Privacy - A Sense Of Privacy, Privacy And Popular Fiction, Public And Private Realms, Rights Of Privacy In National And International Law
studies social including human
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.
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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…
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 p…
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 be…
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 �…
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 in…
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 priva…
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 du…
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…
Agre, Philip, and Marc Rotenberg, eds. Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Banisar, David. Privacy and Human Rights 2000: An International Survey of Privacy Laws and Developments. Washington, D.C.: Electronic Privacy Information Center, and London: Privacy International, 2000.…
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