Privacy

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.

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.