premodern societies, as governments in all parts of the world strive to identify themselves as modern, democratic, and based on the rule of law. Although speculation in popular opinion, journalism, and conservative nationalism continues to dwell on which societies or ethnic groups do or do not enjoy a sense of privacy, the academic debate in the 1970s and 1980s shifted to distinctions between public and private realms.

Public and Private Realms

One of the earliest modern studies of privacy was by Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), who noted the blurring of the public and private realms after Roman times. Jürgen Habermas (1929–) systematized and developed her concept of social and public life since Greek and Roman times in Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit (1962), which became the chief source for discussion of public and private realms from the 1960s on (the English translation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, appeared in 1989). Habermas was primarily interested in the public realm but found its vitality dependent on an organization of private life that enabled and encouraged citizens to rise above private identities and concerns. Drawing on literary evidence as well as philosophers and political writers, Habermas focused on the development of the modern European polity. His distinction between mutually interpenetrating public and private spheres within a general private realm (i.e., as opposed to the state) has led to considerable confusion, but his main thesis, that modern society has undergone a transformation in which the expansion of the public sphere within the private realm has taken place at the expense of the private sphere, became a dominant theme in Western culture in the late 1960s and 1970s. To his more radical followers, the apparent triumph of the public sphere represented a post-Marxian liberation from the petty concerns of private life.

The rise of communitarianism in the late 1980s further complicated the public versus private debate, aligning the public interest with conservative values rather than political reform. The American sociologist Amitai Etzioni's The Limits of Privacy (1999) depicted privacy in the United States as a highly privileged state that needed to be modified for the sake of common interests in public safety and public health. Paradoxically, his evidence showed that intrusions on privacy came chiefly from the private sector and that the privacy of individuals was best protected by granting more powers to governments.

PRIVACY AND POPULAR FICTION

Rights to privacy in the United States have been heatedly debated in issues such as abortion, especially for minors, and the personal conduct of candidates for or persons elected to high political office. These concerns form the basis of two novels by the best-selling author Richard North Patterson: No Safe Place (1998) and Protect and Defend (2000). Underpinning a fast-paced narrative on electoral pressures, congressional trade-offs, abortion, adultery, domestic violence, and presidential privacy is thorough research on U.S. law and the advocacy of parties on all sides. Despite his even-handedness, the author comes down strongly against a bill requiring parental permission for the late termination of a minor's pregnancy in Protect and Defend. The fictional bill is defeated in the novel; three years later, President George W. Bush signed a similar bill into law.

The interface of public and private realms in modern Western societies is most strikingly evident in debates concerning abortion, domestic violence, and the private lives of public officials. Contrary to popular belief, no serious academic study has been able to draw a strict line between public and private realms, for reasons related to methodology and terminology. It is inherently unreasonable, for example, to expect that hard and fast borders are possible in such complex matters of political and social relationships. Studies in English, in particular, are typically confused by an ambiguity that is not necessarily present in other European languages (i.e., meanings of the attributive "'private"' that do not carry over into the substantive "'privacy"'). Attempts in the United States to incorporate a defense of privacy into law in the 1980s highlighted problems of terminology and definition.

Rights of Privacy in National and International Law

The principle of a right of privacy was traced back to ancient Jewish law in Samuel H. Hofstadter and George Horowitz's influential The Right of Privacy (1964). Hofstadter, a justice of the New York Supreme Court, and Horowitz, a law professor, also cited case law from European and British Commonwealth countries to show the range of codified legal rights (or their absence) current at the beginning of the 1960s. This state of affairs gradually changed after the General Assembly of the United Nations "took cognizance" of the rights of privacy as formulated in English in Article 17 of the International Covenants on Human Rights in 1960. The text of Article 17 declared that "(1) No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour or reputation;" and "(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

Most works on privacy written after 1960 referred at least in passing to privacy as a universal human right, despite different legal systems. For practical reasons, however, discussions on legal aspects of privacy—as in Ruth Gavison's often-quoted study in The Yale Law Journal, "Privacy and the Limits of the Law" (1980)—tend to be country-specific. Studies of rights to privacy in law also accepted nation-states as imposing significant boundaries; although to some extent common law in England corresponds to common law in the United States, the different legal systems of Scotland and continental Europe, not to mention other parts of the world, appear to be too remote for realistic comparison. Gavison's methodology utilized a framework distinguishing status (privacy as a situation of an individual vis-à-vis others, rather than a claim, a psychological state, or a form of control) and characteristics (related to secrecy, anonymity, and solitude) to establish what she calls "a neutral concept of privacy" that might be used for cross-cultural comparison. This attempt at a legally acceptable definition has been criticized in principle and shown to be unworkable in practice.

Terminology

The English words private and privacy come from the Latin privatus, meaning "withdrawn from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself," and the generally negative sense is continued into the early understanding of the English word private, whose first recorded appearance goes back to 1380. The substantive privacy is not recorded until 1450, and its further meanings of "personal relationships," and then "intimacy" and "confidential relationships" developed even later in succeeding centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century, privacy had begun to refer to legal and political rights, associated with modernity and advanced civilization, and attributed relatively or very high value. These associations were not transferred to private in its meanings of selfish interests or property rights or access. Near-synonyms for private as a descriptor in English in other contexts include individual, personal, familiar, family, domestic, secret, confidential, secure, inner, interior, and intimate ; an Elizabethan equivalent term for privacy avant la lettre is contemplation.

Many European languages do not have exact equivalents of the terms private and privacy. In Dutch, for example, the words eigen (cognate with "own") and openbaar (cognate with "open") are used with reference to property or access where English would use "private" and "public." Swedish has a close equivalent for private (privat ), but not for privacy. The Finnish words related to privacy, such as yksitisasia ("private or intimate affairs"), yksityinen ("private as opposed to public") and yksityisyydensuoja ("private data protection") are derived from the word yksi meaning "one" or "single." Despite this etymological diversity, few English-speakers would wish to claim on linguistic grounds that concepts of privacy in the Netherlands, Sweden, or Finland are radically different from those held in the United Kingdom or United States.

Rights to privacy in law and their political and ethical implications in Britain and its colony Hong Kong have been exhaustively studied by Raymond Wacks, professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, in The Protection of Privacy (1980), Personal Information: Privacy and the Law (1989), and Law, Morality, and the Private Domain (2000). A collection of essays published as a special issue of the European Human Rights Law Review in 2003, edited by Jonathan Cooper, raises cross-cultural issues such as transsexual marriage, policing, and the protection of privacy in the workplace as well as surveillance and constitutional rights. The most exhaustive global survey on rights under national and international laws is David Banisar's Privacy and Human Rights 2000: An International Survey of Privacy Laws and Developments, jointly published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington D.C. and Privacy International in London. Both organizations operate invaluable Web sites that include news, archives, and bibliographies. Inevitably, their emphasis is on ways in which advanced technology opens up new avenues for intrusions into privacy and for its protection.

Advanced Technology: Privacy Protection and Intrusions

Alan F. Westin's Privacy and Freedom (1967), a comprehensive work whose descriptions of privacy states and functions are cited and elaborated upon by most subsequent writers on privacy, was prompted by concern about new technologies for invading privacy in the hands of government and commercial agencies. As professor of public law and government at Columbia University, Westin occupied an influential position from which to propose changes in U.S. law. Calling for greater protection to the ordinary citizen, Westin pointed out that the tradition of limiting the surveillance powers of the authorities over the private activities of individuals and groups goes back to ancient Greece. He then dedicated over a decade's research to collecting data and investigating attitudes towards privacy in the United States.

In Databanks in a Free Society (1972), one of the first books linking data collection with privacy, Westin and his co-author Michael A. Baker found that the scope of information collection about individuals had not yet significantly expanded as a direct result of computerization, but a National Science Foundation conference in 1979 in which Westin was a key speaker concluded that this was no longer the case. A Harris survey directed by Westin in 1979 on attitudes towards privacy in the United States, which addressed the potential abuse or misuse of personal information by business or government, identified growing public concern about the perceived erosion of privacy in the early 1970s in the United States.

Definitions

Producing an adequate definition of privacy is one of the most intractable problems in privacy studies. A University of Edinburgh Ph.D. dissertation by Katherine J. Day, "Perspectives on Privacy: A Sociological Analysis" (1985), listed more than a hundred examples. One of the oldest definitions remains influential: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis's 1890 declaration that privacy is the right of the individual to be left alone. However, its negativity and stress on the individual as the locus of privacy have had unfortunate consequences.

Alan F. Westin's 1967 definition of privacy is the most commonly cited, but strictly speaking his is not so much a definition as a two-tier description of privacy states and privacy functions. Julie Inness's 1992 attempt combines the aspects of control over access and the intimate nature of privacy in a three-fold definition, but it requires further definition of what is meant by "intimate" and fails to cope with non-intimate instances of privacy.

Ruth Gavison highlighted the difficulty of legal definitions of privacy in 1980, and Raymond Wacks further explored the issue in 1989. Wacks concluded that the term was so overladen with assumptions and ambiguous in terms of its use that conceptual coherence was an unreachable target. The proliferation of definitions and their unsuitability for legal purposes have therefore led some legal scholars to avoid the term privacy in formulating laws for its protection. It is highly unlikely, however, that the term will disappear from common use, since most people are content to muddle along with an imperfect but workable understanding.

Inspired by Westin's advocacy to make the issue of data protection and privacy his life's work, David H. Flaherty produced two pioneering surveys, Privacy and Data Protection: An International Bibliography (1984) and Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies: The Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden, France, Canada, and the United States (1989). The former lists 1,862 Western-language works (books, articles, and government reports) published between 1978 and 1983 concerning Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the rest of the world. An impressive number of U.S. works on threats to information privacy followed, including Managing Privacy: Information Technology and Corporate America (1994) by H. Jeff Smith, Privacy and Its Invasion (1995) by Deckle McClean, The Culture of Surveillance (1997) by William G. Staples, Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape (1997) edited by Philip E. Agre and Marc Rotenberg, and The Electronic Privacy Papers (1998) edited by Bruce Schneier and David Baniser. Most of these works regarded surveillance and data collection as necessary evils in modern life against which the citizen should be warned and equipped with appropriate measures, including individual acts of resistance as well as pressure on corporate and stage agencies.

The most aggressive defense of privacy against intrusion from government and corporate interests was Gini Graham Scott's Mind Your Own Business: The Battle for Personal Privacy (1995). It contains detailed accounts of privacy cases in the United States since the 1960s, relating to employment, police surveillance, media intrusion, medical and health issues, and medical and insurance records. Scott is unequivocally opposed to court decisions that favor employers, the media, schools, the law courts, and the police. He alerts readers to grounds on which privacy may or may not be protected in law, provides an appendix listing computer privacy bulletin boards, and gives his own address for further communication.

Celebrity Privacy

The issue of celebrity privacy goes back at least to the nineteenth-century growth of newspapers, but came to dominate discourse on privacy at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the new millennium. In the United Kingdom, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 was regarded by many as due in part to media intrusion, enabled by the use of new surveillance equipment, and also due in part to press refusal to observe conventions on personal privacy for public figures.

In the United States, President Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1999 for having denied on oath improper sexual relationships became unavoidable when DNA analysis was carried out on his semen. Responding to the constitutional crisis that then arose, Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, made a plea for the protection of presidential privacy. In what he called "the disastrous erosion of the precious but fragile conventions of personal privacy in the United States over the last ten or twenty years," Nagel lamented that "American society has lost its grip on a fundamental value, one which cannot be enforced by law alone but without which civilization would not survive.… The division of the self protects the limited public space from unmanageable encroachment and the unruly inner life from excessive inhibition.… The growth of tolerance does not make the collapse of privacy significantly less damaging" (London Review of Books, 4 February 1999, p. 3–6). The support given to the president throughout the unsuccessful impeachment hearings in the spring of 1999 suggests that despite his admissions of wrongdoing, the U.S. electorate sympathized with Clinton's plea that even presidents have private lives.

A transatlantic case that came to trial under English law was the claim for damages by the film stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas against Hello! magazine in 2003. The prosecution claimed that their right to privacy had been breached by the magazine's unauthorized publication of photographs from their wedding. Both sides claimed a vindication of sorts when Zeta-Jones and Douglas were granted the relatively small sum of £14,600 (US$23,360), including £3,750 each for emotional hurt, in compensation for what the judge ruled was a breach of confidence, since the couple had granted publication rights to another publisher. The judge rejected the couple's complaint about invasion of privacy since there was no privacy law in England. Commenting on the verdict, many British newspapers described the issue as one of control rather than privacy, thus illustrating nicely the gap between popular understanding and academic research on privacy.

Compared to the United States, pressure groups in the United Kingdom were slow to react to privacy intrusions. Although one of the first works on the subject, Private Lives and Public Surveillance (1973) by James B. Rule, warned of the consequences, public safety concerns permitted the proliferation of surveillance technology, so that by the end of the twentieth century more closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras were installed in shops and public places in the United Kingdom than anywhere else in the world. A guide to the new Data Protection Act of 1984 by Richard Sizer and Philip Newman noted that the act does not mention privacy as an issue, and that privacy was not a legal right under English law. Attempts to incorporate a bill of rights, including privacy rights, into law in the 1980s and 1990s were rebuffed with claims that English common law afforded greater protection. However, works such as The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective (2002) by Colin J. Bennett and Charles D. Raab show that by the beginning of the twenty-first century the mood had changed dramatically in the United Kingdom as well as in countries throughout the world.

New privacy issues arose in the 1990s with the adoption of DNA technology in preventive and forensic medicine. Mark A. Rothstein's Genetic Secrets: Protecting Privacy and Confidentiality in the Genetic Era (1997) and Graham Laurie's Genetic Privacy: A Challenge to Medico-Legal Norms (2002) are ground-breaking investigations on matters such as the disposal of body parts by hospitals for medical research and the status of the right to know—or not to know—one's individual medical records by the person concerned, by their families, by insurance companies, or by other interested agencies. Public outrage at intrusions into genetic privacy in the United States and United Kingdom demonstrates its close relation to questions of personal identity and the body, an area distinctly more emotional than intrusions via databases, surveillance devices, and Internet tracking. It is hardly surprising that the last three decades before the turn of the twenty-first century saw an unprecedented level of scrutiny of the nature, value, and functions of privacy.

The Psychological Functions and Philosophical Values of Privacy

According to the most prominent researcher on philosophical aspects of privacy, Ferdinand Schoeman, there was no major philosophical discussion on the value of privacy until the late 1960s. By 1968, another philosopher, Charles Fried, noted that the literature on privacy was "enormous," as psychologists and sociologists joined in the debate. Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958) set out some of the basic functions of privacy: Privacy guarantees psychological and social depth, containing things that cannot withstand the constant presence of others on the public scene; it undergirds the public by establishing boundaries, which fix identity; and it preserves the sacred and mysterious spaces of life. Some phenomena are different if they are not private: confessions of shame or guilt made public become boastful; over-disclosure becomes false; terror, a guilty secret; love and goodness are destroyed.

Westin's Privacy and Freedom (1967) refined Arendt's analysis by introducing a two-tier definition of privacy, combining personal and social dimensions and consisting of four states (anonymity, reserve, solitude, and intimacy) plus four functions of privacy (personal autonomy, emotional release, self-evaluation, and limited and confidential communication). Westin is a firm universalist: Margaret Mead's famous proclamation that Samoans lacked a sense of privacy or shame is shown to be based on a restrictive understanding of the varied mechanisms of privacy, where speaking softly is as valid a mechanism as physical avoidance. Westin pointed out that that even animals seek periods of individual seclusion or small-group intimacy. He also acknowledged rights of privacy to organizations in areas such as medical and business confidentiality, jury deliberations, executive privilege, and the secrets of the confessional.

Writing in 1977, Carl D. Schneider related the sense of privacy to the sense of shame in his Shame, Exposure, and Privacy. He listed phenomena where privacy is related to dignity: the use of nicknames or formal names; the names of relatives; things that carry the weight of the individual's identity or autonomy; faces and other body parts; things needed to care for the body such as soap, towels, and combs. The open display of bodily functions (defecating, great pain, the process of dying) threatens dignity, revealing an individual vulnerable to being reduced to bodily existence; the function of privacy and shame is to preserve wholeness and integrity. Bodily functions (sexual activities, sleep and excretion; illness, suffering, and eating) are rarely physiological processes alone. People invest all their activities with meanings, so that the physiological is invariably permeated with the human; the obscene is a deliberate violation of the sense of shame and privacy. Human relationships demand a pattern of mutual and measured self-disclosure. The private world is both a realm that is valued for oneself as a retreat, and one of which we are suspicious in other people; it is of lesser value than the public world. Totalitarian regimes are opposed to respect for persons, and thus deny privacy; when society does not provide for privacy, being apart will take the form of hiding.

The Private Me (1980), by June Noble and William Noble, anticipated the obsession with "me" that is said to characterize the 1980s. It is a crusading work, seeing privacy under threat from intrusions by family as well as government and society, and offering advice on ways to foster privacy through developmental programs including encounter groups and other forms of self-taught or group therapy. Among examples of modern devaluations in privacy, Noble and Noble noted that until the late twentieth century, diaries, letters and biographies were regarded as private legacy bequeathed by the deceased to family, and chart the growth of straight autobiography as distinct from the novel as fictionalized autobiography. They deplore compulsive self-disclosure (glamorized as candor) and over-disclosure, not only because it becomes boring, but also because it looks for sympathy as against creating intimacy or developing self-awareness. Reticence, on the other hand, encourages limited or protected communication, while privacy keeps emotions and acts from being trivialized: What is important is kept private (for example, lovemaking). Children develop a sense of privacy from the age of eight years on and need privacy to develop fulfilling sex lives.

Noble and Noble emphasized the link between privacy and power: Privacy allows or asserts power, and power confers privacy. Privacy in modern America has become a luxury, indicating status; lack of privacy among the poor and in the workplace leads to stress, and lack of assertiveness means that important boundaries cannot be established. Privacy is resisted by calling it "selfishness"; shyness in modern America is regarded as synonymous with worthlessness but can be seen instead as sensitivity and perceptiveness.

The most original attempt to provide a comprehensive account of privacy in the 1990s was Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation (1992) by the philosopher Julie Inness. Inness constructed a definition of privacy from data on cases under tort and constitutional law in the United States, covering three areas: access to intimate information about the agent; access to intimate aspects of the agent's person; and autonomy in the agent's decisions about intimate matters. Although it requires further definition of what is meant by "intimate" and fails to acknowledge nonintimate dimensions of privacy, the emphasis on control and access makes it one of the most useful definition to date.

Inness is also unusually systematic on the question of values, stressing that privacy is rarely if ever given primary status in conflict with other values. Arendt and Westin both had previously pointed out limitations to privacy. According to Westin, "the individual's desire for privacy is never absolute, since participation in society is an equally powerful desire" (1967, p. 7). Inness adds a feminist perspective, pointing out that privacy protection may act as a mechanism for maintaining the dominance of groups or individuals in power and enforcing silence and helplessness on others.

With some outstanding exceptions, most researchers on privacy are located in the United States and focus on contemporary U.S. experience; relatively little has been produced about other modern societies, Western or otherwise. A countertrend may be starting with the publication of three books on privacy in China: Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (2003) by Yan Yunxiang; Chinese Concepts of Privacy, edited by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson (2002); and Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping (2002) by Bonnie S. McDougall. Among insights raised by these studies is the often-ignored fact that privacy is more frequently a condition shared by lovers, families, or friends than one experienced alone by a single individual. As concluded in the preface to Chinese Concepts of Privacy, "The apparent chaos in privacy studies is a reflection of real-life complexity and will not be resolved by including more cultures in the debate. But by taking Chinese and other non-Western cultures into account, a global understanding of privacy will help to clarify crucial issues such as universal awareness of privacy and universal privacy rights" (McDougall and Hansson, p. 24).

See also Human Rights ; Liberty ; Public Sphere ; Society .

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Bonnie McDougall

Privacy

Determinants and indicators of privacy

Functional analysis of privacy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Privacy is a concept related to solitude, secrecy, and autonomy, but it is not synonymous with these terms; for beyond the purely descriptive aspects of privacy as isolation from the company, the curiosity, and the influence of others, privacy implies a normative element: the right to exclusive control of access to private realms. The philosophical problem of private knowledge, whether and in what sense knowledge and experience may be idiosyncratic and fundamentally incommunicable to others, will not be discussed here (see Ayer 1959). Rather, after some comments on the right to privacy and the basis for contemporary interest in the subject, this article will consider some of the determinants and indicators of privacy, the elements of a functional analysis of privacy, and finally, the law of privacy.

A right to privacy is recognized both in law and in common parlance; but different legal systems emphasize different aspects, and customs related to privacy differ greatly from culture to culture, from social system to social system, and from situation to situation. Many of the claims to the right to privacy are difficult to distinguish from other claims to rights of the personality, from claims to respect for personal integrity, and from claims against interference by government and other external agents. It has been said that a free society is governed by the principle that “there are frontiers not artificially drawn, within which men should be inviolable, these frontiers being defined in terms of rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being” (Berlin 1958, p. 51). The frontiers mentioned are “not artificially drawn” because they are recognized in a given culture as legitimate boundaries of the personality. More generally, they are recognized as identity boundaries that define the culturally recognized entity—be it personality, status, collectivity, or institution—whose “space of free movement” (Lewin [1936] 1948, p. 5), or domain of autonomous activity, or privacy is at issue.

Determinants and indicators of privacy

Among the material facts and relatively fixed social conditions that strongly affect patterns of privacy must be reckoned population density, rates of interaction, patterns of residence, the division of labor, and the nature of family and other social relationships. Comparative anthropological data do not seem to exist in a form that crystallizes out the aspects relevant to questions of privacy, nor have correlations of these aspects with other social and cultural elements been given any extensive study. The topics mentioned here, accordingly, suggest only the range of matter that appears relevant and deserves further study.

Urban society of necessity has privacy standards and privacy problems different from those of rural society. Through the variety of experiences open to the urban dweller and the multiplicity of subgroups to which he may be tied, he becomes more distinctive, more isolated, and more aware of his existence and his rights as a distinct person. In the urban setting, individual honor supersedes family or community honor, and individual privacy gains legitimacy. As Maine (1871) pointed out, the legitimacy of group interests historically precedes the claims of individual interests. Thus the nature of privacy has been changing for groups as well as for individuals.

Private property may be looked upon as a manifestation of the concept of individuality in a given culture. In Western industrial societies, the concept of property is undergoing fundamental changes as an increasing fraction of the wealth of each nation is distributed by its government. The transition from “privilege” to “right” (e.g., to receive licenses, franchises, grants, or welfare benefits) constitutes a change in the region over which individuals or organizations may expect to have autonomous control, and thus surely changes the region over which privacy may be claimed. For example, if support from a welfare department is seen as a right, much of what is now done in welfare client investigations would surely be considered an invasion of the client’s privacy (Reich 1964; 1966). In general, major social changes imply changes in identity boundaries and domains of privacy.

Residence patterns and family structure put bounds on patterns of interaction and thus on patterns of privacy (Chombart de Lauwe 1961; 1965). Conversely, privacy norms will dictate some aspects of residence patterns and will exert a strong influence on the process of individual development within the family. But no set of external conditions completely determines patterns of privacy. Even in the most crowded situations one occasionally finds mechanisms that give the individual privacy by institutionalizing places and occasions that grant the individual sanctuary from approaches by others. On the other hand, the relatively isolated city apartment dweller may find that he has very little privacy because of the thinness of walls, the location of doors and windows, the accessibility provided by mail and telephone, and the hordes of service people who collect refuse, read meters, and inspect or “service” the machinery with which the modern apartment is filled, not to mention salesmen, interviewers, and others who have developed the skill of approaching people for one purpose or another.

Distance is perhaps the most obvious and external characteristic of social interaction that may be taken as an indicator of exclusiveness or intimacy, of respect or contempt (Simmel [1908] 1958, pp. 320–324). An “undue closeness,” that is, one which violates exclusiveness or intimacy norms, clearly represents an invasion of privacy. Hall (1963) has coined the term “proxemics” to denote the study of the distance kept between people of different backgrounds in different situations. The strong feelings aroused by cultural differences in regard to habits of intimate contact indicate the social and psychological importance of distance. For example, that men should hold hands when walking together seems very strange to the European but is quite acceptable to the Arab. Similarly strange to the northern European and North American city dweller are customs such as conversing at a distance so short that one feels the warmth of the other’s body and the spray from his mouth; the sharing of half-chewed material (e.g., the betel wads of the Tikopia); the sharing of eating utensils; the chewing of the child’s food by the mother (Hall 1959). Indeed, some scholars have suggested (e.g., Lee 1959) that the large differences in habits in different cultures regarding the constancy and frequency of body contact between mother and child have a bearing on differences in character development.

Concealment, or avoidance of observation, is another action from which privacy norms may be inferred. In anthropological compendia concealed behavior is listed primarily in terms of religion and magic, on the one hand, and modesty patterns, on the other. Recalling Durkheim’s definition of the sacred (1912, pp. 56, 236–237 in the 1961 edition), it becomes quite clear how much privacy shares with sacredness. The sacred is set apart, isolated, untouchable except by special people with special dispensations, and it inspires a respect which demands that a distance be kept from it. Without stretching common meanings, it can be said that the right to privacy asserts the sacredness of the person. Modesty is usually discussed in relation to biological events and functions, and anthropologists have found some regularities in the social patterning of these. For bathing and elimination, segregation of the sexes is common; for eating, such segregation is much less common. Sexual intercourse is most commonly hidden in some way, although customs demanding rather little concealment or none at all, especially on ceremonial occasions, have been reported (see, for example, Ford & Beach 1951, as well as Westermarck 1889). Childbirth, illness, death, and religious rites are events at which only individuals in particular statuses or in particular relationships are allowed or expected to be present. The analysis of such patterns in terms of their consequences for social systems—for example, that occasional exclusiveness affirms the solidarity of the exclusive group —appears in many cases to be more successful than the analysis of the motivation of the participants. Yet, what is perhaps the dominant reason for seeking privacy, namely, the desire to be insulated from observation, is intimately related to motives of avoiding criticism, punishment, or the discomfort of feeling inhibited.

Social and technological developments have greatly increased the possibility of observing the activities of individuals and groups, of disturbing their equanimity or internal balance, and of influencing or controlling their behavior. Such possibilities of encroachment upon privacy inevitably become realities unless effective social control mechanisms are developed. Law provides one such mechanism; but in a period of rapid social change, the heterogeneity of social norms and beliefs leaves much uncertainty and instability of behavior in those areas of action which law does not seek to control or fails to control.

Technology provides the material potential for electronic spying and high-speed record keeping and information retrieval; for psychological testing and psychiatric interviews; for the use of drugs and other physiological agents, as well as methods of physical deprivation, irritation, and coercion which, contrary to the victim’s wishes and interests, may unveil the secrets of his mind; and for the manipulation of groups to make people confess or turn informers. The chances that these methods will be used are vastly increased if ideologies are at hand to legitimate such use.

When ideologies, political or religious, demand orthodoxy of all citizens, or when confessions of guilt or the punishment of persons, irrespective of proof of guilt, are considered justifiable on administrative or educational grounds, spying and informing, forced confession, and coercive persuasion will flourish. Ideologies of religious or political “purity,” of “moral community” or of “mental health,” can be and have been employed to legitimate the use of psychological techniques for the manipulation of behavior in flagrant disregard of time-honored concepts of personal integrity (Lifton 1961; Schein et al. 1961; Szasz 1963). Thus, in the current crisis in the relations between psychiatry and law one may observe a monumental obfuscation in the notions of personal responsibility and mental health, of therapy and punishment, of personal integrity and the individual’s welfare, as these terms are defined by authorities in these fields (Szasz 1963).

Functional analysis of privacy

The basic social-psychological mechanism that motivates seclusion is expressed by the following proposition: The greater the (perceived) probability that an action will be observed, the greater the probability that the action will be in compliance with the perceived social norms of the observer.Observation is a crucial part of social control (Merton [1949] 1957, pp. 336–357; Zetterberg 1957; Hopkins 1964); hence, privacy norms put limits upon the degree of social control.

Opportunity for privacy facilitates spontaneity. For example, in the therapeutic professional-client relationship confidentiality implies not only that the client will be protected from external sanctions but also that the professional will not exert the usual sanctions for deviance. Thus the client may feel free to tell what the professional may need to know, or what the client may need to tell, if he is to be helped. The experiments in stimulating group creativity that have been called “brainstorming” have, with limited success, attempted to institutionalize the withholding of sanctions (Haefele 1962, pp. 155–156). But the most usual method of attempting to minimize the inhibitions of workers whose creativity is being tapped is to grant them a maximum of privacy.

Imperfect consensus and integration of norms and values are found in all but the smallest, simplest, and most homogeneous societies; consequently, in most societies a degree of deviance from legitimate expectations of some role partners is unavoidable. Privacy may therefore be seen as having the function of protecting people against the psychological conflict that would be generated by unremitting observation. In a large-scale, pluralistic society such protection is especially necessary.

Privacy insulates the individual from social pressures to compliance and generally reduces the need to act in ways that are likely to gain the approval of others. Gouldner and Peterson (1962, pp. 44—45) have made the distinction between “self-esteem”–the positive self-evaluation gained from others’ approval, by “consensual validation”–and “self-regard”—the positive self-evaluation attained through recognition of one’s distinctness from others, through “conflictual validation.” Privacy not only reduces the need for consensual validation but also provides an opportunity for the process of individuation, which depends on conflictual validation. Thus the development of autonomy and personal responsibility in children and adolescents requires opportunities for them to act autonomously, in spite of the possibility that their actions may be contrary to the dominant norms. Privacy and tolerance would seem to be alternative conditions for such opportunities. In general, the less individuals can be relied upon to have internalized norms, the greater will be the external social control. Where both distrust and external controls become particularly severe, various forms of social and psychological pathology may be expected. Severe efforts to interfere with a child’s attempts to develop autonomy have been reported to be one component of the etiology of schizophrenia (Lennard et al. 1965).

The internalization of norms may be considered a functional alternative to external social control. Hence, the greater the internalization of norms, the greater the privacy granted and, therefore, the greater the development of privacy norms.

Other things being equal, the longer the socialization process, the greater the likelihood that relevant norms are internalized and that subsequent supervision is minimal. Physicians and other professionals who have a relatively long educational experience are subsequently given much responsibility with only sporadic supervision. Privacy may also be seen as a reward for responsibility. Studies of industrial workers in the United States have shown rather consistently that close supervision, that is, supervision with short intervals between supervisory contact, and hence with little privacy, results in poor morale and low productivity (Whyte 1961). In a study of industrial work in England, it was found that the normal interval between supervisory contacts was an excellent measure of the responsibility exercised by a worker and could be used as a basis for wage scales (Jaques 1956).

This correlation between responsibility and privacy illustrates a more general correlation between social rank and privacy. Certainly, the higher the individual’s socioeconomic rank, the more likely it is that his physical amenities and interaction patterns can be arranged so as to maximize privacy; and it is equally true that the higher the socioeconomic rank, the greater the individual’s power to defend his rights, including privacy, against both neighbors and agents of the community or state. Furthermore, social distance, exclusiveness, and thus privacy, as expressions of self-regard, are correlated with social rank. This correlation between social rank and privacy is emphasized by the problem of securing privacy for celebrities and public servants whose visibility is especially high.

The privacy of collectivities

Many instructive examples of the social structure of privacy situations can be found in the privacy patterns of collectivities. The family is a collectivity that demands respect and privacy; in some societies—for example, contemporary Japan and Greece, as well as in most of the developing societies—the claims of the family or larger group far outbalance the rights of the individual. One may expect to find this to be the case wherever family or group honor is the ultimate criterion by which the individual is judged. Aristocracies provide examples, but so do such groups as the Mafia.

Family types may be classified by the degree of freedom with which they grant access to nonmembers. “Open” families readily admit members from neighboring families; their doors are not locked, and their members freely mind each other’s business, including, for example, the disciplining of children. Little secrecy is possible, and mutual social control is at a maximum. This pattern is likely to occur only if the community has a relatively impermeable privacy boundary: the families are open, but outsiders from beyond the community are kept out. The “closed” family, at the other end of the continuum, protects its privacy by dwellings and other technical arrangements that preserve distance and exclusiveness, but above all by norms that prescribe social distance and formality in social relations. Since there is much less mutual social control, greater variety may be expected to develop among closed families, as well as greater individuality within them. Thus the privacy of the closed family in the open community appears to have the function of generating and preserving the diversity of personalities and values within a given society.

The following generalization may tentatively be deduced from this case and other examples to follow: In collectivities with strong privacy boundaries, subcollectivities will tend to be relatively open; in open collectivities, subcollectivities will tend to be closed. The “open society” contains closed social, political, religious, economic, and other organizations. They are closed, at least, to political influence and investigation by the government; and those organizations which are in a competitive relationship (e.g., political parties) are also closed to each other in certain ways. In contrast, closed totalitarian societies either do not permit organizations to develop within them or demand great permeability of all organizational boundaries to governmental observation and influence—to the extent that family members are encouraged to inform on each other. Many situations—familial, therapeutic, conspiratorial, educational—combine strong external privacy boundaries with demands for openness on the part of the individuals who are the subunits. Such openness provides an opportunity for intensive socialization, for the internalization of the norms and values of the collectivity, and, as a special case, for the development of that trustworthy identification with the collectivity which is called loyalty.

Loyalty is a prerequisite for privacy in a collectivity that feels itself threatened. Above all, the loyalty of those in leadership and other “sensitive” positions must be assumed, unless it is possible to subject them to constant surveillance by other members of the collectivity, whose loyalty would, in turn, have to be assumed. On a national scale, differences in the social structuring of sentiments can have very important implications for general climates of trust and the concomitant state of privacy. Great Britain and the United States provide an interesting contrast (Shils 1956; Lewin 1936; Hyman 1963). Traditionally, privacy standards for both the individual and the government are much higher in Britain than in the United States. While it would be difficult to say whether, in fact, loyalty is greater in one country than in the other, the common identification with dominant national institutions is made more visible in Britain, for example, by recurring expressions of the generally shared attitude of deference toward the crown, the government, and those higher in the stratification system in general. Thus there is a recurrent expression of consensus invoking the common history of a relatively homogeneous population and focused upon the leadership of the country; and since the leadership group reflects the same consensus in its public utterances, there is a greater continuity of sentiment and trust. Since the American public lacks such recurrent expressions of consensus, it has more easily fallen prey to jingoistic demagogues, and this tendency has resulted, at various times, in widespread suspicion of “treason in high places” and rampant loyalty investigations that have trampled privacy underfoot. [SeeLoyalty.]

The law of privacy

Laws regarding the right of privacy were relatively late in arriving on the scene. While a general law of private personality, rooted in Roman law, found its way into numerous Continental codes, judges have preferred to link the right to privacy with property rights, and its violation with specific torts, such as libel or slander, copyright infringement, breach of contract, trespass, and assault and battery. This has been particularly true of AngloAmerican courts; indeed, common-law jurisprudence regarding the right of privacy dates back no farther than 1890, when Warren and Brandeis (1890) published a famous article on this topic. In England there is still no actionable invasion of privacy unless property rights have been violated or reputation has been injured.

In the United States a general right to privacy was first explicitly affirmed by the Supreme Court as recently as 1965, in Griswold et al. v. Connecticut(381 U.S. 530). This decision invalidated a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives even by married couples. Yet the dissenting opinion of Justice Potter Stewart questioned the legal basis of the decision: “What provision of the Constitution, then, does make this state law invalid? The Court says it is the right of privacy ‘created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees/ With all deference, I can find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution, or in any case ever before decided by this Court.” In fact, the majority opinion, written by Justice Douglas, relied upon “a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights—older than our political parties, older than our school system.” In both the concurring and the dissenting opinions, implied references to natural law were called into question. But it cannot be questioned that fundamental values were invoked when the opinion of the Court mentioned that the marriage relationship is “intimate to the degree of being sacred.” It is quite literally Durkheim’s idea of the sacred that is involved here. An appeal to such basic and general values would not have been necessary if this decision could have been based on more immediate precedents.

Invasions of privacy

Invasions of privacy recognized up to 1965 in the U.S. law courts have been categorized by Prosser (1960, pp. 389 ff.) into “four distinct kinds of invasion of four different interests of the plaintiff, which are tied together by the common name, but otherwise have almost nothing in common except that each represents an interference with the right of the plaintiff… ‘to be let alone.’” A somewhat different view has been expressed by Bloustein (1964), who has argued brilliantly that this common element is the central issue in the law of privacy. It has been said that the law of privacy developed as a parasite upon laws about specific classes of torts (Harper & James 1956, pp. 677–679). However, Bloustein pointed out that court decisions, judicial opinions, and the most important scholarly sources make clear the principle that, beyond the particular torts to which privacy cases have been tied, any invasion of privacy constitutes an offense against the rights of the personality—against individuality, dignity, and freedom.

The following discussion of Prosser’s four classes of torts will serve to illustrate the specific wrongs that Anglo-American courts have connected with the concept of privacy. The first category is concerned with intrusion upon the plaintiff’s seclusion or solitude or into his private affairs. Exposure of one’s private doings to public view, to Peeping Toms, to eavesdropping and wire tapping, to open pursuit, shadowing, trailing, or public surveillance is seen as disturbing one’s equanimity. And this fact, rather than any possible harm or loss subsequent to the intrusion, is the basis of the claim that the right to privacy has been invaded. “It appears obvious,” wrote Prosser (1960, p. 392), “that the interest protected by this branch of the tort is primarily a mental one. It has been useful chiefly to fill in the gaps left by trespass, nuisance, the intentional infliction of mental distress, and whatever remedies there may be for the invasion of constitutional rights.” However, Bloustein pointed out a critical distinction made by Warren and Brandeis when they asserted that mere injury to feelings is without legal remedy. Invasion of privacy is thus “a legal injuria” or an “act wrongful in itself”; it is not “mental suffering” that is taken into account in reckoning damages for a legal injury. In common parlance the term “privacy” is very often employed in connection with what legally may come exactly under the categories of trespass, nuisance, or the infliction of mental distress, although under U.S. law the offense in question may not involve any legal question in regard to privacy.

The second category of invasions of privacy is concerned with public disclosure of embarrassing private facts about the plaintiff. This was the principal topic of the article by Warren and Brandeis, upon which most of the Anglo-American legal discussions of privacy have been based. Warren and Brandeis pointed out that, in contrast with the law of defamation, which deals only with damage to reputation by lowering a person in the estimation of his fellows, the right to privacy grants protection against actions that would outrage a person’s own feeling, irrespective of his reputation. Thus, to publish another’s name or picture is an invasion of his right to privacy if it is done without his consent and if it cannot be justified as a matter of public interest, as in the case of the actions of a public figure. The truth of the disclosed matter is no defense, as it may be under the law of defamation.

The third category deals with publicity which places a person in a false light in the public eye. The principal cases in this category deal with the publication by the police of information about an individual which may lead the public to infer that he has committed delinquencies of which he has not been convicted. Impersonating someone and forgery of another’s signature also belong to this class of privacy invasions, which, in contrast with the other three classes, depends on the falsity of the fiction that is publicized.

Finally, Prosser’s fourth category concerns appropriation,for the defendant’s advantage, of the plaintiff’s name or likeness. In contrast with the three other classes of privacy invasions recognized by the U.S. law, this one involves the use of th advantage gained through the offensive actions. It seems to focus more on the proprietary aspect than the others. What it shares most crucially with the other recognized privacy invasions is that it constitutes an attack upon the individual’s identity.

Privacy law under civil codes

In countries under civil codes privacy law is often better developed than in common-law countries. In civil codes, laws against many specific privacy invasions can be found under the most diverse chapters of law Correspondence by letter, telegram, and telephone, as well as personal information given to public officials or professionals, tend to be explicitly pro tected. And each code has its peculiar prohibitions, for example, against “intrusion by illicit means into another’s secrets,” or against “injury to per sonal relationships owing to the willful or negligent act of another.” General categories of privacy violation, such as the “injury to personal relationships” just mentioned (which occurs in the Swiss code), are fairly common, although varied in content. On the Continent the recognition and protection of the right of privacy is based, in large part, on the con cept of the injuria delict derived from the Roman law. The concept of Personlichkeitsrecht and th idea of a tort contra bonos mores have also done much to strengthen judicial protection of personal privacy (Weeks 1963, p. 501).

Finally, it should be noted that the Draft Covenant of Civil and Political Rights as adopted at th fifteenth session of the General Assembly of th United Nations, in 1960, recognizes a right to pri vacy in article 17: “1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful … attacks on his honour and reputation. 2. Everyone has the right to the pr tection of the law against such interference or at tacks” (United Nations…1961).

The limits of privacy

The legal protection of privacy has inherent limitations, since legal remedies of privacy invasions may bring with them further exposure of the matter that was to be kept private. It remains to be seen whether the recognition of a general right to privacy by the U. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut will indeed open the gates to a vast amount of litigation about privacy, a fear often expressed in past discussions of possible developments in the law o privacy.

A matter closely related to privacy ( although not subsumed under the law of privacy) that is likely to be the source of some litigation is the subject of confessions made by citizens accused of a crime. Supreme Court decisions in regard to confessions (Escobedo v. Illinois [378 U.S. 478]; Miranda v. Arizona [384 U.S. 436]) are clearly based on th fact that certain policemen and other custodians of prisoners have not sufficiently respected the individual’s right not to reveal what he does not want to reveal. This issue points to another essential difficulty of enforcing the legal protection of pri vacy: violations of privacy often are injuries inflicted by relatively large and powerful forces upon the smallest and weakest element in society, the individual, who may be poor, uneducated, and member of a minority group. Thus the protection of privacy requires not only a degree of consensus in the total population about the rights of the individual, and adequate laws to recognize these rights, but also considerable effort by those who exercise influence and wield power, governmental or otherwise, to enforce the laws and to encourage compliance with the more general social norms of re spect for the individual.

The emphasis that has been placed here on th right of privacy should not obscure the fact that governments and other collectivities have legitimate concerns with private aspects of their members’ lives. Laws establish only guidelines for th competition between the autonomy of the individual and his government; the understanding of that competition requires further study of the functions of privacy for individuals, for collectivities, and for the relationships between the two.

Arnold Simmel

[See alsoCensorship; Ethics, article onethical issues in the social sciences; Loyalty; Organizations, article onOrganizational intelligence. Other relevant material may be found inBrain-washing; Constitutional law; Freedom; Human rights; Interviewing, article OnSocial re search; and in the biographies ofLewin; Simmel.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayer, A. J. 1959 Privacy. British Academy, London, Proceedings 45:43–65.

Bay, Christian 1958 The Structure of Freedom. Stanford Univ. Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Atheneum.

Berlin, Isaiah (1958) 1963 Two Concepts of Liberty.Oxford: Clarendon.

Bloustein, Edward J. 1964 Privacy as an Aspect of

Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser. New York University Law Review 39:962–1007.

Chombart De Lauwe, Paul H. 1961 The Sociology of Housing Methods and Prospects of Research. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 2:23–41.

Chombart De Lauwe, Paul H. 1965 Des hommes et des villes. Paris: Payot.

Douglas, William O. 1958 The Right of the People.Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Durkheim, Émile (1912) 1954 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. -* First published as Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, le systeme totemique en Australie. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier.

Evers, Hans-Ulrich 1960 Privatsphäre und Ämter filr Verfassungsschutz. Berlin: Gruyter.

Ford, Clellan S.; and Beach, Frank A. 1951 Patterns of Sexual Behavior. New York: Hoeber.

Gouldner, Alvin W.; and Peterson, R. A. 1962 Notes on Technology and the Moral Order. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill.

Haefele, John W. 1962 Creativity and Innovation. New York: Reinhold.

Hall, Edward T. 1959 The Silent Language. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. → A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Fawcett.

Hall, Edward T. 1963 Proxemics: The Study of Man’s Spatial Relations. Pages 422–445 in Arden House Conference on Medicine and Anthropology, 1961, Man’s Image in Medicine and Anthropology. Edited by Iago Galdston. New York: International Universities Press.

Halmos, Paul 1952 Solitude and Privacy: A Study of Social Isolation; Its Causes and Therapy. London: Routledge.

Harper, Fowler V.; and James, Flemming Jr. 1956 The Law of Torts. Boston: Little.

Hofstadter, Samuel H.; and Horowitz, George 1964 The Right of Privacy. New York: Central Book.

Hopkins, Terence K. 1964 The Exercise of Influence in Small Groups. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press.

Hyman, Herbert 1963 England and America: Climates of Tolerance and Intolerance–1962. Pages 227–257 in Daniel Bell (editor), The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. → A paperback edition was published in 1964.

Jaques, Elliott 1956 Measurement of Responsibility: A Study of Work, Payment and Individual Capacity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Lee, Dorothy 1959 Freedom and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Lennard, Henry L.; Beaulieu, Maurice R. and Embrey, Nolen G. 1965 Interaction in Families With a Schizophrenic Child. Archives of General Psychiatry 12:166–183.

Lewin, Kurt (1936) 1948 Some Social-psychological Differences Between the United States and Germany. Pages 3–33 in Kurt Lewin, Social Conflicts: Selected Papers in Group Dynamics. New York: Harper.

Lifton, Robert J. 1961 Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. New York: Norton.

Maine, Henry J. S. (1871) 1890 Village-communities in the East and West, to Which Are Added Other Lectures, Addresses, and Essays. New ed. London: Murray.

Merton, Robert K. (1949) 1957 Social Theory and Social Structure. Rev. & enl. ed. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

Pound, Roscoe 1915 Interests of Personality. Harvard Law Review 28:343–365, 445–456.

Prosser, William L. 1960 Privacy. California Law Review 48:383–423.

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Reich, Charles A. 1966 The New Property. Public Interest No. 3:57–89.

Ruebhausen, Oscar M.; and Brim, Orville G. Jr. 1965 Privacy and Behavioral Research. Columbia Law Re view 65:1184–1211.

Schein, Edgar H.; Schneier, I.; and Barker, C. H. 1961 Coercive Persuasion: A Socio-psychological Analysis of “Brainwashing” of American Civilian Prisoners by the Chinese Communists. New York: Norton.

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Simmel, Georg (1902–1917) 1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

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United Nations, General Assembly 1961 Draft International Covenants on Human Rights. U.N. General Assembly, Official Records, Session 15, Annexes, Agenda Item 34.

U.S. Office of Science and Technology 1967 Privacy and Behavioral Research. Washington: Government Printing Office.

Warren, Samuel D.; and Brandeis, Louis D. 1890 The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law Review 4:193–220. → Reprinted in Samuel H. Hofstadter and George Horowitz, The Right of Privacy, 1964.

Weeks, James K. 1963 Comparative Law of Privacy.Cleveland Marshall Law Review 12:484–503.

Westermarck, Edward A. (1889) 1921 The History of Human Marriage. 5th ed. 3 vols. New York: Macmillan.

Westermarck, Edward A. (1906–1908) 1924–1926 The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 2d ed. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.

Westin, Alan F. 1967 Privacy and Freedom. New York: Athenaeum. → A study sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Whyte, William F. 1961 Men at Work. Homewood, III.: Dorsey.

Zetterberg, Hans L. 1957 Compliant Actions. Ada sociologica 2:179–201.

Privacy

Concern over personal privacy has risen as a result of two areas of development in computing and related technologies. First, databases used as surveillance tools for gathering, storing, and disseminating personal information have stirred fears that privacy is being eroded. This type of concern for privacy is known as information privacy. Second, vastly expanded communications abilities, including electronic mail and wireless communications networks, have raised questions about the appropriate degree of privacy for these new forms of communications. This type of concern for privacy is known as communications privacy. This article will focus mainly on information privacy.

The practice of collecting, recording, and storing personal data began long before the advent of computers. For example, the Domesday Book was a written record of a census and survey of English landowners and their property made by the order of William the Conqueror in 1085. However, computers greatly expanded the capacity and ease of data collection. This led to further uses of personal information and the need to collect more data. The U.S. government was among the first to take advantage of such technology. A variety of government functions such as taxation, social welfare, crime prevention, national security, and immigration greatly rely on information about citizens. As such, they require efficient communications, exchange, and access to information. Also, the government was a leader in the use of computerized databases because it could afford the computing power, which was initially very expensive and required expert management.

An example of a government computer database is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. Established in 1967, NCIC allows law enforcement agencies around the country to enter and share information in order to catch criminals. Although the NCIC has been praised by police officers, it has been criticized by privacy advocates and civil libertarians. They argue that the uncontrolled entry and use of data in the system, and the ease of access by both law enforcement agencies as well as non-criminal justice agencies, provide many opportunities for abuse of police power and privacy, as well as errors in content.

Besides power abuse and privacy invasion, other objections to government databases include: 1) that people whose records are accessed are not informed; 2) that the traditional presumption of innocence is replaced by a presumption of guilt if government agencies can search through huge amounts of information to find people who seem suspicious for any reason; and 3) that the Fourth Amendment, which requires the government to have probable cause or a warrant to search and seize materials from homes and businesses, is being challenged since the government needs neither criteria to search government-created computerized databases.

With the decrease in cost and size of computer equipment, and the increase in the amount of mass-produced consumer software including powerful database programs, a new demand for personal databases emerged from a different sector of society, namely the private sector. In an age where micromarketing is rapidly becoming the norm, the value of information increases as decision-makers find new ways to use data for strategic advantage. Companies must store and share information about individuals before conducting telemarketing campaigns or selected mailings.

The following are some examples of how the private sector is using consumer data stored in their databases for marketing purposes. American Express mines 500 billion bytes of data on how customers have spent more than $350 billion since 1991. The company then sends discount coupons and special promotions for the specific stores where customers shop. Blockbuster Entertainment Corporation uses video rental histories to generate specialized lists of recommended movies that are mailed to customers. Long-distance telephone companies use lists of subscribers to foreign-language newspapers to find potential customers for special telephone service deals. Once potential customers have been identified, the companies mail advertisements to them in the customer's native language.

One objection concerning the collection and use of such consumer data is that, in many cases, consumers are not aware of this activity. Therefore, the consumer has no opportunity to agree or disagree to the use of this information. The second grievance lies in secondary use—the use of information for a purpose other than originally intended. Most people do not object when businesses use in-house lists to send advertisements or special offers to their own customers. However, many people do mind if information collected by one business or organization is shared with or sold to another without their knowledge or consent.

Computer databases can undoubtedly help both businesses and consumers, but distribution, leakage, and various specific uses of the information by corporations or government agencies can have detrimental effects. The question is, how much risk are we willing to accept in exchange for convenience and the availability of useful information? Also, how can we reduce the risks while still receiving the benefits?

A number of efforts have begun to redress the privacy problem in the United States. First, there is legislation such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, the Computer Security Act of 1987, the Computer-Matching and Privacy Protection Act of 1988, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Second, industry can voluntarily comply with recommendations such as the posting of privacy policy statements on their web sites. Finally, privacy can be protected through the use of special technologies such as encryption products like the Anonymizer and Pretty Good Privacy, and by disabling the cookie on web browsers.

Other suggested means include establishing a privacy commission to oversee privacy protection at the state and federal levels, such as exists in Canada. Another possibility is to invest individuals with property rights over personal information, thereby shifting the burden from the individual to prove why he or she considers the use of the information undesirable, to the collectors and disseminators, who would need to prove that their actions neither harm nor violate the individual's privacy. These remedies may come about if the public voices its concerns to the authorities. As noted in The Intruders: The Invasion of Privacy by Government and Industry, Sen. Edward Long (R-Mississippi) once pointed out: "Privacy is necessary to the development of a free and independent people. To preserve this privacy, our national lethargy and lack of knowledge must be countered." He added: "People must be made to realize that, little by little, they are losing their right to privacy. Once they become aware of this, I think they will shake off their apathy and demand action. Then, and only then, will we get strong legislation to protect a reasonable amount of our right to be left alone."

Communications Privacy Organizations and Publications

The following organizations and publications deal extensively with information and communications privacy.

Organizations:

• American Civil Liberties Union <www.aclu.org>
• Center for Democracy and Technology <www.cdt.org>
• Electronic Frontier Foundation <www.eff.org>
• Electronic Privacy Information Center <www.epic.org>
• Internet Society <www.isoc.org>
• Privacy and American Business <www.pandab.org>
• The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse <www.privacyrights.org>

Publications:

• Privacy Forum, a moderated listserv <www.vortex.com/privacy.html>
• Privacy Journal <townonline.com/privacyjournal>
• Privacy Times <www.privacytimes.com>.

see also Security.

Joyce H-S Li

Bibliography

Baase, Sara. A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues in Computing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Branscomb, Anne Wells. Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Burnham, David. The Rise of the Computer State. New York: Random House, 1983.

Cavoukian, Ann, and Don Tapscott. Who Knows: Safeguarding Your Privacy in a Networked World. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Johnson, Deborah G., and Helen Nissenbaum, eds. Computers, Ethics and Social Values. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995.

Kling, Rob, ed. Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, 2nd ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1996.

Miller, Arthur R. The Assault on Privacy: Computers, Data Banks, and Dossiers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1971.

Rosenberg, Richard S. The Social Impact of Computers, 2nd ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1997.

Schoeman, Ferdinand David, ed. Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Westin, Alan F. Privacy and Freedom. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Privacy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

One of the main difficulties in assessing the meaning of privacy in the social sciences is that the term usually connotes a normative character. From the liberal defense of privacy as a right that protects individuals from state intervention and abuse, to the feminist critiques that denounce its role in disguising the oppression of women, most definitions of privacy present contrasting perspectives regarding its value or function.

Yet, when approached from the standpoint of ordinary language, privacy describes a certain domain of social practice—spatial, relational, decisional—that is generally expected to be sheltered from public scrutiny. It can be argued then, that privacy also facilitates the emergence of difference and particularity, and nourishes the development of interpersonal relations based on varying degrees of closeness and intimacy (Boling 1996).

The notion of privacy is closely connected to the predicate private, which can be ascribed to places and objects but also to practices, decisions, information, feelings, or—as critic Iris Young synthesizes—any aspect of life from which one has a right to exclude others. Control over access, then, is a central feature of privacy (Gavison 1980). Since the last decades of the twentieth century, concern over the right to privacy, its limits, and the legal measures to protect it has spanned the advances of information technologies and the incursion of the media; regulation over sexuality and the body, reproductive rights, or domestic violence; and issues of family law, such as decisions on childrearing.

In all these discussions, privacy designates a sphere of life that is protected from the influence of what is deemed external, be it state institutions or the public realm more generally. The history of the distinction between the private and public spheres can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who conceived the domain of the household and family in opposition to the polis, or public realm of political activity. The divide has since remained a central theoretical notion and was inherited by the social sciences, often resulting in one of the poles viewed as a residual category defined by its opposition and relative subordination to the other. Modern theories of the public sphere, for example, often relegate the private realm to a subsidiary role. Thus, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) argues that household matters—such as the sustenance and reproduction of life—are necessary preconditions for political life but are not part of it. In a similar vein, Jürgen Habermas sees the family as functioning to prepare individuals to be rational and autonomous actors in the public realm. In both depictions the spheres are clearly distinguished by virtue of their content, the private being equated with the domestic realm where basic necessities of life are satisfied.

The public/private divide is one of the pillars of liberal political theory, where the private is given preeminence as the sphere of individual freedoms. Classical liberal philosophers attribute a quasi-natural quality to the private realm, which is associated to the individual in opposition to the contractual character of society. This becomes evident in John Locke’s (1632–1704) natural law arguments restricting the power of the state over private property and the family, or John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) discussion of privacy as the natural domain of liberty.

Liberalism has long considered privacy a necessary requirement for autonomy, as it provides the adequate milieu to develop the capacity of independent decision making that allows one to lead a self-determined or autonomous life. This argument conveys an implicit spatial understanding of privacy as isolation, or seclusion, straightforwardly demarcating the space of the individual from the outside. However, privacy can conversely be conceived as a condition that allows selective degrees of access and fosters intimacy and relations with others (Schoeman 1992).

Legal perspectives focus on the notion of privacy as a right, questioning if it designates a specific domain not provided for by other established rights, such as the right to property or to individual freedoms, or debating whether it is granted by the U.S. Constitution. In the American case, for example, there has been significant discussion since the late nineteenth century concerning the status of privacy as a principle of common law. Whether considered a legal right or a moral principle, however, there is an understanding of the notion of privacy as protecting individuals from unwanted contact with others and intrusion or judgment on personal decisions.

The feminist critique that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, has consistently challenged the liberal notion that privacy benefits all equally. Through historical and theoretical elaborations, feminists have shown that the conventional distinction between the public and the private spheres is not only naturalized, but also gendered, as the domestic is considered the realm of women and thus deprived of public recognition. The defense of privacy, they argue, serves the purpose of concealing the oppression of women through the appearance of personal choice and intimacy. Feminists deny any particularity of social relationships that happen in private that inherently distinguishes them from those that take place in public, as they are all conditioned by power and hierarchy. Rather, it is the distinction between the private and the public—between a prepolitical or natural sphere and a political one—that performs the ideological role of hiding oppression. Feminist critics have moved to reject the very distinction by stating that even the personal is political (MacKinnon 1989).

Still, several scholars are reluctant to abandon the notion of privacy altogether, and propose to produce a redescription of the concept taking into account the aforementioned critiques. Political theorists like Jean Cohen or Iris Young, for example, argue that privacy does not merely obscure oppressive practices but also enables diversity by protecting from the homogenizing pressure of the public realm and facilitating differences in experience and perspectives. Moreover, the concept is useful to confront domination of women and minorities by preserving a domain of information and decision, which might involve aspects of intimacy, sexuality, the body, or other personal issues. In a similar tone to Ferdinand Schoeman’s suggestions, these arguments draw away from conceiving the private and the public as clearly demarcated spaces, and view them instead as dimensions of social relations present in different spheres of life. Moving away from the normative bend, social sciences might depict privacy as a common practice emerging from and at the same time constituting a shared form of life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Boling, Patricia. 1996. Privacy and the Politics of Intimate Life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Cohen, Jean. 2001. Introduction to Section “Privacy and the State.” Social Research 68 (1): 235–236.

Gavison, Rachel. 1980. Privacy and the Limits of Law. Yale Law Journal 89: 421–471.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Locke, John. [1690] 1980. The Second Treatise of Government. Ed. C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

MacKinnon, Catharine. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mill, John Stuart. 2002. The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill. Ed. Dale E. Miller. New York: Modern Library.

Rössler, Beate. 2005. The Value of Privacy. Trans. R. D. V. Glasgow. Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, MA: Polity.

Schoeman, Ferdinand. 1992. Privacy and Social Freedom. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Young, Iris. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Valeria Procupez

PRIVACY

PRIVACY. The notion of a right to have certain parts of one's life, one's home, and one's property protected against invasion by other citizens or by government is as old as America itself. Four of the first five amendments to the Constitution of the United States protect some aspect of the privacy of Americans, including the First Amendment's right to association, the Third Amendment's prohibition against the government quartering soldiers in private homes, the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fifth Amendment's protection from self-incrimination.

The specific idea of what was later recognized as the "right to privacy" began with British common law notions, such as "a man's home is his castle" and the right "to be let (or left) alone." A number of early U.S. Supreme Court decisions recognized these traditional rights to be free of unwanted personal or governmental invasions. Responding to some of the invasive journalistic practices of the day, a future justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Louis D. Brandeis, and his coauthor and law partner, Samuel D. Warren, are credited with coining the phrase "the right to privacy" in their 1890 article of that name in the Harvard Law Review. When Brandeis was elevated to the Supreme Court, he took the opportunity in that Court's first wiretapping case to reiterate his strongly held views on the right to privacy. That 1928 case, Olmstead v. United States, involved the attempt by the federal government to tap the phone of a person without first obtaining a warrant. The majority of the Court ruled that this was not a violation of the Constitution. In his dissenting opinion, however, Brandeis said those who wrote and ratified the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did recognize the existence of a right to privacy:

The makers of our Constitution … conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth [and Fifth] Amendment[s].

But Brandeis's view remained in the minority on the Supreme Court until the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut. That case involved the constitutionality of an 1879 Connecticut law that banned the use of contraceptives, even by married couples. A seven to two majority opinion, vindicating Brandeis's view, held that the Constitution does contain a right to privacy and that the right is a fundamental one, even if that right does not appear in so many words anywhere in the text. While a majority of justices agreed that such a right was protected by the Constitution and its amendments, they disagreed over where in the text of the Constitution that right is found. Justice William O. Douglas's majority opinion claimed that various parts of the Bill of Rights have "penumbras" formed by "emanations" from specifically granted guarantees in the text. This kind of argument did not sit well with many other members of the Supreme Court then, and as the Court became more literal and conservative in subsequent years, more and more justices expressed their skepticism over the existence of such a right to privacy.

The announcement of the existence of a constitutional right to privacy resonated through American law, politics, and society in the years following the Supreme Court's 1965 decision in Griswold. This right to privacy was at the foundation of the Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which brought a woman's right to have an abortion under the rubric of the right to privacy. William H. Rehnquist, then an associate justice of the Court, dissented from Roe v. Wade, arguing that abortion does not involve the issue of privacy. As chief justice Rehnquist has generally continued to argue against the existence of this constitutional right.

Other areas of American life have been impacted by this debate over the existence of the right to privacy. In 1967 in the case of Katz v. United States the Supreme Court overturned its 1928 ruling in Olmstead. In Katz the Court ruled that someone speaking on the phone, even on a public pay phone, has a reasonable expectation of privacy and that the government must secure a warrant prior to eavesdropping on that conversation. In 1969 the Supreme Court ruled in Stanley v. Georgia that the mere possession of obscene materials in the privacy of one's home could not be interfered with by government official. However, in the 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy did not include the right to engage in homosexual sodomy in the privacy of one's home.

Certain professional and personal relationships are considered private and thus protected from various kinds of intrusion. The relationships between doctor and patient and between attorney and client are examples of professional relationships given special privacy protections under the law. Student grades and recommendations are also protected by various federal and state laws. In addition the spousal relationship is considered by many jurisdictions to be a generally private relationship, and husbands and wives are of ten protected from being compelled to testify against each other.

The advent of computers brought with it a new range of privacy concerns. Prior to computers, to intercept a piece of mail from one person to another, an actual letter had to be seized and then opened. In the information age intercepting an electronic mail message requires no physical interference but merely the accessing of data files in which E-mail is sent and stored. Consequently privacy invasions became not only easier but also less detectable. Cell phone calls are less secure than wire-based phone communications and more easily intercepted. Other privacy issues include the privacy of what an employee does on a workplace computer, the proliferation of video surveillance cameras in public and private spaces, access to personal information contained in electronic databases, and the "identity theft" that sometimes results from the stealing of such electronically stored personal information.

As communication occurs less in face-to-face exchanges and more in technological data exchange mediums, the opportunities for individuals and governments to eavesdrop on those virtual conversations increase. For example, in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the federal government passed legislation that made it easier for law enforcement officials to have access to previously private data and communication, even between lawyer and client. Privacy in the information age promises to be an important and contentious topic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

McLean, Deckle. Privacy and Its Invasion. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995.

Rosen, Jeffrey. The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. New York: Random House, 2000.

Akiba J.Covitz

Esa LianneSferra

Meredith L.Stewart

See alsoBill of Rights in U.S. Constitution .

PRIVACY

Any information that a person chooses to keep to himself or herself is considered "private" information. A person's right to privacy is protected under Article 12 of the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." UN member countries are morally, if not legally, bound by such declarations.

Privacy relates to personal information that a person would not wish others to know without authorization, and to a person's right to be free from the attention of others. Under the ethical principle of respect for a person's autonomy, public health workers have an obligation to respect privacy. What a person regards as private is a personal choice, and it can change throughout one's life. When people disclose private information for any public health purpose, it is expected that the information will be held in the strictest confidence. Only with this trust can public health programs succeed. One's right to privacy may, however, be superseded by legal requirements, particularly in matters pertaining to the welfare of vulnerable members of society (e.g., children) and where illegal drugs are concerned. Laws governing privacy and its limits also change over time and reflect a society's changing values.

Confidentiality and privacy are related, but distinct concepts. Privacy is a right, while confidentiality is an obligation one has to respect another's privacy. When we grant others access to ourselves, we necessarily give up some measure of privacy. However, we still retain a right over the dissemination of information in the contractual situation of informed consent. Informed consent is provided when securing a person's participation in research, or in relation to the physician-patient relationship. An infringement of confidentiality occurs when a person to whom information deemed private was disclosed in confidence fails to protect that information, or allows others access to it.

To protect privacy, agencies that compile health statistics are required to aggregate information when they tabulate subcategories of data to avoid any possible disclosure that could be inferred from small numbers of people having particular characteristics. In the context of screening people for markers of exposure to infection, researchers and practitioners have the obligation to consider the potential stigma associated with information that flows from such screening tests.

For example, in the case of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) there is no evidence to suggest that the virus is spread through casual contact. Therefore, there is no overwhelming need for society to know a person's HIV antibody status. When government agencies implement screening programs for HIV, however, the possibility of the test results being made known could cause consternation to both the public and to individuals who test positive. Public health officials thus may implement screening programs by offering anonymous testing as a way of protecting the individual's right to privacy. There is a drawback to this, however, because the information cannot be linked to the person's record for research purposes. Nevertheless, any compulsory screening program should be done anonymously, thus avoiding any potential breach of privacy.

A voluntary screening program could be offered either anonymously or not. Generally, however, in the interest of public health, access to information is given priority over an individual's right to privacy, though it is important to give full and rational consideration to the modes of transmission and other characteristics of the pathogen of concern.

Colin L. Soskolne

Lee E. Sieswerda

(see also: Benefits, Ethics, and Risks; Codes of Conduct and Ethics Guidelines; Confidentiality; Ethics of Public Health; Informed Consent )

Bibliography

Beachamp, T. L., and Childress, J. F. (1994). Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 4th edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mann, J. M.; Gruskin, S.; Grodin, M. A.; and Annas, G. J., eds. (1999). Health and Human Rights: A Reader. New York: Routledge.

right of privacy the right to be left alone without unwarranted intrusion by government, media, or other institutions or individuals. While a consensus supporting the right to privacy has emerged (all recently confirmed Justices to the Supreme Court have affirmed their belief in the right to privacy), the extent of the right, and its basis in constitutional law, remain hotly contested. It was not until the U.S Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which voided a state statute preventing the use of contraceptives, that the modern doctrine of privacy emerged. In his opinion, Justice William O. Douglas argued that a protection from state intrusion into marital privacy was a constitutional right, one that was a "penumbra" emanating from the specific guarantees of the constitution. The right to sexual privacy as set forth in Griswold was one of the main foundations of the court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) to overturn state abortion statutes. Later attempts to extend the right of privacy to consensual homosexual acts in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) were initially rejected by the court. In 2003, however, the court reversed that decision and rejected all antisodomy laws.

The Privacy Act of 1974 provides for disclosure of, and personal access to, all federal records containing personal information, regulates their transfer to others, and allows for legal remedies in cases of their misuse under the law. The Right to Financial Privacy Act (1978) limits federal access to financial records but places few restrictions on access by states, businesses, and others. The privacy of most other information is not guaranteed. Computer and telecommunications advances have made credit, medical, and other data a readily available, highly marketable commodity, raising many concerns about individuals' privacy. Although the European Union in 1998 severely limited the buying and selling of personal data, these practices have been generally allowed under U.S. law. Limits exist on the federal government's ability to intercept voice and data communications; these are established by law and related to the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches (see search, right of ).

privacy Roughly speaking, the right to be left alone. The law on privacy is vague and judge-made in both the USA and the UK. It is complicated by cases on trade secrets and has been overtaken by the computer-related version of privacy, data protection. See data protection legislation.

With regard to protection against unauthorized reading of computer data, i.e. to the privacy of data, there are two concepts. 1 Protection of data about an individual or corporate entity. Where data can be determined to refer to a specific person, or in some cases to a specific organization, there may exist a legal right to limit access to that data and, in many cases, associated rights to guarantee accuracy and completeness. This form of privacy exists only for data about an identifiable individual, and exists to protect the rights of the individual to whom the data refers. See data protection legislation, Computer Misuse Act 1990.2 Protection of data owned by an individual or corporate entity. Where data is deemed to be in some sense the property of someone (or some group) there may exist a right to limit access to that data. This form of privacy exists for data belonging to someone, and exists to protect the rights of the owner of the data. See trade secrets. See also integrity, security.

pri·va·cy / ˈprīvəsē/ • n. the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people: she returned to the privacy of her own home. ∎  the state of being free from public attention: a law to restrict newspapers' freedom to invade people's privacy.

Privacy

SeeSelf-Disclosure; Home; Housing

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