Conceptualizing Privacy
Daniel J. Solove†
Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................ 1088
I. A Critique of the Conceptions of Privacy ....................................... 1093
A. Methods of Conceptualizing..................................................... 1095
1. The Traditional Method ..................................................... 1095
2. Wittgensteinian Family Resemblances .............................. 1096
B. Conceptions of Privacy............................................................. 1099
1. The Right to Be Let Alone ................................................. 1099
2. Limited Access to the Self ................................................. 1102
3. Secrecy ............................................................................... 1105
4. Control Over Personal Information.................................... 1109
5. Personhood......................................................................... 1116
a. Individuality, Dignity, and Autonomy......................... 1116
b. Antitotalitarianism ....................................................... 1119
6. Intimacy.............................................................................. 1121
C. Toward a New Approach to Conceptualizing Privacy.............. 1124
II. Reconceptualizing Privacy: A Pragmatic Approach ...................... 1126
A. Privacy and Practices................................................................ 1129
1. Social Practices .................................................................. 1129
2. Historical Development of Privacy Practices..................... 1132
a. Family.......................................................................... 1132
b. Body............................................................................. 1135
c. Home............................................................................ 1137
3. Privacy and Technological and Social Change .................. 1141
B. The Value of Privacy ................................................................ 1143
C. Practical Applications............................................................... 1146
Conclusion ............................................................................................. 1154
Copyright © 2002 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a California
nonprofit corporation. CLR and the authors are solely responsible for the content of their publications.
† Assistant Professor of Law, Seton Hall Law School. J.D., Yale Law School, 1997. Special
thanks to Michael Sullivan for his immensely helpful comments on several drafts of this Article. I
would also like to thank Michelle Adams, Jim Freeman, Timothy Glynn, Rachel Godsil, Raymond Ku,
Marc Poirier, Michael Risinger, Charles Sullivan, and Richard St. John for their very insightful
comments on the manuscript. Additionally, I would like to thank Richard Weisberg and Jack Balkin for
illuminating discussions about the ideas in this Article.
1087
1088 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
Conceptualizing Privacy
Daniel J. Solove
In this Article, Professor Solove develops a new approach for
conceptualizing privacy. He begins by examining the existing discourse
about conceptualizing privacy, exploring the conceptions of a wide array
of jurists, legal scholars, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists.
Solove contends that the theories are either too narrow or too broad. With
a few exceptions, the discourse seeks to conceptualize privacy by isolating
one or more common “essential” or “core” characteristics of privacy.
Expounding upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances,”
Solove contends that privacy is better understood as drawing from a
common pool of similar characteristics. Rather than search for an
overarching concept, Solove advances a pragmatic approach to
conceptualizing privacy. According to Solove, when we talk about privacy,
we are really talking about related dimensions of particular practices. We
should explore what it means for something to be private contextually by
looking at privacy problems: instances of particular forms of disruption to
particular practices. Solove demonstrates how practices involving privacy
have changed throughout history and explains the appropriate way to assess
the value of privacy.
Introduction
Currently, privacy is a sweeping concept, encompassing (among other
things) freedom of thought, control over one’s body, solitude in one’s
home, control over information about oneself, freedom from surveillance,
protection of one’s reputation, and protection from searches and interrogations.
Time and again philosophers, legal theorists, and jurists have lamented
the great difficulty in reaching a satisfying conception of privacy.1
Arthur Miller has declared that privacy is “difficult to define because it is
exasperatingly vague and evanescent.”2
According to Julie Inness, the legal
and philosophical discourse of privacy is in a state of “chaos.”3
Alan
Westin has stated that “[f]ew values so fundamental to society as privacy
1. See, e.g., Ruth Gavison, Privacy and the Limits of Law, 89 Yale L.J. 421, 422 (1980)
(lamenting the lack of a useful, distinct, and coherent concept of privacy).
2. ARTHUR R. MILLER, THE ASSAULT ON PRIVACY: COMPUTERS, DATA BANKS, AND DOSSIERS
25 (1971).
3. JULIE C. INNESS, PRIVACY, INTIMACY, AND ISOLATION 3 (1992).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1089
have been left so undefined in social theory . . . .”4
William Beaney has
noted that “even the most strenuous advocate of a right to privacy must
confess that there are serious problems of defining the essence and scope of
this right.”5
Privacy has “a protean capacity to be all things to all lawyers,”6
Tom Gerety has observed. According to Robert Post, “[p]rivacy is a value
so complex, so entangled in competing and contradictory dimensions, so
engorged with various and distinct meanings, that I sometimes despair
whether it can be usefully addressed at all.”7
Several theorists have surveyed
the interests that the law protects under the rubric of privacy and
have concluded that they are distinct and unrelated.8
Judith Thompson has
even argued that privacy as a concept serves no useful function, for what
we call privacy really amounts to a set of other more primary interests.9
The widespread discontent over conceptualizing privacy persists even
though the concern over privacy has escalated into an essential issue for
freedom and democracy. To begin to solve some of the problems of privacy,
we must develop an approach to conceptualizing privacy to guide
policymaking and legal interpretation. Although the domain of law relating
to privacy has made significant strides in dealing with privacy problems, it
has thus far suffered numerous failures and difficulties in resolving them.
Why does such a diverse body of law seem so outmatched and unsuited for
the privacy problems we are currently experiencing? In a world constantly
4. ALAN F. WESTIN, PRIVACY AND FREEDOM 7 (1967).
5. William M. Beaney, The Right to Privacy and American Law, 31 Law & Contemp. Probs.
253, 255 (1966).
6. Tom Gerety, Redefining Privacy, 12 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 233, 234 (1977); see also J.
Thomas McCarthy, The Rights of Publicity and Privacy § 5.7 [E] (1999) (“It is apparent that
the word ‘privacy’ has proven to be a powerful rhetorical battle cry in a plethora of unrelated
contexts . . . . Like the emotive word ‘freedom,’ ‘privacy’ means so many different things to so many
different people that it has lost any precise legal connotation that it might once have had.”); Robert
Gellman, Does Privacy Work?, in Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape 193 (Philip E.
Agre & Marc Rotenberg eds., 1997) (stating that privacy can be a broad and almost limitless issue);
Hyman Gross, The Concept of Privacy, 42 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 34, 34 (1967) (stating that we can readily
recognize a threat to privacy “yet stumble when trying to make clear what privacy is”); Glenn Negley,
Philosophical Views on the Value of Privacy, 31 Law & Contemp. Probs. 319, 320 (1966) (“[T]he
question of privacy has rarely been directly discussed in moral thought.”); Judith Jarvis Thomson, The
Right to Privacy, in Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy 272 (Ferdinand David Schoeman ed.,
1984) (“Perhaps the most striking thing about the right to privacy is that nobody seems to have any
very clear idea what it is.”).
7. Robert C. Post, Three Concepts of Privacy, 89 Geo. L.J. 2087, 2087 (2001).
8. See, e.g., Ken Gormley, One Hundred Years of Privacy, 1992 Wis. L. Rev. 1335, 1339
(“[L]egal privacy consists of four or five different species of legal rights which are quite distinct from
each other and thus incapable of a single definition.”); William L. Prosser, Privacy [A Legal Analysis],
in Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, supra note 6, at 104, 107 (“The law of privacy comprises
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. . . .”); McCarthy, supra note 6, §
5.7 [B] 5-60 to 5-61 (noting agreement among commentators “that the only significant thing that the
Constitutional right of privacy and the common law right of privacy share is the label”).
9. Thomson, supra note 6, at 281.
1090 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
being transformed by technology, how can we erect a robust and effective
law of privacy when the ground is constantly shifting?
The difficulty in articulating what privacy is and why it is important
has often made privacy law ineffective and blind to the larger purposes for
which it must serve. Judicial opinions and statutes often depend upon some
notion of the definition and value of privacy. Fourth Amendment law looks
to whether a person has a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”10
The tort of
public disclosure of private facts applies only to “matter[s] concerning the
private life of another.”11
The tort of intrusion upon seclusion also requires
a determination of what is private, applying to intrusions “upon the
solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns.”12
Likewise,
the constitutional right to information privacy, originating in Whalen
v. Roe,13
is predicated upon a conception of privacy.14
Additionally, the
numerous federal and state laws addressing privacy concerns depend upon
an implicit conception of privacy, which informs what matters are protected
and the nature and scope of the particular protections employed.15
Judges, politicians, and scholars have often failed to adequately conceptualize
the problems that privacy law is asked to redress. Privacy problems
are often not well articulated, and as a result, we frequently do not
have a compelling account of what is at stake when privacy is threatened
and what precisely the law must do to solve these problems. Thus, the need
to conceptualize privacy is significant; yet the discourse about conceptualizing
privacy remains deeply dissatisfying.
In this Article, I set forth a new approach for conceptualizing privacy.
In doing so, I make two principal arguments. First, I contend that, with a
few exceptions, the discourse seeks to conceptualize privacy in terms of
necessary and sufficient conditions. In other words, most theorists attempt
to conceptualize privacy by isolating one or more common “essential” or
10. The “reasonable expectation of privacy” test currently employed by the Court to determine
the applicability of the Fourth Amendment to a particular situation was first articulated in Justice
Harlan’s concurring opinion in Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). A person must demonstrate
an “actual (subjective) expectation of privacy” and “the expectation [must] be one that society is
prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’” Id. at 360-61 (Harlan, J., concurring).
11. RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF TORTS § 652D (1977).
12. Id. § 652B.
13. 429 U.S. 589 (1977); see also Nixon v. Adm’r of Gen. Servs., 433 U.S. 425 (1977).
14. The constitutional right to information privacy is derived from the substantive due process
right to privacy originating in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), and it protects “the
individual interest in avoiding disclosure of personal matters.” Whalen, 429 U.S. at 599-600. A number
of circuit courts have recognized the constitutional right to information privacy. See, e.g., Barry v. City
of New York, 712 F.2d 1554, 1559 (2d Cir. 1983); United States v. Westinghouse Elec. Corp., 638
F.2d 570, 577-80 (3d Cir. 1980); Plante v. Gonzalez, 575 F.2d 1119, 1132 (5th Cir. 1978).
15. See, e.g., Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g (2002);
Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, 18 U.S.C. § 2701 (2002); Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of
1994, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2721-2725 (2002); Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, 15 U.S.C. §§
6501-6503 (2002); Privacy Act of 1974, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2522, 2701-2709 (2002); Electronic
Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 5 U.S.C. § 552a (2002).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1091
“core” characteristics of privacy. In contrast, I argue that privacy is better
understood by drawing from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family
resemblances.”16
As Wittgenstein suggests, certain concepts might not have
a single common characteristic; rather they draw from a common pool of
similar elements.17
Second, I propound a pragmatic approach to conceptualizing privacy.
Although pragmatism encompasses a diverse range of theories,18
certain
ideas recur among many pragmatists. Pragmatism focuses on the palpable
consequences of ideas rather than on their correspondence to an ultimate
reality; urges philosophers to become more ensconced in the problems of
everyday life; adapts theory to respond to flux and change rather than seeking
to isolate fixed and immutable general principles; and emphasizes the
importance of the concrete, historical, and factual circumstances of life.19
I
identify my approach as “pragmatic” because it emphasizes the contextual
16. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS §§ 66-67 (G.E.M. Anscombe
trans., 1958).
17. Id.
18. Pragmatism was originally developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John
Dewey, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Mead, and others. For more background about the origins of
pragmatism, see Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the
Philosophical Life (1997); John J. Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy,
Experience, and Community (1997); Daniel J. Solove, The Darkest Domain: Deference, Judicial
Review, and the Bill of Rights, 84 Iowa L. Rev. 941, 970-71 (1999). A number of prominent
contemporary scholars identify themselves as pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty, Judge Richard
Posner, Cornell West, Robin West, Daniel Farber, and Thomas Grey. See Richard A. Posner,
Overcoming Law (1995); Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1977-1980
(1982); Cornell West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993); Daniel A.
Farber, Legal Pragmatism and the Constitution, 72 Minn. L. Rev. 1331 (1988); Thomas C. Grey,
Holmes and Legal Pragmatism, 41 Stan. L. Rev. 787, 814 (1989); Robin West, Liberalism
Rediscovered: A Pragmatic Definition of the Liberal Vision, 46 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 673 (1985). For
critical views of the “new” legal pragmatism, see David Luban, Legal Modernism 125-78 (1997);
Steven D. Smith, The Pursuit of Pragmatism, 100 Yale L.J. 409 (1990); William Weaver, Why
Pragmatism? The Puzzling Place of Pragmatism in Critical Theory, 1993 U. Ill. L. Rev. 535.
Although many of the contemporary scholars who identify themselves as pragmatists share certain
ideas and assumptions, they also have profound differences—sometimes more differences than
similarities.
19. When I use the term “pragmatism” and “pragmatic,” I am using it as a shorthand for a variety
of ideas propounded by different thinkers. John Dewey declared that:
[I]t is better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and parcel of a general movement of
intellectual reconstruction. For otherwise we seem to have no recourse save to define
pragmatism . . . in terms of the very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in escaping
that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival system making like claim to completeness and
finality.
JOHN DEWEY, THE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN ON PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER ESSAYS, at x-xi (Prometheus
Books ed., 1997) (1910).
Recently, several legal scholars have declared a renaissance of pragmatism in legal theory. See
Symposium, The Revival of Pragmatism, 18 Cardozo L. Rev. 1 (1996); Symposium, The Renaissance
of Pragmatism in American Legal Thought, 63 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1569 (1990); see also Morris
Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture
(1998); Pragmatism in Law and Society (Michael Brint & William Weaver eds., 1991); Robert
Samuel Summers, Instrumentalism and American Legal Theory (1982).
1092 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
and dynamic nature of privacy. My approach diverges from traditional accounts
of privacy that seek to conceptualize it in general terms as an overarching
category with necessary and sufficient conditions. In other words, I
suggest an approach to conceptualize privacy from the bottom up rather
than the top down, from particular contexts rather than in the abstract.
In Part I, I begin by examining the existing discourse about conceptualizing
privacy. I explore the conceptions of a wide array of jurists, legal
scholars, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. Despite what appears
to be a welter of different conceptions of privacy, I argue that they
can be dealt with under six general headings, which capture the recurrent
ideas in the discourse. These headings include: (1) the right to be let
alone—Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s famous formulation for the
right to privacy; (2) limited access to the self—the ability to shield
oneself from unwanted access by others; (3) secrecy—the concealment of
certain matters from others; (4) control over personal information—
the ability to exercise control over information about oneself;
(5) personhood—the protection of one’s personality, individuality, and
dignity; and (6) intimacy—control over, or limited access to, one’s intimate
relationships or aspects of life. Some of the conceptions concentrate
on means to achieve privacy; others focus on the ends or goals of privacy.
Further, there is overlap between conceptions, and the conceptions discussed
under different headings are by no means independent from each
other. For example, control over personal information can be seen as a subset
of limited access to the self, which in turn bears significant similarities
to the right to be let alone. These headings are therefore not taxonomical;
rather, they track how scholars have chosen to theorize about privacy. I use
the headings to discuss the primary representatives of conceptual approaches
in the discourse.
In examining the discourse, I survey the criticisms of various scholars
regarding each other’s conceptions of privacy and suggest a number of
criticisms of my own. Looking broadly at the discourse, almost all of the
criticisms boil down to claims that the theories are either too narrow or too
broad.
In Part II, I contend that attempts to conceptualize privacy by locating
the common denominator to identify all instances of privacy have thus far
been unsatisfying. Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances” suggests
that there are other ways to conceptualize beyond a search for the
common denominator. Expanding on Wittgenstein’s notion, I then develop
a pragmatic approach to conceptualizing privacy, seeking to understand
privacy in terms of practices. By “practices,” I am referring to activities,
customs, norms, and traditions. Under my approach, privacy is not reducible
to a set of neutral conditions that apply to all matters we deem private.
Rather, to say that a particular matter is “private” or to talk about “privacy”
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1093
in the abstract is to make a generalization about particular practices. These
practices are a product of history and culture. Therefore, we should explore
what it means for something to be private contextually by looking at particular
practices. I illustrate these points by looking historically at certain
matters Western societies have long understood as private: the family, the
body, and the home.
Following philosopher John Dewey’s view that philosophical inquiry
should begin as a response to dealing with life’s problems and difficul-
ties,20
I explain that privacy should be conceptualized contextually as it is
implicated in particular problems. When we protect privacy, we protect
against disruptions to certain practices. A privacy invasion interferes with
the integrity of certain practices and even destroys or inhibits such practices.
“Privacy” is a general term that refers to the practices we want to
protect and to the protections against disruptions to these practices. I suggest
that instead of attempting to locate the common denominator of these
practices, we should conceptualize privacy by focusing on the specific
types of disruption and the specific practices disrupted.
Next, I turn to an account of how privacy should be valued. Privacy
does not have a universal value that is the same across all contexts. The
value of privacy in a particular context depends upon the social importance
of the practice of which it is a part.
Finally, I examine some applications of my approach. With a series of
examples, I illustrate how privacy law has fixed itself too firmly to certain
conceptions of privacy, and as a result, has lost flexibility in dealing with
emerging privacy problems. I then demonstrate how my approach can help
courts conceptualize privacy in ways better adapted to address emerging
issues.
I
A Critique of the Conceptions of Privacy
What is privacy? We all have some intuitive sense that there are certain
aspects of life that are “private” and view these aspects of life as related
to each other. But what does it mean when we say that these aspects
of life are “private”?
This question is very important for making legal and policy decisions.
Many recognize the importance of privacy for freedom, democracy, social
welfare, individual well-being, and other ends. Many also assert it is worth
protecting at significant cost. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis spoke
of the profound importance of establishing and safeguarding a right to privacy,
describing such a right as “the most comprehensive of rights and the
right most valued by civilized men.”21
Society’s commitment to privacy
20. See John Dewey, Logic, The Theory of Inquiry 106-10 (Jo Ann Boydston ed., 1988).
21. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).
1094 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
often entails restraining or even sacrificing interests of substantial importance,
such as freedom of speech and press, efficient law enforcement, access
to information, and so on. Why is privacy valuable enough to make
significant trade-offs to protect it? To answer this question, we need to
have some notion of what privacy is. When we protect “privacy,” what are
we protecting?
Traditionally, theorists of privacy have attempted to locate the essential
elements common to the aspects of life we deem “private” and then
formulate a conception based on these elements. A robust discourse has
developed about conceptualizing privacy, and a multitude of different conceptions
of privacy have been proposed and critiqued.
Although the extensive scholarly and judicial writing on privacy has
produced a horde of different conceptions of privacy, I believe that they
can be discussed under six headings: (1) the right to be let alone; (2) limited
access to the self; (3) secrecy; (4) control of personal information;
(5) personhood; and (6) intimacy. These headings often overlap, yet
each has a distinctive perspective on privacy. In this Part, I delve into the
extensive literature on the subject, analyzing and critiquing the privacy
conceptions set forth in judicial opinions and legal scholarship as well as in
works by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and others.
My own approach to conceptualizing privacy emerges from studying
various problems in the discourse. Thus, I have attempted to provide a
comprehensive overview of the discourse to reveal that various parts of it
suffer from similar problems; that theorists are often dissatisfied with the
discourse because of these problems; and that the discourse has by and
large failed to transcend these difficulties.
The most prevalent problem with the conceptions is that they are either
too narrow or too broad. The conceptions are often too narrow because
they fail to include the aspects of life that we typically view as private, and
are often too broad because they fail to exclude matters that we do not
deem private. Often, the same conceptions can suffer from being both too
narrow and too broad. I contend that these problems stem from the way
that the discourse goes about the task of conceptualizing privacy.
In this Part, I spend considerable time discussing what I call the
“discourse” about conceptualizing privacy. Although I often refer to the
discourse as a whole, I do not claim that all privacy theorists are engaged
in a dialogue with each other or that any statements about the discourse
apply to every theorist who has examined privacy. Whenever we seek to
theorize about a topic, we must do so amidst the background noise of differing
terminology, contrasting definitions of the same terms, and diverging
theories of supporting and interconnecting concepts. Therefore, when I
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1095
talk about the discourse as a whole, I am making generalizations about the
discourse and attempting to eliminate some of the background noise.
Since my critique is ultimately of the discourse’s methods and aims in
conceptualizing privacy, it is important to begin with some background
about methods of conceptualizing.
A. Methods of Conceptualizing
1. The Traditional Method
When we conceptualize privacy, what are we attempting to do? Under
what I will refer to as the “traditional method,” conceptualizing privacy is
understood as an attempt to articulate what separates privacy from other
things, what makes it unique, and what identifies it in its various manifes-
tations.
Most attempts to conceptualize privacy thus far have followed the
traditional method of conceptualizing. The majority of theorists conceptualize
privacy by defining it per genus et differentiam. In other words, theorists
look for a common set of necessary and sufficient elements that single
out privacy as unique from other conceptions.22
A conception of privacy is different from the usage of the word
“privacy.” The usage of the word “privacy” constitutes the ways in which
we employ the word in everyday life and the things we are referring to
when we speak of “privacy.” The word “privacy” is currently used to describe
a myriad of different things: freedom of thought, control over personal
information, freedom from surveillance, protection of one’s
reputation, protection from invasions into one’s home, the ability to prevent
disclosure of facts about oneself, and an almost endless series of other
things.
According to the traditional method of conceptualizing, a conception
is a category, an abstract mental picture of what makes privacy distinct
from other things and the criteria for what makes things fall within the
category. People can use the word “privacy” improperly by referring to
things outside the category or by not referring to things within the
category. The purpose of conceptualizing is to define the unique
22. See, e.g., Inness, supra note 3, at 56 (noting that intimacy is the “common denominator” of
privacy); Miller, supra note 2, at 25 (stating that control is the “basic attribute” of privacy); David M.
O’Brien, Privacy, Law, and Public Policy 16 (1979) (conceptualizing privacy as “fundamentally
denoting an existential condition of limited access”); Edward J. Bloustein, Privacy as an Aspect of
Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser, 39 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 962, 963 (1964) (proposing a
“general theory of individual privacy which will reconcile the divergent strands of legal development”);
Charles Fried, Privacy, 77 Yale L.J. 475, 475 (1968) (seeking to “isolate from restrictions and
intrusions in general whatever is peculiar about invasions of privacy”); Gavison, supra note 1, at 423
(developing a “distinct and coherent” conception of privacy); Gerety, supra note 6, at 263 (“Intimacy is
the chief restricting concept in the definition of privacy.”); Richard B. Parker, A Definition of Privacy,
27 Rutgers L. Rev. 275, 277 (1974) (seeking to articulate “some characteristic common to all or some
of [a list of invasions of ‘different personal interests’]”); see also infra Part I.B.
1096 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
characteristics of privacy; usage of the word “privacy” must then be
cleaned up to match the conceptual category of privacy. Given the great
difficulties of capturing everything referred to by “privacy,” the often disparate
ways that the word “privacy” is used, and the lack of agreement over
the precise meaning of the word, many scholars seek to establish clear criteria
to distinguish “privacy” from other things. A few things might be left
out, but the aim is to establish a conception that encompasses most of the
things that are commonly viewed under the rubric of “privacy.”
Although the terminologies theorists employ differ, most theorists
strive toward the central goals of the traditional method of conceptualizing
privacy: to locate the “essence” of privacy, the core common denominator
that makes things private.23
The traditional method endeavors to conceptualize
privacy by constructing a category that is separate from other conceptual
categories (such as autonomy, freedom, and so on) and that has fixed
clear boundaries so we can know when things fall within the category or
outside of it.
Under the traditional method, how are conceptions of privacy to be
evaluated? The traditional method looks to determine whether a conception
of privacy accurately captures what privacy is. Most often, theorists assess
a conception by determining whether it is coherent—that is, whether it is
logical and consistent. Coherence alone, however, would be incomplete as
a way to evaluate a conception of privacy. Thus, in addition to coherence,
theorists often look to the usage of the word “privacy.” They examine
whether a conception of privacy includes the things we view as private and
excludes the things we do not. For example, if a conception of privacy
were to omit things we commonly view as private—such as medical information,
intimate marital secrets, freedom from surveillance, and so on—
theorists would likely reject the conception.24
A successful conception thus
aims to get close to the modern usage of the word “privacy,” yet maintain
coherence by identifying a combination of common elements that are
unique to privacy.25
This is certainly not the only way to evaluate conceptions
of privacy, but it is the way most often used by theorists in the dis-
course.
2. Wittgensteinian Family Resemblances
I draw on some of the ideas of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to
demonstrate that the traditional method is not the only way to approach the
task of conceptualizing. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an Austrian
philosopher who focused extensively on problems in language and logic. In
23. This will be illustrated in depth infra Part I.B.
24. For specific examples, see the discussion of the conceptions of privacy infra Part I.B.
25. See, e.g., Parker, supra note 22, at 277 (stating that “[o]ur definition of privacy should
be . . . true (fit the data)”).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1097
a posthumous work, Philosophical Investigations, written during the latter
part of his career,26
Wittgenstein embarks on the task of critiquing the traditional
conception of language. According to the traditional view of language,
we should endeavor to locate the essence of a word or expression,
to strive toward “making our expressions more exact.”27
In contrast,
Wittgenstein suggests that meaning is not an objectively true link between
a word and the things to which it refers. Rather, the meaning of a word
comes from the way a word is used in language, not from any inherent
connection between the word and what it signifies.28
Wittgenstein demonstrates a way to conceptualize language apart
from the traditional method of conceptualizing. Specifically, he explains
that language does not have a single essence but involves a horde of different
activities29
which have “no one thing in common” but “are related to
one another in many different ways.”30
Thus, in examining the concept of
language, Wittgenstein suggests that certain concepts might not share one
common characteristic; rather they draw from a common pool of similar
characteristics, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of
detail.”31
He illustrates this point by using the example of various types of
games: “board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so
on.”32
There is not “something that is common to all, but similarities,
relationships, and a whole series of them at that.”33
There are “many
correspondences” between board games and card games, “but many
common features drop out, and others appear.”34
Wittgenstein uses the term
“family resemblances,” analogizing to the overlapping and crisscrossing
characteristics that exist between members of a family, such as “build,
26. After publishing his highly influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, Wittgenstein
disappeared from the philosophical scene for over a decade. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuiness trans., 1961). When he returned, he had
substantially altered his views, recognizing that he had made “grave mistakes” in Tractatus. See
Wittgenstein, supra note 16, at vi. Because Wittgenstein’s thinking changed dramatically during his
career, Tractatus is often referred to as “early” Wittgenstein, and Philosophical Investigations, along
with other works such as On Certainty, are referred to as “late” Wittgenstein.
27. Wittgenstein, supra note 16, § 91.
28. Id. § 43 (“[T]he meaning of a word is its use in the language.”).
29. Wittgenstein uses the term “language-games” to describe the activities involving language.
Id. § 7. Wittgenstein uses “games” as a metaphor to describe language as an active endeavor such as
playing chess, tennis, or a card game. Wittgenstein thus sees language not as an abstract system of signs
but as a functioning aspect of our daily lives, as something we do, as a “form of life.” Id. § 19. There
are a “multiplicity” of language-games, such as giving orders, describing appearances, reporting an
event, speculating, singing, telling a joke, and so on. See id. § 23.
30. Id. § 65.
31. Id. § 66.
32. Id.
33. Id.
34. Id.
1098 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc.”35
For example, in a family,
each child has certain features similar to each parent; and the children
share similar features with each other; but they may not all resemble each
other in the same way. Nevertheless, they all bear a resemblance to each
other.
Using another analogy, the traditional method of conceptualizing
views things as spokes linked by the hub of a wheel, all connected by a
common point. This common point, where all spokes overlap, defines the
way in which the spokes are related to each other. However, Wittgenstein
suggests that sometimes there is no hub. We have a web of connected
parts, but with no single center point. Yet the parts are still connected.36
One might make the objection that a conception consisting of a web
of connected parts without a common denominator is deficient because it
has no boundaries and thus is endless. Although Wittgenstein suggests that
not all conceptions are “closed by a frontier,”37
this does not mean that
conceptions are endless. Rather, it means that not all conceptions have
fixed and sharp boundaries separating them from other conceptions.
Boundaries can be fuzzy or can be in a state of constant flux.38
We can
draw fixed and sharp boundaries, but we do so for special purposes, not
because the boundary is a necessary part of a conception.39
As Wittgenstein
asserts, conceptions can still be useful without having to be circumscribed
by fixed and sharp boundaries.40
The ramification of Wittgenstein’s insight is not that all attempts to
conceptualize by locating a common denominator are doomed; rather,
Wittgenstein suggests that there are other ways to approach the conceptualization
of certain things. As Judith Genova characterizes Wittgenstein’s
insight: “Once one sees the variety of cases and the family resemblances
between them, the attempt to establish an a priori generalization is
thwarted. There is no one answer, but a variety of answers depending on a
35. Id. § 67. For more background into Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances, see P.M.S.
HACKER, INSIGHT AND ILLUSION: THEMES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITTGENSTEIN 131-34 (1986);
HANNA FEINCHEL PITKIN, WITTGENSTEIN AND JUSTICE: ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LUDWIG
WITTGENSTEIN FOR SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 63-65 (1972).
36. In his excellent recent book, Steven Winter develops a related view of conceptualization. He
argues: “On the standard view, categories are descriptive, definitional, and rigidly bounded. The
empirical evidence, in contrast, presents a picture of categorization as an imaginative and dynamic
process that is flexible in application and elastic in scope.” Steven L. Winter, A Clearing in the
Forest: Law, Life, and Mind 69 (2001). Winter contends that categories are “radial”; they consist of
a “central model” or paradigm example and related extensions radiating outward. Id. at 71. These
related extensions, “though related to the central case in some fashion, nevertheless cannot be generated
by rule.” Id.
37. Wittgenstein, supra note 16, § 68.
38. Wittgenstein uses the terms “blurred edges” and “indistinct picture.” Id. § 71.
39. See generally id. §§ 69, 499; see also Winter, supra note 36, at 100-01 (contending that
categories are not static entities but are tools created for particular purposes).
40. Wittgenstein, supra note 16, § 69.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1099
variety of factors. The moral is: Look to the circumstances!”41
Shifting the
focus away from finding a common denominator may prove immensely
fruitful. The top-down approach of beginning with an overarching conception
of privacy designed to apply in all contexts often results in a conception
that does not fit well when applied to the multitude of situations and
problems involving privacy.
In contrast to the view of the traditional method, where the quest for a
common denominator or essence leads to greater clarity, Wittgenstein
shows us that such a quest can sometimes lead to confusion. I contend that
this explains the problems currently experienced in the discourse.
In the remainder of this Part, I will illustrate these rather abstract ideas
by examining the various attempts to conceptualize privacy, and will demonstrate
the difficulties of conceptions of privacy that seek to isolate its
core characteristics.
B. Conceptions of Privacy
As I have discussed before, the philosophical discourse about privacy
has proposed numerous conceptions that attempt to capture the common
denominator of privacy. Wittgenstein demonstrates that not all conceptions
have a “core” or “essence.” Is privacy such a conception?
In this section, I explore the philosophical and legal discourse to assess
the conceptions that attempt to isolate a common denominator of privacy.
Although I am critical of most conceptions of privacy, I do not intend
to imply that the discourse is devoid of merit. In fact, many of the conceptions
capture profound insights about privacy. However, each of the conceptions
has significant limitations if it is to serve as a conceptual account
of privacy in general. Beyond the specific critiques of each general category
of conceptions, I aim to illustrate my overarching critique about the
predominant approach of the discourse toward conceptualizing privacy.42
1. The Right to Be Let Alone
In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis penned their famous article,
The Right to Privacy,43
hailed by a multitude of scholars as the
41. JUDITH GENOVA, WITTGENSTEIN: A WAY OF SEEING 44 (1995).
42. In some instances, the theorists I discuss under one heading are also discussed under other
headings, since some theorists have combined one or more conceptions. For example, Charles Fried,
who advocates a control-over-information conception, defines the scope of information over which we
should have control by using an intimacy conception. See infra Parts I.B.4 & I.B.6. Further, the Court’s
jurisprudence on privacy reveals influences of many conceptions, and collectively, it does not reflect a
single conception of privacy. Nevertheless, the Court readily adopts a particular conception of privacy
for particular areas of law, such as Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the constitutional right to
privacy, federal statutes, and so on.
43. Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890).
1100 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
foundation of privacy law in the United States.44
The influence of the
Warren and Brandeis article cannot be questioned—the article inspired
significant interest in and attention to privacy; it spawned at least four
common law tort actions to protect privacy; and it framed the discussion of
privacy in the United States throughout the twentieth century.45
Warren and Brandeis began by noting new technological developments
that were posing a potential threat to privacy and focused on how the
common law could develop to protect the interest then called “privacy.”
The authors, however, did not spend much time setting forth a conceptual
account of privacy. Warren and Brandeis defined privacy as the “right to
be let alone,”46
a phrase adopted from Judge Thomas Cooley’s famous treatise
on torts in 1880.47
Cooley’s right to be let alone was, in fact, a way of
explaining that attempted physical touching was a tort injury; he was not
defining a right to privacy.48
Warren and Brandeis’s use of the phrase was
consistent with the purpose of their article: to demonstrate that many of
the elements of a right to privacy existed within the common law.
The authors declared that the underlying principle of privacy was
“that of inviolate personality.”49
They noted that the value of privacy “is
found not in the right to take the profits arising from publication, but in the
peace of mind or the relief afforded by the ability to prevent any
publication at all.”50
Warren and Brandeis observed that increasingly,
“modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy,
subjected [an individual] to mental pain and distress, far greater than
could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.”51
The authors noted that this type
of harm was not typically protected by tort law. While the law of
44. See, e.g., Irwin P. Kramer, The Birth of Privacy Law: A Century Since Warren and Brandeis,
39 Cath. U. L. Rev. 703, 704 (1990). Harry Kalven has even hailed it as the “most influential law
review article of all.” Harry Kalven, Jr., Privacy in Tort Law—Were Warren and Brandeis Wrong?, 31
Law & Contemp. Probs. 326, 327 (1966).
45. See, e.g., Richard C. Turkington, Legacy of the Warren and Brandeis Article: The Emerging
Unencumbered Constitutional Right to Informational Privacy, 10 N. Ill. U. L. Rev. 479, 481-82
(1990). Turkington observed:
[T]he article has acquired legendary status in the realm of legal scholarship. It is likely that
The Right to Privacy has had as much impact on the development of law as any single
publication in legal periodicals. It is certainly one of the most commented upon and cited
articles in the history of our legal system.
Id.
46. Warren & Brandeis, supra note 43, at 193.
47. Thomas M. Cooley, Law of Torts (2d ed. 1888). Around the same time that Warren and
Brandeis published their article, the Supreme Court referred to the right to be let alone in holding that a
court could not require a plaintiff in a civil case to submit to a surgical examination: “As well said by
Judge Cooley: ‘The right to one’s person may be said to be a right of complete immunity; to be let
alone.’” Union Pac. Ry. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891).
48. ROBERT ELLIS SMITH, BEN FRANKLIN’S WEB SITE: PRIVACY AND CURIOSITY FROM
PLYMOUTH ROCK TO THE INTERNET 128 (2000).
49. Warren & Brandeis, supra note 43, at 205.
50. Id. at 200.
51. Id. at 196.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1101
defamation protected injuries to reputations, privacy involved “injury to
the feelings,” a psychological form of pain that was difficult to translate
into the tort law of their times, which focused more on tangible injuries.52
Nearly forty years later, when he was a justice on the Supreme Court,
Brandeis wrote his famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States.53
In
Olmstead, the Court held that wiretapping was not a violation under the
Fourth Amendment because it was not a physical trespass into the home.54
Brandeis fired off a dissent that was to become one of the most important
documents for Fourth Amendment privacy law, stating that the Framers of
the 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.”55
Brandeis’s article and his dissent in Olmstead have had a profound
impact on the law of privacy and on subsequent theories of privacy. In Katz
v. United States,56
the Court adopted Brandeis’s view, overruling
Olmstead. In its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, as well as its substantive
due process protection of the right to privacy, the Court frequently has
invoked Brandeis’s formulation of privacy as “the right to be let alone.”57
“[The right to privacy] is, simply stated, the right to be let alone,” Justice
Fortas observed, “to live one’s life as one chooses, free from assault,
intrusion or invasion except as they can be justified by the clear needs of
community living under a government of law.”58
According to Justice
Douglas:
[The] right of privacy was called by Mr. Justice Brandeis the right
“to be let alone.” That right includes the privilege of an individual
to plan his own affairs, for “outside areas of plainly harmful
conduct, every American is left to shape his own life as he thinks
best, do what he pleases, go where he pleases.”59
The formulation of privacy as the right to be let alone merely describes
an attribute of privacy. Understanding privacy as being let alone
fails to provide much guidance about how privacy should be valued vis-àvis
other interests, such as free speech, effective law enforcement, and
other important values. Being let alone does not inform us about the matters
in which we should be let alone. Warren and Brandeis did speak of
“inviolate personality,” which could be viewed as describing the content of
52. Id. at 197.
53. 277 U.S. 438 (1928).
54. See id. at 466.
55. Id. at 478 (Brandeis, J., dissenting).
56. 389 U.S. 347 (1967).
57. See, e.g., Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 454 n.10 (1972); Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S.
557, 564 (1969); Katz, 389 U.S. at 350.
58. Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374, 413 (1967) (Fortas, J., dissenting).
59. Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 213 (1973) (Douglas, J., concurring) (citations omitted)
(quoting Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116, 126 (1958)).
1102 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
the private sphere, but this phrase is vague, and the authors failed to elaborate.
To the extent that being let alone refers to “noninterference by the
state,” legal scholar Ruth Gavison argues, it often neglects to understand
that “the typical privacy claim is not a claim for noninterference by the
state at all. It is a claim for state interference in the form of legal protection
against other individuals.”60
The right to be let alone views privacy as a type of immunity or seclusion.
As many commentators lament, defining privacy as the right to be let
alone is too broad.61
For example, legal scholar Anita Allen explains: “If
privacy simply meant ‘being let alone,’ any form of offensive or harmful
conduct directed toward another person could be characterized as a violation
of personal privacy. A punch in the nose would be a privacy invasion
as much as a peep in the bedroom.”62
According to philosopher Ferdinand
Schoeman, Warren and Brandeis “never define what privacy is.”63
Edward
Bloustein, a noted legal theorist of privacy, observed that instead of developing
a conception of privacy, Warren and Brandeis’s article focused
mostly on the gaps in existing common-law torts.64
To its credit, the article was far ahead of its time, and it contained
flashes of insight into a more robust theory of privacy. And to be fair,
Warren and Brandeis’s aim was not to provide a comprehensive conception
of privacy but instead to explore the roots of a right to privacy in the
common law and explain how such a right could develop. The article was
certainly a profound beginning toward developing a conception of privacy.
However, while the right to be let alone has often been invoked by judges
and commentators,65
it still remains a rather broad and vague conception of
privacy.
2. Limited Access to the Self
A number of theorists conceptualize privacy as “limited access” to the
self.66
This conception recognizes the individual’s desire for concealment
and for being apart from others. In this way, it is closely related to the
right-to-be-let-alone conception, and is perhaps a more sophisticated formulation
of that right.
60. Gavison, supra note 1, at 438.
61. See, e.g., O’Brien, supra note 22, at 5; Gerety, supra note 6, at 263.
62. Anita L. Allen, Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society 7 (1988).
63. Ferdinand Schoeman, Privacy: Philosophical Dimensions of the Literature, in
Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, supra note 6, at 1, 14.
64. See Bloustein, supra note 22, at 970.
65. See, e.g., J. Braxton Craven, Jr., Personhood: The Right to Be Let Alone, 1976 Duke L.J.
699.
66. In addition to the scholars discussed in this section, see, for example, Adam Carlyle
Breckenridge, The Right to Privacy 1 (1970) (“Privacy, in my view, is the rightful claim of the
individual to determine the extent to which he wishes to share of himself with others.”).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1103
The limited-access conception is not equivalent to solitude. Solitude is
a form of seclusion, of withdrawal from other individuals, of being alone.
Solitude is a component of limited-access conceptions as well as of the
right-to-be-let-alone conception, but these theories extend far more broadly
than solitude, embracing freedom from government interference as well as
from intrusions by the press and others. Limited-access conceptions recognize
that privacy extends beyond merely being apart from others.
E.L. Godkin, a well-known writer of the late nineteenth century, advanced
an early version of the limited-access theory when he observed that
“nothing is better worthy of legal protection than private life, or, in other
words, the right of every man to keep his affairs to himself, and to decide
for himself to what extent they shall be the subject of public observation
and discussion.”67
Around the same time as the publication of Warren and
Brandeis’s article in 1890, Godkin published an article noting that privacy
constituted the “right to decide how much knowledge of [a person’s]
personal thought and feeling . . . private doings and affairs . . . the public at
large shall have.”68
A number of contemporary theorists also have advanced limitedaccess
conceptions. For philosopher Sissela Bok, privacy is “the condition
of being protected from unwanted access by others—either physical access,
personal information, or attention.”69
Hyman Gross, a legal theorist of privacy,
conceives of privacy as “the condition of human life in which acquaintance
with a person or with affairs of his life which are personal to
him is limited.”70
According to Ernest Van Den Haag, “Privacy is the
exclusive access of a person (or other legal entity) to a realm of his own.
The right to privacy entitles one to exclude others
from (a) watching, (b) utilizing, (c) invading (intruding upon, or in
other ways affecting) his private realm.”71
Legal theorist Anita Allen
asserts that “a degree of inaccessibility is an important necessary condition
for the apt application of privacy.”72
David O’Brien argues that there is an important distinction among
theorists who propound privacy as limited access formulations. Some view
limited access as a choice, a form of individual control over who has access
67. E.L. Godkin, Libel and Its Legal Remedy, 12 J. Soc. Sci. 69, 80 (1880).
68. E.L. Godkin, The Rights of the Citizen, IV—To His Own Reputation, Scribner’s Magazine,
July-Dec. 1890, at 65. For a discussion of this article’s influence on Warren and Brandeis, see Richard
C. Turkington & Anita L. Allen, Privacy Law: Cases and Materials 40-41 (1999).
69. Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation 10-11 (1983).
70. Gross, supra note 6, at 35-36 (emphasis removed).
71. Ernest Van Den Haag, On Privacy, in Nomos XIII: Privacy 149, 149 (J. Ronald Pennock &
J.W. Chapman eds., 1971).
72. Allen, supra note 62, at 10. For an additional proponent of limited-access conceptions, see
Edward Shils, Privacy: Its Constitution and Vicissitudes, 31 Law & Contemp. Probs. 281, 281 (1966)
(Privacy “is constituted by the absence of interaction or communication or perception within contexts
in which such interaction, communication, or perception is practicable . . . .”).
1104 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
to the self. Others view limited access as a state of existence. Arguing for
the latter view, O’Brien claims that privacy “may be understood as
fundamentally denoting an existential condition of limited access to an
individual’s life experiences and engagements.”73
“Privacy is not identical
with control over access to oneself, because not all privacy is chosen. Some
privacy is accidental, compulsory, or even involuntary.”74
For O’Brien, privacy boils down to the condition of being alone. This
suffers from two problems. First, O’Brien neglects to incorporate into his
conception an approach toward understanding the content of the private
sphere. Second, O’Brien’s conception omits any notion of the individual’s
power to make certain choices about revealing aspects of herself to others.
For example, O’Brien would claim that a person stranded on a deserted
island has complete privacy, but this is better described as a state of isolation.
Privacy involves one’s relationship to society; in a world without others,
claiming that one has privacy does not make much sense. According to
sociologist Barrington Moore, “the need for privacy is a socially created
need. Without society there would be no need for privacy.”75
Without a notion of what matters are private, limited-access conceptions
do not tell us the substantive matters for which access would implicate
privacy. Certainly not all access to the self infringes upon privacy—
only access to specific dimensions of the self or to particular matters and
information. As a result, the theory provides no understanding of the degree
of access necessary to constitute a privacy violation. How much control
we should have over access to the self? Proponents of the limitedaccess
conception could respond that privacy is a continuum between
absolutely no access to the self and total access. If privacy is such a continuum,
then the important question is where the lines should be drawn—that
is, what degree of access should we recognize as reasonable? This question
can only be answered with an understanding of what matters are private
and the value of privacy. Like the right-to-be-let-alone conception, the limited-access
conception suffers from being too broad and too vague.
In Privacy and the Limits of Law, legal theorist Ruth Gavison, in an
attempt to address these shortcomings, develops the most compelling conception
of privacy as limited access. Her aim is to define “a neutral concept
of privacy” that is “distinct and coherent” because “the reasons for which
we claim privacy in different situations are similar.”76
For Gavison, limited
access is the common denominator of privacy: “Our interest in
privacy . . . is related to our concern over our accessibility to others: the
extent to which we are known to others, the extent to which others have
73. O’Brien, supra note 22, at 16.
74. Id. at 15.
75. Barrington Moore, Jr., Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History 73 (1984).
76. Gavison, supra note 1, at 423.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1105
physical access to us, and the extent to which we are the subject of others’
attention.”77
According to Gavison, privacy cannot be understood “as a
claim, a psychological state, or an area that should not be invaded . . . [or]
as a form of control.”78
Unlike many limited access theorists who neglect
to elaborate on the value of privacy, Gavison argues that privacy as limited
access to the self is valuable in furthering liberty, autonomy, and free-
dom.79
Further, Gavison explains what constitutes limited access, which consists
of “three independent and irreducible elements: secrecy, anonymity,
and solitude.”80
However, the way that Gavison defines access restricts
privacy to matters of withdrawal (solitude) and concealment (secrecy, anonymity).
Excluded from this definition are invasions into one’s private life
by harassment and nuisance and the government’s involvement in decisions
regarding one’s body, health, sexual conduct, and family life.81
Although
Gavison contends that “the collection, storage, and computerization
of information”82
falls within her conception, these activities often do not
reveal secrets, destroy anonymity, or thwart solitude.83
Therefore, although
Gavison avoids the broadness and vagueness of most limited-access conceptions,
her attempt to define what “access” entails winds up being too
narrow.
3. Secrecy
One of the most common understandings of privacy is that it constitutes
the secrecy of certain matters. Under this view, privacy is violated by
the public disclosure of previously concealed information. According to
Judge Richard Posner:
[T]he word ‘privacy’ seems to embrace at least two distinct
interests. One is the interest in being left alone—the interest that is
invaded by the unwanted telephone solicitation, the noisy sound
truck, the music in elevators, being jostled in the street, or even an
obscene theater billboard or shouted obscenity. . . . The other
privacy interest, concealment of information, is invaded whenever
private information is obtained against the wishes of the person to
whom the information pertains.84
77. Id.
78. Id. at 426.
79. See id. at 423.
80. Id. at 433.
81. Gavison openly recognizes that her theory excludes these things. See id. at 436.
82. Id.
83. See Daniel J. Solove, Privacy and Power: Computer Databases and Metaphors for
Information Privacy, 53 Stan. L. Rev. 1393, 1422 (2001) (“The problem with databases emerges from
subjecting personal information to the bureaucratic process with little intelligent control or limitation,
resulting in a lack of meaningful participation in decisions about our information.”).
84. Richard A. Posner, The Economics of Justice 272-73 (1981).
1106 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
The latter privacy interest, “concealment of information,” involves secrecy.
When talking about privacy as secrecy, Posner defines it as an individual’s
“right to conceal discreditable facts about himself.”85
Posner sees privacy
as a form of self-interested economic behavior, concealing true but harmful
facts about oneself for one’s own gain. People “want to manipulate the
world around them by selective disclosure of facts about themselves.”86
“[W]hen people today decry lack of privacy,” Posner argues, “what they
want, I think, is mainly something quite different from seclusion; they want
more power to conceal information about themselves that others might use
to their disadvantage.”87
In a less normatively charged manner, Sidney
Jourard emphasizes secrecy with his definition of privacy: “Privacy is an
outcome of a person’s wish to withhold from others certain knowledge as
to his past and present experience and action and his intentions for the
future.”88
The privacy-as-secrecy conception can be understood as a subset of
limited access to the self. Secrecy of personal information is a way to limit
access to the self. This conception is narrower than limited-access conceptions,
as secrecy involves only one aspect of access to the self—the concealment
of personal facts.
The conception of privacy as concealing information about the self
forms the foundation for what is known as the constitutional right to information
privacy. The constitutional right to information privacy is an
offshoot of the Supreme Court’s substantive due process “right to privacy”
cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut89
and Roe v. Wade.90
In Whalen v.
Roe,91
the Court held that the constitutionally protected “zone of privacy”
not only protected an individual’s “independence in making certain kinds
of important decisions” but also encompassed the “individual interest in
avoiding disclosure of personal matters.”92
Consonant with the notion of
privacy as secrecy, this formulation views privacy as avoiding disclosure.
Accordingly, courts applying the constitutional right to information privacy
have held that although confidential records (such as medical records) are
85. Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law 46 (5th ed. 1998).
86. Posner, supra note 84, at 234.
87. Id. at 271. Posner’s conception of privacy is infused with his own normative assessment of
privacy as a form of deception. According to Posner, “[t]he economist sees a parallel to the efforts of
sellers to conceal defects in their products.” Posner, supra note 85 at 46.
88. Sidney M. Jourard, Some Psychological Aspects of Privacy, 31 Law & Contemp. Probs.
307, 307 (1966).
89. 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
90. 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
91. 429 U.S. 589 (1977).
92. Id. at 599-600.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1107
protected under constitutional information privacy,93
nonconfidential records
(such as arrest and conviction records) are not.94
In a variety of legal contexts, the view of privacy as secrecy often
leads to the conclusion that once a fact is divulged in public, no matter how
limited or narrow the disclosure, it can no longer remain private. Privacy is
thus viewed as coextensive with the total secrecy of information. For example,
the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence adheres to the notion
that matters that are no longer completely secret can no longer be private. As
William Stuntz observes, according to the Court, Fourth Amendment privacy
“flows out of the interest in keeping secrets, not out of the interest in
being free from unreasonable police coercion or from other kinds of
dignitary harms that search targets may suffer.”95
In a series of cases, the
Court has held there can be no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in
things exposed to the public, even if it is highly unlikely that anybody will
see or discover them. As the Court observed in Katz: “What a person
knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a
subject of Fourth Amendment protection.”96
For example, in California v.
Greenwood,97
the Court held there is no reasonable expectation of privacy
in garbage because it is knowingly exposed to the public: “It is common
knowledge that plastic garbage bags left on or at the side of a public street
are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other
members of the public.”98
Similarly, in Florida v. Riley,99
the Court held
that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to surveillance of a person’s
93. See, e.g., United States v. Westinghouse Elec. Corp., 638 F.2d 570 (3d Cir. 1980) (finding
that agency’s request for medical records to investigate work-related health hazards justified a minimal
intrusion into the privacy of employees’ medical records; agency had to notify the workers and give
them a chance to opt out); Doe v. Borough of Barrington, 729 F. Supp. 376 (D.N.J. 1990) (finding
violation of constitutional right to privacy by police disclosing that person had AIDS); Woods v. White,
689 F. Supp. 874, 876 (W.D. Wis. 1988) (finding that a prisoner has a constitutional right to privacy in
his medical records); Carter v. Broadlawns Med. Ctr., 667 F. Supp. 1269 (S.D. Iowa 1987) (finding that
hospital’s allowing chaplains access to medical records violated constitutional privacy).
94. Paul P. v. Verniero, 170 F.3d 396, 404 (3d Cir. 1998) (finding that a community notification
law for sex offenders (known as Megan’s Law) does not violate constitutional privacy because
government’s interest in preventing sex offenses is compelling); Russell v. Gregoire, 124 F.3d 1079,
1094 (9th Cir. 1997) (finding that Washington State’s version of Megan’s Law does not violate
constitutional privacy because the “information collected and disseminated by the Washington statute is
already fully available to the public and is not constitutionally protected”); Cline v. Rogers, 87 F.3d
176, 179 (6th Cir. 1996) (holding that there is no constitutional privacy right in criminal records
because “arrest and conviction information are matters of public record”); Scheetz v. The Morning
Call, Inc., 946 F.2d 202, 207 (3d Cir. 1991) (finding no right to privacy for disclosure of information in
police reports).
95. William J. Stuntz, Privacy’s Problem and the Law of Criminal Procedure, 93 Mich. L. Rev.
1016, 1022 (1995).
96. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967).
97. 486 U.S. 35 (1988).
98. Id. at 40.
99. 488 U.S. 445 (1989).
1108 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
property from an aircraft flying in navigable airspace because the surveillance
was conducted from a public vantage point.100
A number of theorists have claimed that understanding privacy as secrecy
conceptualizes privacy too narrowly. Legal theorist Edward
Bloustein as well as anthropologist Arnold Simmel have criticized the theory
of privacy as secrecy as failing to recognize group privacy.101
By equating
privacy with secrecy, this formulation fails to recognize that
individuals want to keep things private from some people but not others.
Criticizing a boss to a coworker does not mean that the employee desires
that her boss know her comments. Being a member of an organization, especially
an unpopular one, is also regarded by many as a private matter.
Further, the conception of privacy as secrecy maintained by many courts
views secrecy as tantamount to total secrecy rather than selective secrecy.
As sociologist Edward Shils notes, contrary to privacy as secrecy, the individual
does not intend an act of disclosure to be limitless.102
“Meaningful
discussion of privacy,” legal scholar Kenneth Karst states, “requires the
recognition that ordinarily we deal not with an interest in total
nondisclosure but with an interest in selective disclosure.”103
Some theorists attempt to avoid these problems by focusing on selective
secrecy. For example, Amitai Etzioni defines privacy as “the realm in
which an actor (either a person or a group, such as a couple) can
legitimately act without disclosure and accountability to others.”104
Nevertheless,
even under the selective secrecy conception, the harm caused by an
invasion of privacy is understood as the disclosure of previously concealed
information. Privacy, however, involves more than avoiding disclosure; it
also involves the individual’s ability to ensure that personal information is
used for the purposes she desires.105
According to philosopher Judith
Wagner DeCew, secrecy is certainly not coextensive with privacy; secret
100. See id. at 450-51; see also California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986) (holding that Fourth
Amendment did not apply to surveillance of property from airplane flying at 1000 feet); Dow Chem.
Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227 (1986) (holding that Fourth Amendment did not apply to aerial
surveillance of property with high-tech camera which could enlarge objects so that objects half an inch
in diameter could be seen).
101. See, e.g., Arnold Simmel, Privacy Is Not an Isolated Freedom, in Nomos XIII, supra note 71,
at 71, 81. Simmel observed:
We become what we are not only by establishing boundaries around ourselves but also by a
periodic opening of these boundaries to nourishment, to learning, and to intimacy. But the
opening of a boundary of the self may require a boundary farther out, a boundary around the
group to which we are opening ourselves.
Id. For a theoretical discussion of group privacy, see Edward J. Bloustein, Individual and Group
Privacy 123-86 (1978).
102. See Shils, supra note 72, at 305.
103. Kenneth L. Karst, “The Files”: Legal Controls Over the Accuracy and Accessibility of
Stored Personal Data, 31 Law & Contemp. Probs. 342, 344 (1966).
104. Amitai Etzioni, The Limits of Privacy 196 (1999).
105. See Solove, supra note 83, at 1439.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1109
information is often not private (for example, secret military plans) and
private matters are not always secret (for example, one’s debts).106
We often expect privacy even when in public. Not all activities we
deem as private occur behind the curtain. The books we read, the products
we buy, the people we associate with—these are often not viewed as secrets,
but we nonetheless view them as private matters. As philosopher
Julie Inness observes, privacy as secrecy omits the element of control:
“[P]rivacy might not necessarily be opposed to publicity; its function
might be to provide the individual with control over certain aspects of her
life.”107
This sentiment was also recognized by Stanley Benn, who observed
that privacy is not that one’s private affairs “are kept out of sight or
from the knowledge of others that makes them private. Rather, [one’s
private affairs] are matters that it would be inappropriate for others to try to
find out about, much less report on, without one’s consent.”108
In elaborating upon the privacy exemption of the Freedom of
Information Act (“FOIA”), the Supreme Court appeared to understand the
imperfections of understanding privacy as secrecy. In United States
Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press,109
the Court held that the release of FBI rap sheets (containing personal information
from law enforcement records about millions of people) was an
invasion of privacy within the privacy exemption of FOIA. Although the
information in the rap sheet had previously been publicly disclosed, the
Court held that “there are few facts that are not at one time or another
divulged to another,” and that there was an important distinction “between
scattered disclosure of the bits of information contained in a rap sheet and
revelation of the rap sheet as a whole.”110
In other words, the Court recognized
that the accessibility of information, not the mere secrecy of it, was
important to protecting privacy. However, the Court has failed to recognize
this insight in other contexts.
Therefore, while most theorists would recognize the disclosure of certain
secrets to be a violation of privacy, many commonly recognized privacy
invasions do not involve the loss of secrecy. Secrecy as the common
denominator of privacy makes the conception of privacy too narrow.
4. Control Over Personal Information
One of the most predominant theories of privacy is that of control
over personal information. According to Alan Westin: “Privacy is the
106. Judith Wagner DeCew, In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of
Technology 48 (1997).
107. Inness, supra note 3, at 6.
108. Stanley I. Benn, Privacy, Freedom, and Respect for Persons, in Nomos XIII, supra note 71, at
2.
109. 489 U.S. 749 (1989).
110. Id. at 763-64.
1110 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves
when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to
others.”111
Numerous other scholars have articulated similar theories.112
Arthur Miller declares that “the basic attribute of an effective right of
privacy is the individual’s ability to control the circulation of information
relating to him.”113
According to Charles Fried, “Privacy is not simply an
absence of information about us in the minds of others; rather it is the
control we have over information about ourselves.”114
President Clinton’s
Information Infrastructure Task Force has defined privacy as “an
individual’s claim to control the terms under which personal information—
information identifiable to the individual—is acquired, disclosed, and
used.”115
The Supreme Court has even stated that privacy is “control over
information concerning his or her person.”116
The control-over-information can be viewed as a subset of the limited
access conception. The theory’s focus on information, however, makes it
too narrow a conception, for it excludes those aspects of privacy that are
not informational, such as the right to make certain fundamental decisions
about one’s body, reproduction, or rearing of one’s children.
111. Westin, supra note 4, at 7.
112. See, e.g., Breckenridge, supra note 66, at 1 (noting that privacy is “the individual’s right to
control dissemination of information about himself”); Executive Office of the President, Office
of Science and Technology, Privacy and Behavioral Research 2 (Washington, D.C., G.P.O.
1967) (“The right to privacy is the right of the individual to decide for himself how much he will share
with others his thoughts, his feelings, and the facts of his personal life.”); Randall P. Benzanson, The
Right to Privacy Revisited: Privacy, News, and Social Change, 1890-1990, 80 Calif. L. Rev. 1133,
1135 (1992) (“I will advance a concept of privacy based on the individual’s control of information.”);
Oscar M. Ruebhausen & Orville G. Brim, Jr., Privacy and Behavioral Research, 65 Colum. L Rev.
1184, 1189 (1965) (“The essence of privacy is no more, and certainly no less, than the freedom of the
individual to pick and choose for himself the time and circumstances under which, and most
importantly, the extent to which, his attitudes, beliefs, behavior and opinions are to be shared with or
withheld from others.”). Anne Wells Branscomb, in a recently published book, focuses almost
exclusively on the importance of control over information for privacy. See Anne Wells Branscomb,
Who Owns Information?: From Privacy to Public Access (1994). Warren and Brandeis also
appear at one point to suggest a control-over-information conception of privacy:
The common law secures to each individual the right of determining, ordinarily, to what
extent his thoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others. . . . [E]ven if
he has chosen to give them expression, he generally retains the power to fix the limits of the
publicity which shall be given them.
Warren & Brandeis, supra note 43, at 198; see also Ian Goldberg et al., Trust, Ethics, and Privacy, 81
B.U. L. Rev. 407, 418 (2001) (“We build our own definition of privacy on what we consider the most
elegant definition, ‘informational self-determination,’ which refers to a person’s ability to control the
flow of his own personal information.”).
113. Miller, supra note 2, at 25.
114. Fried, supra note 22, at 482-83.
115. President Clinton’s Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF): Principles for
Providing and Using Personal Information 5 (1995).
116. United States Dep’t of Justice v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749,
763 (1989).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1111
Additionally, the theory is too vague because proponents of the theory
often fail to define the types of information over which individuals should
have control. Ferdinand Schoeman, for example, observes:
One difficulty with regarding privacy as a claim or entitlement to
determine what information about oneself is to be available to
others is that it begs the question about the moral status of privacy.
It presumes privacy is something to be protected at the discretion
of the individual to whom the information relates.117
In other words, the privacy as control-over-information theory at most says
that we protect as private all information over which individuals want to
retain control. Privacy, however, is not simply a matter of individual prerogative;
it is also an issue of what society deems appropriate to protect.
Some theorists attempt to define the scope of what constitutes personal
information over which individuals should exercise control, but their
attempts run into significant difficulties. For example, legal scholar
Richard Parker’s theory defines the scope of personal information extremely
broadly: “Privacy is control over when and by whom the various
parts of us can be sensed by others.”118
“Control over who can see us, hear
us, touch us, smell us, and taste us, in sum, control over who can sense us,
is the core of privacy.”119
Parker’s definition would make most interpersonal
contact in society a privacy invasion because it brings unwanted access
to the self. Yet, we are frequently seen and heard by others without
perceiving it as even the slightest invasion of privacy.
Charles Fried links his definition of the scope of personal information
to the value of privacy. He defines privacy as “control over knowledge
about oneself”120
that is necessary to protect “fundamental relations” of
“respect, love, friendship and trust.”121
His theory speaks about the value of
privacy (promoting respect, love, friendship, and trust) and presumably,
would define the scope of information as “intimate” information (information
necessary to form and foster relationships involving respect, love,
friendship, and trust). However, looking at only intimate information excludes
important information such as financial records.
Finally, one could limit the scope of personal information to that
which relates to the individual. Richard Murphy defines the scope of personal
information as consisting of “any data about an individual that is
identifiable to that individual.”122
Murphy’s definition is too broad because
there is a significant amount of information identifiable to us that we do
117. Schoeman, supra note 63, at 3.
118. Parker, supra note 22, at 281.
119. Id. at 280.
120. Fried, supra note 22, at 483.
121. Id. at 477.
122. Richard S. Murphy, Property Rights in Personal Information: An Economic Defense of
Privacy, 84 Geo. L.J. 2381, 2383 (1996).
1112 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
not deem as private. For example, the fact that a person is a well-known
politician is identifiable to her, but is not private. Murphy’s definition thus
provides no reasonable limitation in scope.
In addition to failing to adequately define the scope of information,
the conceptions of privacy as control over information fail to define what is
meant by “control” over information. Theorists provide little elaboration as
to what control really entails, and it is often understood too narrowly or too
broadly. Frequently, control is understood as a form of ownership in information.
For example, Westin concludes that “personal information,
thought of as the right of decision over one’s private personality, should be
defined as a property right.”123
This notion is partially embodied in the tort
of commercial appropriation, which protects people against others’ using
their image or likeness for commercial gain.124
The notion that individuals have a property right in information about
themselves can be traced to John Locke, who asserted that individuals have
property rights in their person and the fruits of their labor. According to
Locke, privacy flows naturally from selfhood: “[E]very man has a
property in his own person.”125
From this principle, Locke deduced that
property extends to the products of one’s labor: “Whatsoever then he
removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath
mixed his labor with, and joined it to something that is his own, and
thereby makes it his property.”126
Locke’s conception of property as the fruit of labor and as an extension
of self have formed the backbone of intellectual property law, which,
as James Boyle has observed, has developed around the notion of the
“romantic author,” the individual who mixes her unique personality with
ideas, who most displays originality and novelty in her creations.127
Unlike
physical property, intellectual property protects the expression of ideas,
“original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of
expression.”128
The “romantic author” notion of intellectual property
embodies Locke’s idea that one gains a property right in something when it
emanates from one’s self.
Personal information as property is justified by viewing it as an extension
of personality. As the authors of our own lives, we generate information
as we develop our personalities. The growth of individualism spawned
123. Westin, supra note 4, at 324.
124. According to the Restatement of Torts: “One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the
name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy.”
Restatement (Second) of Torts §652C (1977).
125. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government § 27, at 19 (1980) (1690).
126. Id.
127. See James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of
the Information Society 54 (1996).
128. 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (1994).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1113
the “belief that one’s actions and their history ‘belonged’ to the self which
generated them and were to be shared only with those with whom one
wished to share them.”129
“One’s self—for other people—is one’s
expression of one’s self,” observes Madame Merle in Henry James’s
Portrait of a Lady, “and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the
books one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all
expressive.”130
Given the unique nature of information, the extension of these concepts
to personal information does not come without some difficulties. Information
can be easily transmitted, and once known by others, cannot be
eradicated from their minds. Unlike physical objects, information can be
possessed simultaneously within the minds of millions. This is why intellectual
property law protects particular tangible expressions of ideas rather
than the underlying ideas themselves. The complexity of personal information
is that it is both an expression of the self as well as a set of facts, a historical
record of one’s behavior.
Further, there are problems with viewing personal information as
equivalent to any other commodity. Personal information is often formed
in relationships with others, with all parties to that relationship having
some claim to that information. For example, individuals are not the lone
creators of their web-browsing information, for most of that information is
created from the interaction between the user and websites.131
Often, the
market value of information is not created exclusively by the labor of the
individual to whom it relates but in part by the third party that compiles the
information.132
For example, the value of personal information for advertisers
and marketers emerges in part from their consolidation and categorization
of that information.
An example of the difficulty in assigning ownership to information is
illustrated by Haynes v. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.133
This case involved
Nicholas Lemann’s highly praised book about the social and political history
of African Americans who migrated from the South to northern cities.
The book chronicled the life of Ruby Lee Daniels, who suffered greatly
from her former husband Luther Haynes’s alcoholism, selfishness, and irresponsible
conduct. Haynes sued the author and the publisher under the
public disclosure of private facts tort, claiming that he had long since
turned his life around and that the disclosure of his past destroyed the new
life he had worked so hard to construct. Judge Posner, writing for the
panel, concluded that there could be no liability for invasion of privacy
129. Shils, supra note 72, at 290.
130. HENRY JAMES, PORTRAIT OF A LADY 253 (Geoffrey Moore ed., Penguin Books 1986) (1881).
131. Jerry Kang, Information Privacy in Cyberspace Transactions, 50 Stan. L. Rev. 1193, 1202,
1246 (1998).
132. Miller, supra note 2, at 213.
133. 8 F.3d 1222 (7th Cir. 1993) (Posner, J.).
1114 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
because “[a] person does not have a legally protected right to a reputation
based on the concealment of the truth”134
and because the book narrated “a
story not only of legitimate but of transcendent public interest.”135
Although it did not hinge on the shared nature of the information, this
case illustrates that personal information rarely belongs to just one individual;
it is often formed in relationships with others. Ruby Daniels’s story
was deeply interwoven with Haynes’s story. Daniels had a right to speak
about her own past, to have her story told. This was her life story, not just
Luther Haynes’s. In sum, understanding control as ownership presents difficulties
in grappling with the unique shared nature of much private information.
A claim of privacy is not the same as a claim of ownership.
Not only does defining control prove difficult, control over information
is too broad a conception. Gerety claims that Westin’s definition “on
its face includes all control over all information about oneself, one’s group,
one’s institutions. Surely privacy should come, in law as in life, to much
less than this.”136
According to Inness, not all personal information is private;
she contends that “it is the intimacy of this information that identifies
a loss of privacy.”137
Thus one possibility is that the control-overinformation
conception could be limited in scope by including only intimate
information.
Even if narrowed to include only intimate information, however, the
conception is still too broad. According to DeCew, we often lose control
over information in ways that do not involve an invasion of our privacy.138
To illustrate this point, Daniel Farber invokes the example of the flasher. A
flasher is controlling the visual access to his body by allowing it, yet
preventing flashing is not a violation of the flasher’s privacy; rather, flashing
is seen as a violation of the privacy of others.139
David O’Brien also criticizes the conception of privacy as the control
of information for being too narrow.140
Many privacy interests involve an
individual’s “freedom to engage in private activities” rather than the disclosure
or nondisclosure of information.141
O’Brien correctly recognizes
that privacy is invaded not just by intrusions into information but also by
nuisances such as noises, smells, and other noxious disruptions of one’s
peace of mind.142
As DeCew points out, the conception of privacy as control
over information is too narrow because privacy is not reducible to
134. Id. at 1228.
135. Id. at 1233.
136. Gerety, supra note 6, at 262-63.
137. Inness, supra note 3, at 58.
138. DeCew, supra note 106, at 53.
139. Daniel A. Farber, Book Review: Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation by Julie C. Inness, 10
Const. Comment. 510, 514-15 (1993).
140. O’Brien, supra note 22, at 13.
141. Id. at 14.
142. Id.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1115
personal information.143
Privacy, contends DeCew, can be invaded even if
nobody else knows something new about a person, such as by being forced
to hear propaganda, by being manipulated by subliminal advertisements, or
by being disrupted by a nuisance that thwarts one’s ability to think or
read.144
In other words, the theory of privacy as control over information
excludes many aspects of life that we commonly assume to be private.
Anita Allen similarly critiques the control-over-information conception for
omitting issues such as abortion and sexual freedom.145
Additionally, some theorists critique the control-over-personalinformation
conception as being too narrow because it focuses too heavily
on individual choice. Paul Schwartz argues that the conception of information
control wrongly assumes that individuals have the autonomy to exercise
control over their personal data in all situations, an assumption that
fails to recognize “that individual self-determination is itself shaped by the
processing of personal data.”146
Schwartz also questions the assumption
that individuals are able to exercise meaningful choices with regard to their
information, given disparities in knowledge and power when bargaining
over the transfer of their information.147
The implication is that privacy involves
not only individual control, but also the social regulation of infor-
mation.148
In other words, privacy is an aspect of social structure, an
architecture of information regulation, not just a matter for the exercise of
individual control.
To summarize, conceptualizing privacy as control over personal information
can be too vague, too broad, or too narrow. Conceptions of information
control are too vague when they fail to define what types of
information over which individuals should have control. When theorists
attempt to define what constitutes “personal information,” the conceptions
become overly limited or expansive. Further, when theorists attempt to define
what “control” entails, they often define it as a form of ownership,
making the conception falter in a number of respects. Finally, conceptions
of information control are too narrow because they reduce privacy to informational
concerns, omit decisional freedom from the realm of privacy,
and focus too exclusively on individual choice.
143. DeCew, supra note 106, at 2.
144. See id.
145. Allen, supra note 62, at 8.
146. Paul M. Schwartz, Privacy and Democracy in Cyberspace, 52 Vand. L. Rev. 1609, 1661
(1999).
147. See id. at 1661-64; see also Julie E. Cohen, Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the
Subject as Object, 52 Stan. L. Rev. 1373 (2000); Paul M. Schwartz, Internet Privacy and the State, 32
Conn. L. Rev. 815 (2000).
148. For example, Anita Allen-Castellitto contends that privacy is not merely a matter of
individual choice but must in certain instances be “coerced” by the government. Anita
Allen-Castellitto, Coercing Privacy, 40 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 723 (1999).
1116 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
5. Personhood
Another theory of privacy views it as a form of protecting personhood.
Building upon Warren and Brandeis’s notion of “inviolate
personality,” Paul Freund coined the term “personhood” to refer to “those
attributes of an individual which are irreducible in his selfhood.”149
The theory of privacy as personhood differs from the theories discussed
earlier because it is constructed around a normative end of privacy,
namely the protection of the integrity of the personality. This theory is not
independent of the other theories, and it often is used in conjunction with
the other theories to explain why privacy is important, what aspects of the
self should be limited, or what information we should have control over.
a. Individuality, Dignity, and Autonomy
What is personhood? What aspects of the self does privacy protect?
According to Edward Bloustein, privacy protects individuality.150
Privacy
is a unified and coherent concept protecting against conduct that is
“demeaning to individuality,”151
“an affront to personal dignity,”152
or an
“assault on human personality.”153
Jeffrey Reiman also recognizes a
personhood component to privacy: “The right to privacy . . . protects the
individual’s interest in becoming, being, and remaining a person.”154
Philosopher Stanley Benn also develops a personhood conception of
privacy, noting that privacy amounts to respect for individuals as choosers:
“[R]espect for someone as a person, as a chooser, implie[s] respect for
him as one engaged on a kind of self-creative enterprise, which could be
disrupted, distorted, or frustrated even by so limited an intrusion as
watching.”155
Drawing from Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,
Benn explains that being “an object of scrutiny, as the focus of another’s
attention, brings one to a new consciousness of oneself, as something seen
through another’s eyes.”156
The observed “becomes aware of himself as an
object, knowable, having a determinate character.”157
According to Benn,
149. Paul Freund, American Law Institute, 52nd Annual Meeting 42-43 (1975); see also
Craven, supra note 65, at 702 n.15 (citing Freund’s formulation of personhood).
150. Bloustein, supra note 22, at 971. Bloustein’s article was in response to William Prosser’s
1960 article, Privacy, which examined over 300 privacy cases in the seventy years since Warren and
Brandeis’s 1890 article and concluded that “[t]he law of privacy comprises 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.” Prosser, supra note 8, at 107.
151. Bloustein, supra note 22, at 973.
152. Id.
153. Id. at 974.
154. Jeffrey H. Reiman, Privacy, Intimacy, and Personhood, in Philosophical Dimensions of
Privacy, supra note 6, at 300, 314.
155. Benn, supra note 108, at 26.
156. Id. at 7.
157. Id.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1117
the result is that the observed person “is fixed as something—with limited
probabilities rather than infinite, indeterminate possibilities.”158
In other
words, Benn contends that surveillance restricts an individual’s range of
choices and thus limits her freedom. Accordingly, privacy is about respect
for personhood, with personhood defined in terms of the individual’s capacity
to choose.
The Supreme Court has espoused a personhood theory of privacy in
its substantive due process decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut,159
Eisenstadt v. Baird,160
Roe v. Wade,161
and others. As early as 1891, the
Court articulated this conception in Union Pacific Railway Co. v.
Botsford.162
There, in holding that a court could not compel a plaintiff in a
civil action to submit to a surgical examination, the Court declared the
sanctity of “the right of every individual to the possession and control of
his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by
clear and unquestionable authority of law.”163
Later cases characterized
privacy as an “interest in independence in making certain kinds of
important decisions.”164
Specifically, these cases involved decisions relating
to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and child
rearing.165
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey,166
the Supreme Court provided
its most elaborate explanation of what the “privacy” protected by the constitutional
right to privacy encompasses:
These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a
person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity
and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth
Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own
concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the
mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define
the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of
the State.167
In other words, the Court has conceptualized the protection of privacy as
the state’s noninterference in certain decisions that are essential to defining
personhood.
158. Id.
159. 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (holding unconstitutional a statute criminalizing contraceptives for
married couples because it invaded the “zone of privacy” created by the “penumbras” of the First,
Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments).
160. 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (extending Griswold to the use of contraceptives by nonmarried
individuals).
161. 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (finding that the constitutional right to privacy encompasses the decision
to procure an abortion).
162. 141 U.S. 250 (1891).
163. Id. at 251.
164. Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589, 599-600 (1977).
165. See, e.g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 152-53 (1973).
166. 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
167. Id. at 851.
1118 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
Some critics complain that personhood theories, and the Court’s privacy
cases, are really about liberty and autonomy, not about privacy. In
Democracy’s Discontent, Michael Sandel argues that the Court’s privacy
cases conflate privacy and autonomy.168
Louis Henkin contends that
Griswold, Roe, and Baird establish “not a right to freedom from official
intrusion, but to freedom from official regulation.”169
But as DeCew counters,
there is an “intuitive notion of privacy invoked in the constitutional
privacy cases.”170
She argues that there is no need to view privacy as totally
exclusive from autonomy and liberty, for conceptions can overlap.171
Theories of privacy as personhood, however, fail to elucidate what
privacy is because the theories often do not articulate an adequate definition
of personhood. Freund’s notion of attributes irreducible in one’s selfhood
is far too vague, and merely substitutes “selfhood” for “personhood.”
Bloustein’s discussion of personhood as “individuality” fails to define the
scope or nature of individuality. Other commentators define personhood as
a type of autonomy,172
but as Jed Rubenfeld observes, “to call an individual
‘autonomous’ is simply another way of saying that he is morally free, and
to say that the right to privacy protects freedom adds little to our
understanding of the doctrine.”173
Personhood theories are also too broad. Our personalities are not
purely private; indeed, there is much that is unique to the self that we
readily display and express in public. An artistic work is often an expression
of the deepest recesses of an artist’s existence; yet art is rarely exclusively
a private affair. Gavison, for example, criticizes Bloustein’s dignity
conception because “there are ways to offend dignity and personality that
have nothing to do with privacy.”174
She elaborates: “Having to beg or sell
one’s body in order to survive are serious affronts to dignity, but do not
appear to involve loss of privacy.”175
Further, theories of privacy as personhood tell us why we value privacy
(to protect individuality, dignity, and autonomy), but their usual focus
on limiting state intervention in our decisions often gives too little attention
to the private sector. Merely restricting state interference is not always sufficient
to protect privacy. Therefore, beyond an account of where the state
ought to leave individuals alone, personhood theories frequently fail to explain
how personhood is to be protected. This is essentially what Gross and
168. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent 93 (1996).
169. Louis Henkin, Privacy and Autonomy, 74 Colum. L. Rev. 1410, 1424 (1974).
170. DeCew, supra note 106, at 44.
171. Id. at 44.
172. See, e.g., Joel Feinberg, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Privacy: Moral Ideas in the
Constitution?, 58 Notre Dame L. Rev. 445 (1983); Henkin, supra note 169, at 1424-25.
173. Jed Rubenfeld, The Right of Privacy, 102 Harv. L. Rev. 737, 750 (1989).
174. Gavison, supra note 1, at 438.
175. Id. at 438.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1119
O’Brien are claiming when they criticize Bloustein for telling us only why
we value privacy rather than what privacy is.176
b. Antitotalitarianism
In his influential article, The Right of Privacy, Jed Rubenfeld has provided
a sophisticated account of the problems of the personhood theory of
privacy.177
According to Rubenfeld, “[t]he personhood thesis is this: where
our identity or self-definition is at stake, there the state may not
interfere.”178
As Rubenfeld correctly observes, the law cannot protect all
forms of self-definition, for some forms conflict with others, and very few
meaningful acts of self-definition have no effects on others.179
“Personhood
cannot exclude ‘intolerant’ identities without abandoning its
value-neutrality as between identities.”180
This fact leads Rubenfeld to conclude
that personhood’s “final defense” rests on a view of what is fundamentally
important to individual identity.181
However, Rubenfeld argues, “[b]y conceiving of the conduct that it
purports to protect as ‘essential to the individual’s identity,’ personhood
inadvertently reintroduces into privacy analysis the very premise of the
invidious uses of state power it seeks to overcome.”182
When the state endeavors
to protect personhood, it must adopt and enforce its own
conception of individual identity, impinging upon the freedom of individuals
to define what is central to their identities for themselves.
Rubenfeld offers an alternative conception, defining the right to privacy
as “the fundamental freedom not to have one’s life too totally
determined by a progressively more normalizing state.”183
Rubenfeld
claims that privacy protects against a “creeping totalitarianism, an unarmed
occupation of individuals’ lives.”184
Privacy “is to be invoked only where
the government threatens to take over or occupy our lives—to exert its
power in some way over the totality of our lives.”185
As Rubenfeld elaborates,
“[t]he anti-totalitarian right to privacy . . . prevents the state from
imposing on individuals a defined identity.”186
176. O’Brien, supra note 22, at 9; Gross, supra note 6, at 53.
177. Rubenfeld, supra note 173, at 737.
178. Id. at 754.
179. Id. at 758. According to Laurence Tribe, “freedom to have an impact on others . . . is central
to any adequate conception of the self.” Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 1303
(1988).
180. Rubenfeld, supra note 173, at 770.
181. See id.
182. Id. at 782.
183. Id. at 784.
184. Id.
185. Id. at 787.
186. Id. at 794.
1120 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
Although Rubenfeld’s critique of the personhood conception is certainly
warranted, he fails in his attempt to abandon a personhood conception.
If privacy concerns only those exercises of state power that threaten
the “totality of our lives,” then it is difficult to conceive of anything that
would be protected. Indeed, as Rubenfeld himself notes, infringements on
privacy are “creeping,” that is, they often occur in small encroachments
into our private lives. As I explain in depth in another article, privacy is
often destroyed by an aggregation of these minor encroachments, not always
by a large exercise of state power.187
Rubenfeld’s critique of personhood forbids him to sketch any conception
of identity that the law should protect, for to do so would be to seize
from individuals their right to define themselves. By abandoning any attempt
to define a conception of identity, Rubenfeld’s conception of privacy
collapses into a vague right to be let alone. To the extent it tells us anything
meaningful about which exercises of state power must be curtailed, it must
depend upon an affirmative conception of personhood. For example,
Rubenfeld states: “[C]hildbearing, marriage, and the assumption of a
specific sexual identity are undertakings that go on for years, define roles,
direct activities, operate on or even create intense emotional relations,
enlist the body, inform values, and in sum substantially shape the totality
of a person’s daily life and consciousness.”188
Rubenfeld defines these aspects
of life as at the heart of identity because of their pervasiveness and
longevity. Thus, he is creating a conception of personhood that focuses on
pervasiveness and longevity as the defining factors.
Rubenfeld is correct that laws purporting to be protective of personhood
can impose a view of what aspects of life are essential to the individual
and hence supplant the individual’s own self-definition. However,
Rubenfeld is too quick to condemn as “invidious” all state power that
shapes identities.189
Not all such exercises of state power are pernicious. In
fact, privacy is both a positive and negative right; it is not just a freedom
from the state, but a duty of the state to protect certain matters via property
rights, tort law, criminal law, and other legal devices. Without protection
against rape, assault, trespass, collection of personal information, and so
on, we would have little privacy and scant space or security to engage in
self-definition. To preserve people’s ability to engage in self-definition, the
state must actively intervene to curtail the power of customs and norms
that constrain freedom. Therefore, although Rubenfeld is correct that the
state cannot be neutral when it becomes involved in one’s self-definition,
he errs in assuming that he can develop his theory of antitotalitarianism
without an account of personhood.
187. See Solove, supra note 83, at 1434-35.
188. Rubenfeld, supra note 173, at 801-02.
189. Id. at 782.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1121
6. Intimacy
An increasingly popular theory understands privacy as a form of intimacy.
This theory appropriately recognizes that privacy is not just essential
to individual self-creation, but also to human relationships. As Daniel
Farber correctly notes, one virtue of privacy as intimacy is that it
“expand[s] moral personhood beyond simple rational autonomy.”190
The
theory views privacy as consisting of some form of limited access or control,
and it locates the value of privacy in the development of personal rela-
tionships.
We form relationships with differing degrees of intimacy and selfrevelation,
and we value privacy so that we can maintain the desired levels
of intimacy for each of our varied relationships. For example, political scientist
Robert Gerstein claims that “intimate relationships simply could not
exist if we did not continue to insist on privacy for them.”191
As Jeffrey
Rosen observes: “In order to flourish, the intimate relationships on which
true knowledge of another person depends need space as well as
time: sanctuaries from the gaze of the crowd in which slow mutual
self-disclosure is possible.”192
By focusing on the relationship-oriented
value of privacy, the theory of privacy as intimacy attempts to define what
aspects of life we should be able to restrict access to, or what information
we should be able to control or keep secret.
In Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation, philosopher Julie Inness advances
an intimacy conception of privacy:
[T]he content of privacy cannot be captured if we focus exclusively
on either information, access, or intimate decisions because privacy
involves all three areas. . . . I suggest that these apparently
disparate areas are linked by the common denominator of
intimacy—privacy’s content covers intimate information, access,
and decisions.”193
In contrast to many proponents of privacy as intimacy, Inness recognizes
the need to define intimacy. She notes that there are two ways to do so: by
looking at behavior or by looking at motivations. She rejects an empirical
examination of particular instances of human behavior as inadequate to
define intimacy. This is because these behaviors “lack an intimate essence”
and a theory that looks to behaviors could not account for the fact that intimacy
“is not static across time or culture.”194
According to Inness,
190. Farber, supra note 139, at 516.
191. Robert S. Gerstein, Intimacy and Privacy, in Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, supra
note 6, at 265, 265.
192. Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America 8
(2000).
193. Inness, supra note 3, at 56.
194. Id. at 76.
1122 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
“[I]ntimacy stems from something prior to behavior.”195
It is the motives of
an individual that matter. Intimate matters or acts draw “their value and
meaning from the agent’s love, care, or liking.”196
This, then, she claims,
defines the scope of intimacy. Privacy is “the state of the agent having
control over decisions concerning matters that draw their meaning and
value from the agent’s love, caring, or liking. These decisions cover
choices on the agent’s part about access to herself, the dissemination of
information about herself, and her actions.”197
Charles Fried, who understands privacy as control over information,
advances an intimacy conception to locate the value of privacy and circumscribe
the scope of information over which we should have control. For
Fried, “[i]ntimacy is the sharing of information about one’s actions, beliefs
or emotions which one does not share with all, and which one has the right
not to share with anyone. By conferring this right, privacy creates the
moral capital which we spend in friendship and love.”198
Similarly, James
Rachels contends that privacy is valuable because “there is a close
connection between our ability to control who has access to us and to
information about us, and our ability to create and maintain different sorts
of social relationships with different people.”199
How is “intimate” information to be defined? For Fried and Rachels,
intimate information is that which individuals want to reveal only to a few
other people. Philosopher Jeff Reiman critiques Fried and Rachels for
claiming that intimate information is merely scarce information that
individuals want to keep away from others.200
He argues that Fried and
Rachels’s view of intimacy “overlooks the fact that what constitutes intimacy
is not merely the sharing of otherwise withheld information, but the
context of caring which makes the sharing of personal information
significant.”201
The ability to love and to care for others transcends the
mere sharing of secrets. For example, Reiman states that “[o]ne ordinarily
reveals information to one’s psychoanalyst that one might hesitate to reveal
to a friend or lover. That hardly means one has an intimate relationship
with the analyst.”202
“What is missing,” Reiman declares, “is that particular
kind of caring that makes a relationship not just personal but intimate.”203
To illustrate his point, Reiman points out that merely providing special
195. Id. at 77.
196. Id. at 78.
197. Id. at 91.
198. Charles Fried, An Anatomy of Values: Problems of Personal and Social Choice
142 (1970).
199. James Rachels, Why Privacy is Important, in Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy, supra
note 6, at 290, 292.
200. Reiman, supra note 154, at 304-05.
201. Id. at 305.
202. Id.
203. Id.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1123
access to our bodies does not define sexual intimacy. If this were the case,
a doctor’s examination of our genitals would be intimate.204
Thus Reiman
criticizes Fried and Rachels for focusing too heavily on the notion of control
and limited access rather than on the attributes of intimate relation-
ships.
Tom Gerety also bases his formulation of privacy on intimacy. Beginning
with the criticism that existing theories of privacy are far too broad
because they lack any meaningful limitation in scope, he goes on to claim
that “[i]ntimacy is the chief restricting concept in the definition of
privacy.”205
Intimacy is “the consciousness of the mind in its access to its
own and other bodies and minds, insofar, at least, as these are generally or
specifically secluded from the access of the uninvited.”206
In other words,
his definition of intimacy is a form of limited access to the self. However,
this definition fails for the same reasons the limited-access conceptions
fail: it does not adequately provide us with a scope and content to privacy.
Gerety attempts to develop his definition of intimacy a bit further, discussing
it later in his essay in terms of its expressiveness of individual identity
and autonomy. He thus claims that abortion is a private decision because it
is “an intimate one, expressive of both [a woman’s] identity and her
autonomy.”207
But Gerety’s intimacy theory of privacy, like the theories he critiques,
is too broad. Gerety attempts to limit privacy with the terms “identity” and
“autonomy,” but these are very broad terms that could apply to almost
every action or decision an individual undertakes. While Gerety complains
about overbroad conceptions of privacy that have no meaningful limitation,
his conception suffers from the same defect. Without limitations in scope,
the word “intimacy” is merely a different word for “privacy,” and is certainly
not sufficient as a way to determine which matters are private.
On the other hand, privacy-as-intimacy theories are too narrow because
they focus too exclusively on interpersonal relationships and the particular
feelings engendered by them. Although trust, love, and intimacy are
facilitated by privacy, these are not the sole ends of privacy. As DeCew
points out, information about our finances is private yet not intimate.208
Trust, love, and caring are not broad enough to comprise a conception of
privacy; although privacy helps us achieve these ends, these ends do not
comprise a complete conception of privacy. As Farber notes, there are
many sexual relationships devoid of love, liking, or caring as there are
204. Id. at 306.
205. Gerety, supra note 6, at 263.
206. Id. at 268.
207. Id. at 274.
208. DeCew, supra note 106, at 56.
1124 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
many acts expressive of love, liking, or caring (such as buying gifts) that
are not considered intimate.209
Furthermore, privacy’s value does not lie exclusively in the development
of intimate human relationships. Intimacy captures the dimension of
the private life that consists of close relationships with others; but it does
not capture the dimension of private life that is devoted to the self alone.
As Weinstein observes:
[T]here is a wide range of instances where to speak of something as
private is not to imply intimacy. Individuals not intimately related
may nevertheless assert that their relation or activity is a private
one in the sense that it is not the proper concern of the community
or some institution, such as the state, a church, or a business
firm.210
For example, as political scientist Priscilla Regan notes, computer databases
pose a significant threat to privacy but “do not primarily
affect . . . relationships of friendship, love, and trust. Instead, these threats
come from private and governmental organizations—the police, welfare
agencies, credit agencies, banks, and employers.”211
In sum, privacy-as-intimacy conceptions can be too broad if they do
not adequately define the scope of “intimacy.” Most often, however, such
conceptions are too narrow because they exclude many matters that do not
involve loving and caring relationships.
C. Toward a New Approach to Conceptualizing Privacy
Although each of the conceptions of privacy described above elaborates
upon certain dimensions of privacy and contains countless insights,
settling upon any one of the conceptions results in either a reductive or an
overly broad account of privacy. Because of these difficulties, some theorists,
referred to as “reductionists,”212
claim that the impoverishment of the
discourse is symptomatic of the fact that privacy should not be understood
as a distinct conception. They argue that privacy is reducible to other conceptions
and rights. The most prominent proponent of this view is Judith
Thomson, who claims that the right to privacy is not a distinct right, but is
“overlapped by other rights.”213
According to Thomson, the right to privacy
consists of “the right to not be looked at and the right to not be listened
209. Farber, supra note 139, at 515.
210. W.L. Weinstein, The Private and the Free: A Conceptual Inquiry, in Nomos XIII, supra note
71, at 27, 33.
211. Priscilla M. Regan, Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public
Policy 213 (1995).
212. Inness, supra note 3, at 23.
213. Thomson, supra note 6, at 284.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1125
to”214
—rights which she claims “are analogous to rights we have over our
property.”215
However, reductionists assume without sufficient justification that
privacy derives from other more primary conceptions rather than vice
versa.216
They attempt to carve up the conceptual landscape as colonists
divide conquered territory on a map. Although privacy overlaps with other
conceptions, it does seem to reveal certain dimensions of experience that
are not displayed in the same way by other conceptions. Wittgenstein
speaks of conceptions as ways of seeing things,217
and a difference in perspective
and focus is not irrelevant.
Other scholars also recognize that privacy cannot be consolidated into
a single conception, and instead they cluster together certain of the concep-
tions.218
For example, Jerry Kang defines privacy as a union of three overlapping
clusters of ideas: (1) physical space—“the extent to which an
individual’s territorial solitude is shielded from invasion by unwanted
objects or signals”; (2) choice—“an individual’s ability to make certain
significant decisions without interference”; (3) flow of personal information—“an
individual’s control over the processing—i.e., the acquisition,
disclosure, and use—of personal information.”219
According to DeCew, there are three overlapping “clusters of privacy
claims”: informational privacy, accessibility privacy, and expressive
privacy.220
Informational privacy involves “control over information about
oneself.”221
Accessibility privacy is the limited-access conception:
“accessibility privacy focuses not merely on information or
knowledge but more centrally on observations and physical proximity.”222
Expressive privacy “protects a realm for expressing one’s self-identity or
personhood through speech or activity.”223
Thus, DeCew combines three
theories of privacy: (1) control over information; (2) limited access;
and (3) personhood.
214. Id. at 280.
215. Id. In a similar vein, H.J. McCloskey also claims that “any right to privacy will be a
derivative one from other rights and other goods.” H.J. McCloskey, Privacy and the Right to Privacy,
55 Phil. 37 (1980); see also Kalven, supra note 44, at 327 (“[P]rivacy seems a less precise way of
approaching more specific values, as, for example, in the case of freedom of speech, association, and
religion.”).
216. Inness, supra note 3, at 36
217. See generally Genova, supra note 41.
218. Although William Prosser described privacy as four distinct interests, I do not recognize him
as a cluster theorist because he was speaking explicitly about the privacy interests that the law
recognized rather than elaborating upon a conception of privacy.
219. Kang, supra note 131, at 1202-03.
220. DeCew, supra note 106, at 75.
221. Id.
222. Id. at 76.
223. Id. at 77.
1126 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
Although cluster formulations appear more in line with the
Wittgensteinian family resemblances approach, they still circumscribe privacy
based on the boundaries of each of the clustered conceptions. Thus,
merely aggregating conceptions of privacy together still leaves us with insufficient
guidance on how to understand privacy.
Thus far, I have merely challenged the traditional method by which
privacy is conceptualized. If we turn away from the search for common
denominators and the quest for the essence of privacy, how are we to conceptualize
privacy? I focus on this question in Part II.
II
Reconceptualizing Privacy: A Pragmatic Approach
Because the existing method of conceptualizing privacy has thus far
proven to be problematic and unsatisfying, I recommend a pragmatic approach
to conceptualizing privacy. Pragmatism has many affinities with
Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances.224
As Stanley Cavell explains,
Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances demonstrates that
“universals are neither necessary nor even useful in explaining how words
and concepts apply to different things.”225
Cavell notes that “a new
application of a word or concept will still have to be made out, explained,
in the particular case, and then the explanations themselves will be
sufficient . . . .”226
Likewise, pragmatism turns away from universals and
focuses on specific situations.
Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances frees us from engaging
in the debate over necessary and sufficient conditions for privacy, from
searching for rigid conceptual boundaries and common denominators. If
we no longer look for the essence of privacy, then to understand the
“complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,”227
we
should focus more concretely on the various forms of privacy and recognize
their similarities and differences. We should act as cartographers,
mapping out the terrain of privacy by examining specific problematic
situations rather than trying to fit each situation into a rigid predefined
category. Judith Genova characterizes Wittgenstein’s views as the
following: “Knowledge is not a matter of guessing meanings, offering
explanations, or other kinds of summaries that take law-like form,
224. Although there are many interesting affinities in the thought of Wittgenstein and the
pragmatists, there are many differences as well, and a complete account of the similarities and
differences is beyond the scope of this Article. For some interesting examinations of the relationship
between pragmatic and Wittgensteinian thought, see Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism 27-56 (1995);
Rorty, supra note 18, at 19-36; Shusterman, supra note 18, at 17-64.
225. Stanley Cavell, Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language, in The New Wittgenstein
35 (Alice Crary & Rupert Read eds., 2000).
226. Id.
227. Wittgenstein, supra note 16, § 67.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1127
but of listening to and observing the connections that obtain without
interfering.”228
This is how the pragmatist approaches philosophical in-
quiry.
My approach to conceptualizing privacy draws from a few recurring
ideas of pragmatism:229
a recognition of context and contingency, a rejection
of a priori knowledge, and a focus on concrete practices. According to
William James, the pragmatist “turns away from abstraction and
insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed
principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns
towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and
towards power.”230
As James observed, one of the more common ideas of
pragmatism is a focus away from the notion of a priori knowledge—the
view that there are objective and universal truths that exist prior to, and
independently of, experience. According to the pragmatists, knowledge
originates through experience.231
John Dewey’s philosophy is particularly useful to the task of reconceptualizing
privacy. According to Dewey, philosophical inquiry begins
with problems in experience, not with abstract universal principles.232
Philosophical inquiry must be “experimental,” beginning with problems in
experience, making generalizations based on one’s encounters with these
problems, and then testing these generalizations by examining their consequences
in other contexts.233
“Empirically, all reflection sets out from the
problematic and confused. Its aim is to clarify and ascertain.”234
Specific
problematic situations spur inquiry.235
“[K]nowledge is an affair of making
sure,” Dewey observed, “not of grasping antecedently given sureties.”236
228. Genova, supra note 41, at 35.
229. “Neither the old nor the new pragmatism is a school. The differences between a Pierce and a
James, or between a James and a Dewey, are profound.” Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to
Offer Law?, 63 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1653, 1660 (1990).
230. William James, Pragmatism 25 (Promethius Books 1991) (1907).
231. Pragmatists reject the view of philosophy “as a purely theoretical quest for eternal truths or
knowledge of an ultimate and unchanging reality.” Pragmatism and Classical American
Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays 3 (John J. Stuhr ed., 2000); see also
Dewey, supra note 20, at 72. Many pragmatists go beyond making the epistemological claim that an
ultimate or transcendent reality is not knowable. Some philosophers, observes John Dewey, “have not
ventured to deny that [an ultimate reality] would be the appropriate sphere for the exercise of
philosophic knowledge provided only it were within the reach of human intelligence.” John Dewey,
Reconstruction in Philosophy, in 12 The Middle Works of John Dewey 93 (Jo Ann Boydston ed.,
1982). Dewey claims that philosophy is still possible by exploring knowledge gleaned from experience.
232. See John Dewey, Experience and Nature 9 (1929). Thinking is thus a “tool” for solving
problems. Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural
Instrumentalism 4 (1998).
233. See, e.g., Dewey, supra note 232, at 151; see also John Dewey, How We Think (1910).
234. Dewey, supra note 232, at 65-66.
235. Dewey, supra note 20, at 106-10.
236. Dewey, supra note 232, at 154.
1128 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
A pragmatic approach to the task of conceptualizing privacy should
not, therefore, begin by seeking to illuminate an abstract conception of privacy,
but should focus instead on understanding privacy in specific contextual
situations. “[W]e never experience nor form judgments about objects
and events in isolation,” observes Dewey, “but only in connection with a
contextual whole.”237
Knowledge without its context loses much of its
meaning, and we cannot ignore the “contextual situation in which thinking
occurs.”238
Turning away from attempts to define privacy in the abstract does not
mean abandoning the quest to conceptualize privacy. To the contrary, a
legal or policy analysis of a privacy problem without attempting to understand
what privacy is represents a failure to define the problem adequately.
Understanding the nature of a problem, what is at stake, and what important
values are in conflict, is necessary to guide the crafting of a solution.239
According to Dewey, defining the problem involves careful observation
along with an attempt to conceptualize by making generalizations and creating
theories. Merely collecting facts will “lead nowhere.”240
“On the other
hand,” observes Dewey, “it is possible to have the work of observation so
controlled by a conceptual framework fixed in advance that the very things
which are genuinely decisive in the problem in hand and its solution, are
completely overlooked. Everything is forced into the predetermined
conceptual and theoretical scheme.”241
Thus, although Dewey emphasizes that we must be careful not to allow
conceptual schemas to impede our ability to assess concrete situations,
he recognizes the importance of conceptualizing and formulating generalizations
based on experience. For Dewey, the only way to “control and
enrich concrete experience” is by making generalizations and theories.242
As William James put it, “[t]he pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness,
observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes.”243
According
to Dewey, the best way to avoid the problem of observation without
direction on the one hand and observation overly distorted by one’s theoretical
framework on the other hand is to maintain “sensitivity to the
quality of the situation as a whole.”244
Thus, the pragmatist has a unique
attitude toward conceptions. Conceptions are “working hypotheses,” not
237. Dewey, supra note 20, at 72.
238. Dewey, supra note 232, at 67.
239. See Dewey, supra note 20, at 111-12.
240. See id. at 76.
241. See id.
242. John Dewey, In Reply to Some Criticisms, in 5 The Later Works 216 (Jo Ann Boydston
ed., 1984).
243. James, supra note 230, at 33.
244. See Dewey, supra note 20, at 76.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1129
fixed entities, and must be created from within concrete situations and constantly
tested and shaped through an interaction with concrete situations.245
Therefore, this Article advances an “approach” to understanding privacy
rather than a definition or formula for privacy. It is an approach because
it does not describe the sum and substance of privacy but provides
guidance in identifying, analyzing, and ascribing value to a set of related
dimensions of practices. An approach to conceptualizing privacy should
aid in solving problems, assessing costs and benefits, and structuring social
relationships. My approach is from the bottom up rather than the top down
because it conceptualizes privacy within particular contexts rather than in
the abstract.
A. Privacy and Practices
1. Social Practices
With its emphasis on the concrete, the factual, and the experienced
situations, pragmatism locates the starting point for theorizing in specific
contexts. Conceptualizing privacy is about understanding and attempting to
solve certain problems. I contend that privacy problems involve disruptions
to certain practices. By “practices,” I am referring broadly to various activities,
customs, norms, and traditions. Examples of practices include writing
letters, talking to one’s psychotherapist, engaging in sexual intercourse,
making certain decisions, and so on. Privacy is a dimension of these practices,
and under my approach, privacy should be understood as part of
these practices rather than as a separate abstract conception. As Robert Post
aptly notes, privacy “cannot be reduced to objective facts like spatial
distance or information or observability; it can only be understood by
reference to norms of behavior.”246
Privacy is a dimension of certain practices and aspects of life. When I
speak of privacy as a dimension of practices, I understand privacy to be an
important (sometimes essential) constitutive part of particular practices.
Understanding privacy requires us to look to the specific ways in which
privacy manifests itself within practices and the degree to which privacy is
linked to the purposes. When we state that we are protecting “privacy,” we
are claiming to guard against disruptions to certain practices. Privacy invasions
disrupt and sometimes completely annihilate certain practices. Practices
can be disrupted in certain ways, such as interference with peace of
mind and tranquility, invasion of solitude, breach of confidentiality, loss of
control over facts about oneself, searches of one’s person and property,
245. See John Dewey, Essays on Pragmatism and Truth, in 4 The Middle Works of John
Dewey 100 (Jo Ann Boydston ed., 1977).
246. Robert C. Post, The Social Foundations of Privacy: Community and Self in the Common Law
Tort, 77 Calif. L. Rev. 957, 969 (1989).
1130 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
threats to or violations of personal security, destruction of reputation, surveillance,
and so on.
There are certain similarities in particular types of disruptions as well
as in the practices that they disrupt; but there are differences as well. We
should conceptualize privacy by focusing on the specific types of disruption
and the specific practices disrupted rather than looking for the common
denominator that links all of them. If privacy is conceptualized as a
web of interconnected types of disruption of specific practices, then the act
of conceptualizing privacy should consist of mapping the typography of
the web. We can focus on particular points of the web. These “focal
points” are not categories, and they do not have fixed boundaries. Rather,
they are areas of the web where we are focusing, where we see certain
things in more detail without being overwhelmed by the enormity of the
whole web.
Particular types of disruption do not interfere with all privacy practices
in the same way. For example, anonymity in authorship is a longstanding
practice that has the purpose of, among other things, promoting
the unfettered expression of ideas. One form of disruption to this practice is
the disclosure of concealed information. In this context, such disclosure
involves revealing the identity of the author, and society protects against
this disruption because of the importance of the purposes of anonymity.
Disclosure also interferes with other practices. The disclosure of a person’s
criminal past can interfere with that person’s ability to reform herself and
build a new life. The value of protecting against such disclosures depends,
in part, upon the social importance of rehabilitation. Since the purposes of
the practices of anonymity and rehabilitation are different, the value of protecting
against disclosures differs in these two contexts.
Another form of disruption is surveillance. Surveillance is a different
kind of privacy problem than disclosure, imposing a different type of injury
to a different set of practices. Surveillance differs from disclosure because
it can impinge upon practices without revealing any secrets. Being
watched can destroy a person’s peace of mind, increase her selfconsciousness
and uneasiness to a debilitating degree, and can inhibit her
daily activities.247
We may want to protect against surveillance not merely
to prevent disruptions of certain practices but to foster practices or to
247. See, e.g., David H. Flaherty, Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies 9 (1989)
(explaining how surveillance can lead to conformity); Kang, supra note 131, at 1260 (describing how
surveillance can lead to self-censorship); Paul M. Schwartz, Privacy and Participation: Personal
Information and Public Sector Regulation in the United States, 80 Iowa L. Rev. 553, 560 (1995)
(articulating how surveillance can inhibit free choice). For an extensive discussion of the effects of
surveillance, see David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (2001); Gary
T. Marx, Electric Eye in the Sky: Some Reflections on the New Surveillance and Popular Culture, in
Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy 193 (David Lyon & Elia Zureik eds., 1996).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1131
structure society in a particular way (by restricting the power of the government
or employers).
Turning our focus from disruptions to the practices they disrupt, we
often refer to aspects of these practices as “private matters.” In other
words, we say that certain things, places, and affairs are “private.” For a
long time, philosophers have discussed what has become known as the
public and the private spheres.248
Boundaries between the public and private
spheres create the conditions for developing or expressing various aspects
of selfhood, forming certain kinds of interpersonal relationships, as
well as engaging in certain forms of political activity.
The notion of public and private spheres understands privacy by way
of a spatial metaphor. Often, theorists speak of privacy as a spatial realm, a
sort of bubble zone that surrounds a person. According to legal theorist
Milton Konvitz, privacy “is the claim that there is a sphere of space that
has not been dedicated to public use or control.”249
According to Arnold
Simmel, a sociologist, we establish:
[a] territory . . . that is peculiarly our own. Its boundaries may be
crossed by others only when we expressly invite them. Within
these boundaries our own interests are sovereign, all initiative is
ours, we are free to do our thing, insulated against outside
influence and observation. This condition of insulation is what we
call privacy.250
The Supreme Court has often spoken of “zones” of privacy, understanding
privacy by way of the spatial metaphor.251
Although it is difficult to talk about privacy without invoking some
notion of space, the metaphor of space has significant limitations. As Lloyd
Weinreb explains, reference to privacy as a “space” is metaphorical only
and this metaphor is not very helpful because it “does not specify at all the
shape or dimensions of the space or what it contains.”252
Privacy is not
simply a form of space. An important dimension of privacy is informational
control, which does not readily translate into spatial terms. Further,
Katrin Byford aptly points out that this conception of privacy has difficulty
grappling with the problems of privacy in cyberspace since cyberspace is
not a physical space: “A territorial view of privacy, which associates the
248. See, e.g., Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958); Jürgen Habermas, The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Thomas Burger trans., 1991); John Stuart
Mill, On Liberty 11-13, 75-77 (Norton ed. 1975).
249. Milton R. Konvitz, Privacy and the Law: A Philosophical Prelude, 31 Law & Contemp.
Probs. 272, 279-80 (1966); see also Jourard, supra note 88, at 318 (“In short, privacy is experienced as
‘room to grow in,’ as freedom from interference, and as freedom to explore, to pursue experimental
projects in science, art, work, play, and living.”).
250. Simmel, supra note 101, at 71, 72.
251. See, e.g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
252. Lloyd L. Weinrib, The Right to Privacy, in The Right to Privacy 25, 34 (Ellen Frankel
Paul et al. eds., 2000).
1132 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
concept of privacy with the sanctity of certain physical spaces, has no
application in a realm in which there is no space.”253
We can avoid allowing the metaphor of space to limit our understanding
of privacy yet still maintain a distinction between public and private.
However, as I have argued, we should seek to understand practices rather
than classify certain matters as public or private. Although classifying certain
matters as public or private may be useful for certain general discussions,
such classifications can be misleading. In the next section, I explain
why.
2. Historical Development of Privacy Practices
It is reductive to carve the world of social practices into two spheres,
public and private, and then attempt to determine what matters belong in
each sphere. First, the matters we consider private change over time. While
some form of dichotomy between public and private has been maintained
throughout the history of Western civilization,254
the matters that have been
considered public and private have metamorphosed throughout history due
to changing attitudes, institutions, living conditions, and technology. The
matters we consider to be private are shaped by culture and history, and
have differed across cultures and historical epochs.
Second, although certain matters have moved from being public to
being private and vice versa, the change often has been more subtle than a
complete transformation from public to private. Particular matters have
long remained private but in different ways; they have been understood as
private but because of different attributes; or they have been regarded as
private for some people or groups but not for others. In other words, to say
simply that something is public or private is to make a rather general claim;
what it means for something to be private is the central question. We consider
our Social Security number, our sexual behavior, our diary, and our
home private, but we do not consider them private in the same way. A
number of aspects of life have commonly been viewed as private: the
family, body, and home to name a few. To say simply that these things are
private is imprecise because what it means for them to be private is different
today than it was in the past. I will demonstrate my point by tracing a
brief genealogy of the privacy of the family, body, and home.
a. Family
The family, viewed as the heart of the private sphere, was not always
a sanctuary for privacy. Today, we often view the family as an institution
253. Katrin Schatz Byford, Privacy in Cyberspace: Constructing a Model of Privacy for the
Electronic Communications Environment, 24 Rutgers Computer & Tech. L.J. 1, 40 (1998).
254. Georges Duby, Foreword to A History of Private Life I: From Pagan Rome to
Byzantium, at viii (Paul Veyne ed. & Arthur Goldhammer trans., 1987).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1133
of intimacy, where a nuclear family lives together in the home, and has (or
strives toward) a loving relationship. Further, the family is seen as generally
enhancing individual self-realization.
However, for much of Western history (and still today in some cultures),
entry into marriage was not considered to be an individual autonomous
choice based on selfhood-enhancing criteria. For many, marriages
occurred not out of love or free choice, but were primarily controlled by
parents and governed by economic and strategic concerns.255
Marriage was
not an institution to develop the self through an intimate relationship with
one’s family, but a set of social responsibilities and impediments to individual
self-development. In the world of the family, the individual was not
free but regulated by different forms of authority,256
particularly for
women, for whom marriage was often a life of submission. Indeed, the
family was viewed as the locus of social control, a miniature monarchy
ruled by the patriarch.257
For the expanding bourgeois, family life was inextricably
linked to professional life.258
The family was a business asset used
in public commerce, a network of connections and interdependent reputations
built upon conformity to social norms.259
The family existed for
“sociability rather than privacy.”260
Of course, I am making broad generalizations, as certainly numerous
families were not devoid of love, many marriages were initiated through
individual choice, and many women were not completely subservient to the
men in the household. My point is that in earlier times, certain attitudes and
practices regarding the nature of the family were more prevalent and
widely accepted than they are today.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the family increasingly became
more conducive to the private life of the individual,261
gradually shifting
from an economic institution to a place of intimacy and self-fulfillment.262
255. See, e.g., Habermas, supra note 248, at 47-48.
256. Georges Duby, Private Power, Public Power, in A History of Private Life
II: Revelations of the Medieval World 7 (Georges Duby ed. & Arthur Goldhammer trans.,
1988).
257. See, e.g., David H. Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England 56 (1972).
258. Michelle Perrot, The Family Triumphant, in A History of Private Life IV: From the
Fires of Revolution to the Great War 121 (Michelle Perrot ed. & Arthur Goldhammer trans.,
1990).
259. See id. at 123 (“A family legacy is more than just material goods. A heritage comprises a
portfolio of connections, a symbolic capital in the form of reputation, situation, and status . . . .”).
260. Tamara K. Hareven, The Home and the Family in Historical Perspective, 58 Soc. Res. 253,
257 (1991).
261. Roger Chartier, Community, State, and Family: Trajectories and Tensions: Introduction, in
A History of Private Life III: Passions of the Renaissance 400 (Roger Chartier ed. & Arthur
Goldhammer trans., 1989); see also Beatrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World From
the Black Death to the Industrial Age 52-53 (1993).
262. Catherine Hall, The Sweet Delights of Home, in A History of Private Life IV, supra note
258 at 50; Michelle Perrot, Roles and Characters, in A History of the Private Life IV, supra note
258, at 181-86.
1134 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
Work and home began to be physically separated, creating a public professional
world of business and a more private intimate world of the family.
The growth of individualism—the “concept of the self as unique, and free
to pursue his or her own goals; and a related decline in the idea that the
overriding obligation was to the kin, the society, or the state”263
—led to a
rebellion against arranged marriages, transforming marriage into an institution
of personal choice rather than of economic gain.264
Gradually, the family
began to develop into a “private entity focused into itself.”265
For women, the family was for a long time not associated with selfdevelopment.
According to Anita Allen, throughout much of history,
“[m]arriage has been described as a woman’s greatest obstacle to
privacy.”266
As Reva Siegel explains, a “wife was obliged to obey and
serve her husband, and the husband was subject to a reciprocal duty to
support his wife and represent her within the legal system.”267
Husbands
could also physically punish their wives (known as “chastisement”) so long
as no permanent injury was inflicted.268
Chastisement was justified by
courts not wanting to interfere with marital privacy.269
As one court explained,
although wife beating would typically be classified as an assault,
doing so would “throw open the bedroom to the gaze of the public; and
spread discord and misery, contention and strife, where peace and concord
ought to reign.”270
Thus, ironically, “privacy” of the family consisted of an
association of noninterference of the state in domestic affairs which served,
as Siegel explains, “to enforce and preserve authority relations between
man and wife.”271
This association has led to a number of feminist scholars
attacking privacy in the domestic context.272
263. Lawrence Stone, The Public and the Private in Stately Homes of England, 1500-1990, 58
Soc. Res. 227, 233 (1991).
264. Perrot, Roles and Characters, supra note 262, at 181.
265. Hareven, supra note 260, at 257.
266. Allen, supra note 62, at 69; see generally Henrik Hartog, Man and Wife in
America: A History (2000).
267. Reva B. Siegel, “The Rule of Love”: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy, 105 Yale
L.J. 2117, 2122 (1996).
268. See id. at 2118.
269. See id. at 2152.
270. State v. Hussey, 44 N.C. 123, 126-27 (1852).
271. Siegel, supra note 267, at 2158.
272. The most prominent of these theorists is Catharine MacKinnon, who argues:
For women the measure of the intimacy has been the measure of the oppression. . . . This is
why feminism has seen the personal as the political. The private is public for those for whom
the personal is political. In this sense, for women there is no private, either normatively or
empirically. Feminism confronts the fact that women have no privacy to lose or to guarantee.
Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State 191 (1989). For an overview of
the feminist critique of privacy, see Patricia Boling, Privacy and the Politics of Intimate Life
(1996); DeCew, supra note 106, at 81-94. For a critique of MacKinnon, see Allen, supra note 62; Ruth
Gavison, Feminism and the Public/Private Distinction, 45 Stan. L. Rev. 21 (1992).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1135
That privacy of the family once meant the noninterference of the state
in domestic affairs does not mean that this is inherently what privacy of the
family means today. In contemporary American society, we accept greater
government intervention in spousal relationships as well as in child rearing.
To argue that there is less privacy of the family today because of this development
is too broad a claim. To the extent that family privacy consists
of attributes such as independence, freedom of thought, freedom from coercion,
self-development, and pursuing activities of personal interest, government
intervention actually can enhance privacy.
b. Body
The evolution of attitudes toward the body is also instructive. For
quite some time, theorists have viewed the body as at the core of privacy.273
As the Supreme Court declared: “No right is held more sacred, or is more
carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to
the possession and control of his own person.”274
The claim that the body is
“private” is really a claim about certain practices regarding the body, such
as concealment of certain bodily parts, secrecy about certain diseases and
physical conditions, norms of touching and interpersonal contact, and individual
control and dominion over decisions regarding one’s body. As
Radhika Rao explains, the constitutional right to privacy is often characterized
by the notion of self-ownership of the body, the notion that a person
belongs to herself.275
These attributes were certainly not always associated
with the body. Although we currently associate the body with concealment
(we hide the nude body from others under layers of clothes), the naked
body was far from private in ancient Greece and Rome.276
Richard Sennett
observes that in ancient Athens, the public display of the naked body
“marked the presence of a strong rather than vulnerable person—and more,
someone who was civilized.”277
Public nudity “affirmed one’s dignity as a
citizen.”278
In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for people to bathe in
273. Gerety claims that any concept of privacy “must take the body as its first and most basic
reference for control over personal identity.” Gerety, supra note 6, at 266 & n.119.
274. Union Pac. Ry. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891).
275. Radhika Rao, Property, Privacy, and the Human Body, 80 B.U. L. Rev. 359 (2000). Rao
critiques the tendency to reduce one’s control over one’s body to a simple property right. “[P]rivacy
theory entitled the body to protection as the physical embodiment of a person, the subject of a privacy
interest, whereas property theory reduces the body to a mere object of ownership.” Id. at 445.
276. Peter Brown, Late Antiquity, in A History of Private Life I, supra note 254, at 245-46.
277. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western
Civilization 33 (1994). “Athenian democracy placed great emphasis on its citizens exposing their
thoughts to others, just as men exposed their bodies. These mutual acts of disclosure were meant to
draw the knot between citizens ever tighter.” Id. Public nudity was limited to men. Women did not
display their naked bodies in public. See id. at 34.
278. Id.; see also Marie A. Failinger, Five Modern Notions in Search of an Author: The Ideology
of Intimate Society in Constitutional Speech Law, 30 U. Tol. L. Rev. 251 (1999).
1136 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
front of others,279
and bathing was often part of celebrations and social
congregation.280
Norms of interpersonal contact and nudity gradually shifted toward
more concealment and distancing from others. In the Renaissance, among
the wealthy (and spreading to the middle class), people tried to distance
themselves from their body and other’s bodies: “men and women become
more secretive and modest about bodily functions; they ceased to share
beds with strangers at home, at school, or in inns. They ceased to eat and
drink out of communal dishes and cups, which might contain traces of
saliva of others.”281
After the sixteenth century, people became quite
guarded about their bodies and reserved about their touching of others.282
Another contemporary association is between the body and concealment
of certain bodily functions such as urination, defecation, and copulation.
In the seventeenth century, it was not anomalous for people to chat
with friends while sitting above a chamber pot.283
Before the late nineteenth
century, poor families (close to half of the population of England) lived in
one room and had to urinate, defecate, and copulate in view of others.284
This practice varied depending upon the wealth of families and where they
lived. Families in urban areas often did not have a privy in the rear of their
homes. As Lawrence Stone observes, “Up to the end of the eighteenth
century, close-stools and chamber pots had been scattered randomly about
the house in the public rooms, a system which afforded little or no
privacy.”285
We also currently associate the body with individual control and dominion.
Although many subscribe to John Stuart Mill’s observation that the
individual is “sovereign” over her body,286
for a long time, people viewed
their body (in particular, their blood) as belonging in part to the family and
their ancestors.287
As attitudes toward the family changed and with new
conceptions of individual identity, people began to view the body as their
own possession.288
279. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea 28 (1986).
280. Id. at 30. Of course, such practices differed based on the customs of each specific society as
well as upon religious beliefs and the social status of individuals.
281. Stone, supra note 263, at 229.
282. Philippe Ariès, Introduction, in A History of Private Life III, supra note 261, at 4; Roger
Chartier, Forms of Privatization: Introduction, in A History of Private Life III, supra note 261, at
163-64. This new modesty was so extreme at times that it even made it difficult for doctors to be at the
bedside of women in labor. See Ariès, supra, at 5.
283. Sennett, supra note 277, at 343.
284. Stone, supra note 263, at 228.
285. Id. at 244.
286. Mill, supra note 248, at 11 (“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is
sovereign.”).
287. Jacques Gélis, Forms of Privatization: The Child: From Anonymity to Individuality, in A
History of Private Life III, supra note 261, at 310.
288. Id. at 316.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1137
c. Home
A final example best illustrates the points I am attempting to
make: the home, often viewed as the quintessential place of privacy. To
say the home is a “private” place is imprecise, because although it has long
been viewed as a private space, it was so in a different way than it is now.
For a long time, the home has been regarded as one’s “castle,”289
where the individual enjoyed a freedom from government intrusion. As
early as 1886, in Boyd v. United States,290
the Court strictly protected “the
sanctity of a man’s home.”291
The Court’s worship of the home has not wavered,
and almost a century later, the Court reiterated its staunch protection
of the home: “In none is the zone of privacy more clearly defined than
when bounded by the unambiguous physical dimensions of an individual’s
home.”292
This association has existed for a significant time and is embodied
in the Third Amendment’s prohibition of the quartering of troops in
homes during peacetime,293
and the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of
unreasonable searches and seizures. 294
As the Court declared: “The Fourth
Amendment, and the personal rights which it secures, have a long history.
At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and
there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”295
Although the home was long associated as being a haven from the
government, it still was not a place of solitude or individual
self-development that it is today. Currently, the home is a place where the
public is physically locked out.296
According to Justice Douglas, “[t]he
home of course is the essence of privacy, in no way dedicated to public
use, in no way extending an invitation to the public.”297
The home is understood
as a place where individuals retreat to find peace of mind and to
289. See Richard F. Hixson, Privacy in a Public Society: Human Rights in Conflict 13
(1987). The maxim that the home is one’s castle appeared as early as 1499. See Note, The Right to
Privacy in Nineteenth Century America, 94 Harv. L. Rev. 1892, 1894 (1981). The first recorded case
in which this notion was mentioned was Semayne’s Case, 77 Eng. Rep. 194, 195 (K.B. 1604) (“[T]he
house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress.”). In the eighteenth century, William Blackstone
declared that the law has “so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a man’s house that it
stiles it his castle, and will never suffer it to be violated with impunity.” 4 William Blackstone,
Commentaries on the Laws of England 223 (1769). The maxim that the home is one’s castle
became widely used in the United States during the nineteenth century. See id. at 1894 n.18.
290. 116 U.S. 616 (1886).
291. Id. at 630.
292. Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 589 (1980).
293. U.S. Const. amend. III.
294. U.S. Const. amend. IV.
295. Silverman v. United States, 365 U.S. 505, 511 (1961).
296. Minnesota v. Carter, 525 U.S. 83, 107 (1998) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (“Our decisions
indicate that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes in part because they have
the prerogative to exclude others.”).
297. Bell v. Maryland, 378 U.S. 226, 253 (1964) (Douglas, J., concurring).
1138 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
cultivate intimate relationships.298
Michelle Adams aptly describes the current
view of the home in Western societies as “a place of retreat to the (not
always) protective sphere of family life, and it is reflective of, and a conduit
for, familial and emotional intimacy.”299
Further, the home is associated
with individual self-development, where each individual has the
freedom to engage in personal activities that are not the business of others.
Thus, in Stanley v. Georgia,300
the Court held that obscenity statutes could
not “reach into the privacy of one’s own home. If the First Amendment
means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting
alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may
watch.”301
Although today the home is seen as a place where one can retreat
from the bustle of public life and enjoy tranquility and solitude, the home
was not always routinely associated with such attributes. For much of history,
many did not view the home as “the family’s haven and domestic
retreat;” this concept became more widely held about 150 years ago and
was at first limited to the urban middle classes.302
Many people unrelated to
the family would be present in the home, such as apprentices, servants, and
lodgers.303
As Tamara Hareven explains: “[B]y contrast to the conception
of the home in contemporary society as a private retreat from the outside
world, to preindustrial society the family conducted its work and public
affairs inside the household.”304
This, of course, is a generalization about
the practices of particular families, mainly the families of shopkeepers in
urban centers. For such families, business was conducted in the house, and
the house was a crowded bustling place with little opportunity for the family
to retreat in isolation.305
Until the seventeenth century, many homes merely consisted of a
large, multipurpose space.306
Among the rising bourgeois, homes were primarily
devoted to work, a shop with a place in the back or above to eat and
sleep.307
Houses were hectic crowded places, often crammed with one or
298. As William Pitt once remarked: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to the
Crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of
England cannot enter—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” Charles J.
Sykes, The End of Privacy 83 (1999).
299. Michelle Adams, Knowing Your Place: Theorizing Sexual Harassment at Home, 40 Ariz. L.
Rev. 17, 23-24 (1998).
300. 394 U.S. 557 (1969).
301. Id. at 565.
302. Hareven, supra note 260, at 254.
303. Id. at 255.
304. Id. at 256.
305. Id.
306. Willaim H. Gass, Making Ourselves Comfortable, N.Y. Times, Aug. 3, 1986, § 7 at 1.
307. Rybczynski, supra note 279, at 25.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1139
more large families.308
Dwelling places were noisy, built of creaky wood
with cracks and peepholes, equipped with no soundproofing to stop noise
from echoing throughout the home.309
Beds were large, scarce, and
crammed with multiple people.310
Not only would a couple sleep with their
children, but even guests would share the bed.311
Even among the Puritans
of colonial New England, a couple would think nothing of sleeping in the
same bed with another adult.312
Before the development of specialized
rooms, beds were placed in public areas and “family members slept behind
curtains while social activities including outsiders were going on in other
parts of the same room.”313
Beginning in the seventeenth century, homes began to be partitioned
into rooms, each assigned a distinct purpose and some even becoming personalized
according to their occupants.314
As specialized rooms became
more prevalent, “bedrooms were no longer mixed up with public rooms,
and began to be concentrated upstairs.”315
Even with rooms, solitude would
often be disrupted because there were no corridors, and people would shuffle
through rooms to move about the house.316
Although solitude within the home developed first among the
wealthy,317
there were special impediments to making the home a place of
308. Flaherty, supra note 257, at 45. In eighteenth century New England, for example, families
were twice as large on average as they are today, and a significant number of homes housed more than
one family. See id. at 47.
309. As one historian observes about living quarters in Renaissance Europe: “An apartment
building was a public theater. Some held forth, others squabbled, but no one had any privacy. Marital
disputes, illicit love affairs, noisy tenants, restless children—nothing could be concealed and everything
could be heard.” Arlette Farge, Community, State, and Family: Trajectories and Tensions: The Honor
and Secrecy of Families, in A History of Private Life III, supra note 261, at 575-76. In colonial
New England, most houses were built entirely of wood. Spying on others was easy, and sound carried
readily throughout the house. See Flaherty, supra note 257, at 43-44.
310. See, e.g., Rybczynski, supra note 279, at 28.
311. Flaherty, supra note 257, at 76. Crowded beds were due to the scarcity of beds and the
need for warmth. See id. at 78. At inns, strangers would sometimes share the same bed. See Gottlieb,
supra note 261, at 41.
312. Id. at 76.
313. Hareven, supra note 260, at 257.
314. Rybczynski, supra note 279, at 18; see also Flaherty, supra note 257, at 34 (describing
crowded one-room homes of sixteenth and seventeenth century England). Even in the sixteenth
century, most homes lacked separate rooms. Rybcynski, supra note 279, at 18. When rooms were
assigned purposes, the house became divided into distinct areas for women and men. See Hall, supra
note 262, at 91. Houses in America followed this same pattern of development. Flaherty, supra note
257, at 33-44.
315. Stone, supra note 263, at 237.
316. Flaherty, supra note 257, at 40; see also Rybczynski, supra note 279, at 41 (“There were
no corridors in these houses—each room was connected directly to its neighbor—and architects prided
themselves on aligning all the doors enfilade, so that there was an unobstructed view from one end of
the house to the other.”).
317. Only the aristocracy could afford to purchase the space necessary to maintain privacy. “The
wealthy naturally increased the amount of private space available to them, but for the rest of the
population, the vast majority, the idea of privacy did not extend beyond the bedroom, and perhaps not
1140 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
solitude even among the affluent. According to Lawrence Stone, the
wealthy owners of stately homes in England were “torn between the
conflicting needs of their private selves and their public personae” because
they wanted to maintain their houses to display their riches and status but
also wanted privacy.318
The houses of the wealthy were continually on
show.319
Further, servants, prone to gossip and even blackmail, prevented
solitude in the home. Even in the eighteenth century, very wealthy families
were unable to function without servants “even to the point of being unable
to dress or undress without assistance.”320
Eventually, innovations such as
plumbing, central heating, and gas and electric lighting limited the need for
servants to be ever-present.321
The expansion of living space also contributed to the growing association
of solitude with the home. Among larger homes in the eighteenth century,
hallways emerged, permitting an unprecedented ability to be alone
and undisturbed.322
Privacy began to be possible within certain special
rooms—the study, for example, where the master of the house could withdraw
for quiet reading or for confidential conversations.323
When employment shifted from agriculture to factories and offices in
the late nineteenth century, the homes of many began to be separated
physically from the place of work.324
One’s professional life began to be
viewed as a separate realm of existence from one’s life at home.325
The
gradual separation of work from home helped to alter the nature of the
family and the home. As Hareven notes: “Following the removal of the
workplace from the home as a result of urbanization and industrialization,
the household was recast as the family’s private retreat, and home emerged
as a new concept and existence.”326
beyond the bed curtains.” Orest Ranum, Forms of Privatization: The Refuges of Intimacy, in A
History of Private Life III, supra note 261, at 225. The rise of the bourgeoisie made solitude more
widely available. See Joseph Bensman & Robert Lilienfeld, Between Public and Private: The
Lost Boundaries of the Self 31 (1979).
318. Stone, supra note 263, at 227.
319. Id. at 232-33; see also Gottlieb, supra note 261, at 39-40.
320. Stone, supra note 263, at 234.
321. Id. at 243; Georges Duby, Preface, in A History of Private Life II, supra note 256, at xii.
322. Gini Graham Scott, Mind Your Own Business: The Battle for Personal Privacy
32 (1995); Flaherty, supra note 257, at 40.
323. Roger Chartier, Figures of Modernity: The Practical Impact of Writing, in A History of
Private Life III, supra note 261, at 134. The study was a private place for the master of the house
only; women had no comparable private room of their own. See Philippe Braunstein, Toward
Intimacy: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, in A History of the Private Life II, supra note
256, at 538. The study became so private that it was used to store the master’s secret letters of
extramarital affairs. See Ranum, supra note 317, at 226-27.
324. Shils, supra note 72, at 289.
325. Ariès, supra note 282, at 1-2.
326. Hareven, supra note 260, at 259.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1141
3. Privacy and Technological and Social Change
The preceding discussion illustrates that technological and social
change alters the extent to which privacy is a dimension of certain practices
as well as what we mean when we speak about certain practices as involving
privacy. The history I related is told at an enormous level of generality;
when historical practices regarding the family, body, and home are examined
in more detail, there is a wide variation among such practices based on
factors such as urbanization, class and social status, ethnic and religious
subgroups, and so on. However, what I hope to have illustrated by the use
of this brief historical sketch is that certain attitudes and practices were not
universal, but were shaped by the realities of particular historical periods.
The shrinking of the size of the family, emergence of new social places,
transformation in the nature of the family, changing architecture of the
home, new attitudes toward the body, increasing wealth and space, separation
of home from work, decreased crowding, and numerous other changes
in the quality and nature of life had profound effects for the perception of
what the private life entailed. While we may long regard certain matters as
“private,” what it currently means to call them “private” differs from what
was meant in other times during history.
Although what is public and private is shaped by culture and history, I
am not claiming that the privacy of the family, body, and home is merely a
historical accident. Some practices involving privacy may have roots in our
biological natures. In his analysis of privacy in primitive cultures, sociologist
Barrington Moore observed a general preference for seclusion during
sexual intercourse (although this did not always occur in practice).327
Moore writes: “[t]he fact that human beings can control certain impulses
does not mean they lack these impulses. The human psyche is no blank
slate upon which social training can write any message.”328
Even though certain matters and activities were not private in the way
we understand them today, one could claim that we always desired them to
be so, that such desire stems from biological need, and that this explains
why they became private when technology or other practices enabled this
to occur. Perhaps the interaction of biological desire and social practices
creates the desire for privacy in certain contexts. Further sociological study
is necessary to understand the origin of the desire for privacy in particular
situations. This question, however, should not detract our focus from practices.
Even if the privacy of certain matters stems in part from biological
desire, we control our desires through practices, and a mere desire for
privacy for a certain activity does not necessarily make such an activity
private.
327. Moore, supra note 75, at 67.
328. Id. at 70.
1142 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
One might object to my approach because of its evolving nature. If
there is no consistent set of practices that should be considered private,
how are we to determine what to protect as private? We must make such
determinations by evaluating practices empirically, historically, and normatively.
Empirical and descriptive claims as to the current cultural understandings
of privacy are very important in conceptualizing privacy. A
conception of privacy must be responsive to social reality since privacy is
an aspect of social practices. Since practices are dynamic, we must understand
their historical development. Looking historically at practices deepens
our understanding of the role that privacy has played in them and the
effects that disruptions to them might cause.
However, privacy is not simply an empirical and historical question
that measures the collective sense in any given society of what is and has
long been considered to be private. Without a normative component, a
conception of privacy can only provide a status report on existing privacy
norms rather than guide us toward shaping privacy law and policy in the
future. If we focus simply on people’s current expectations of privacy, our
conception of privacy would continually shrink given the increasing surveillance
in the modern world. Similarly, the government could gradually
condition people to accept wiretapping or other privacy incursions, thus
altering society’s expectations of privacy.329
On the other hand, if we
merely seek to preserve those activities and matters that have historically
been considered private, then we fail to adapt to the changing realities of
the modern world.
We want certain matters to be private, even if we need to create this
privacy through the use of law. Privacy is an issue of power; it is not simply
the general expectations of society, but the product of a vision of the
larger social structure. For example, in America, the privacy of letters was
formed in significant part by a legal architecture that protected the confidentiality
of letters from other people and government officials. In colonial
America, mail was often insecure; it was difficult to seal letters; and the
wax often used to keep letters sealed was not very effective.330
There was
widespread suspicion of postal clerks reading letters; and a number of
prominent individuals, such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and
George Washington, decried the lack of privacy in their letters and would
sometimes even write in code.331
As Ralph Waldo Emerson presumed, it
was unlikely that “a bit of paper, containing our most secret thoughts, and
329. See Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 740 n.5 (1979) (“[W]here an individual’s subjective
expectations had been ‘conditioned’ by influences alien to well-recognized Fourth Amendment
freedoms, those subjective expectations obviously could play no meaningful role in ascertaining what
the scope of Fourth Amendment protection was.”).
330. Smith, supra note 48, at 23-25.
331. Id. at 50-51. For an extensive discussion of the privacy of letters in colonial America, see
Flaherty, supra note 257, at 115-27.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1143
protected only by a seal, should travel safety from one end of the world to
the other, without anyone whose hands it had passed through having
meddled with it.”332
Despite these realities, and people’s expectation that
letters would not be confidential, the law evolved to provide strong protection
of the privacy of letters. Benjamin Franklin, who was in charge of the
colonial mails, required his employees to swear an oath not to open mail.333
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Congress passed several
laws prohibiting the improper opening of mail.334
And the Supreme
Court held in 1877 that despite the fact that people turned letters over to
the government for delivery in the postal system, sealed parcels were protected
from inspection by the Fourth Amendment.335
This example illustrates
that privacy is not just found but constructed. By erecting a legal
structure to protect the privacy of letters, our society shaped the practices
of letter writing and using the postal system. It occurred because of the desire
to make privacy an integral part of these practices rather than to preserve
the status quo.
Therefore, determining what the law should protect as private depends
upon a normative analysis, which requires us to examine the value of privacy
in particular contexts. To do this, we must focus on our practices—
specifically, the nature of privacy in these practices, the role that privacy
plays in these practices, and the ends that these practices further. Thus, the
value of privacy is an important dimension of conceptualizing privacy, and
I now turn to this issue.
B. The Value of Privacy
One of the most integral aspects of conceptualizing privacy is to discern
the value of privacy. The value of privacy not only illuminates what
privacy is but also enables us to balance it with conflicting values. Under
my approach, the value of privacy depends upon the purposes of the practices
that are involved. Privacy is an issue of power; it affects how people
behave, their choices, and their actions. When we seek to protect, create,
disrupt, or halt certain practices, we are basing that decision on our view of
the importance of the purposes of these practices. Practices are activities
and modalities of living that have purposes,336
which means that practices
are performed for particular reasons, aims, and goals. The value of privacy
depends upon the importance of the purposes of the practices.
For example, when analyzing the value of the privacy of the home in
order to make legal and policy decisions, we must look to the purposes of
332. Quoted in Smith, supra note 48, at 56-57.
333. Id. at 49; Regan, supra note 211, at 46-49.
334. Smith, supra note 48, at 50-51.
335. Ex Parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727, 733 (1877).
336. See Michael Sullivan & John T. Lysaker, Between Impotence and Illusion: Adorno’s Art of
Theory and Practice, 57 New German Critique 87 (1992).
1144 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
the privacy practices of the home. One such purpose is one’s ability in the
home to escape from the hustle and bustle of the everyday world. Often,
conflicting values clash with our desire to protect this purpose, such as the
free speech rights of people to protest outside a person’s home or to broadcast
into the home certain potentially offensive television and radio mes-
sages.337
Given the value of a particular practice, we must ask to what extent
privacy is a dimension of that practice and, if so, how it impacts that practice.
If privacy impacts the practice in a negative way, then less privacy
would be desirable. If privacy furthers a desirable practice (or is so constitutive
of the practice that the practice would be impossible without it), then
privacy should be recommended.
The way we shape practices depends upon our vision of the good,
which informs how we wish to structure power in society and how we want
to empower the self. The approach I advocate does not look to history to
locate certain matters that always have been private; rather it looks to history
to understand the development of certain practices and the manner in
which power is exercised in society.
Of course, the current practices of society have significant weight in
what we should protect as private. We may think that privacy is an undesirable
dimension of a certain practice or that a practice involving privacy
is undesirable in its totality, but we must also recognize the costs of disrupting
these practices. One such cost is that unsettling existing practices
can thwart people’s ability to exercise control over their lives. Although we
might think that society would be better off if all medical information were
public, the fact that most people take great pains to keep this information
secret cannot be ignored. A law that runs counter to this practice could
create profound psychological distress as well as changes in behavior that
result in restricting personal freedom. Of course, I am not suggesting that
we must avoid interfering with existing practices; however, our policy decisions
must account for the effects of such interference on people’s
psychological well-being. Disruptions to certain practices affect other
practices, and in many cases, affect the welfare, psyche, and freedom of
individuals.
How, then, is privacy to be valued? First, I contend that privacy
should be valued instrumentally. Second, in contrast to the discourse’s
337. See Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474 (1988) (finding constitutional an ordinance prohibiting
picketing on public streets in front of a specific residence because privacy interests are of the highest
order and people are captive audiences in their homes); FCC v. Pacifica Found., 438 U.S. 726 (1978)
(holding that broadcast of George Carlin’s seven dirty words on the radio could be restricted to certain
times of the day because people who unwittingly heard the monologue were a captive audience until
they had time to switch to a new station); Martin v. City of Struthers, 319 U.S. 141 (1943) (holding that
ordinance prohibiting door-to-door solicitation to prevent annoyance and crime was unconstitutional
because less restrictive alternatives were available).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1145
tendency to value privacy in a general and abstract way, I argue that privacy
must be valued contextually.
My first contention concerns the general method of valuation. According
to many theorists, privacy has an intrinsic value, an inherently positive
value.338
Ronald Dworkin, one of the principal proponents of intrinsic
value, argues that certain things “are valuable in themselves and not just
for their utility or for the pleasure or satisfaction they bring us.”339
Several
privacy scholars who claim that privacy is valuable in itself locate the
source of the value in a form of respect that must be provided to all rational
beings. According to Stanley Benn: “[R]espect for someone as a person, as
a chooser, implie[s] respect for him as one engaged on a kind of
self-creative enterprise, which could be disrupted, distorted, or frustrated
even by so limited an intrusion as watching.”340
“[P]rivacy is valuable,”
Julie Inness claims, “because it acknowledges our respect for persons as
autonomous beings with the capacity to love, care and like—in other
words, persons with the potential to freely develop close relationships.”341
However, along with other scholars,342
I contend that privacy has an
instrumental value—namely, that it is valued as a means for achieving certain
other ends that are valuable. As John Dewey observed, ends are not
fixed, but are evolving targets, constantly subject to revision and change as
the individual strives toward them.343
“Ends are foreseen consequences
which arise in the course of activity and which are employed to give
activity added meaning and to direct its further course.”344
In contrast to many conceptions of privacy, which describe the value
of privacy in the abstract, I contend that there is no overarching value of
privacy. For example, theories of privacy have viewed the value of privacy
in terms of furthering a number of different ends. Fried claims that privacy
fosters love and friendship. Bloustein argues that privacy protects dignity
and individuality. Boling and Inness claim that privacy is necessary for
intimate human relationships. According to Gavison, privacy is essential
for autonomy and freedom. Indeed, there are a number of candidates for
the value of privacy, as privacy fosters self-creation, independence,
338. Byford, supra note 253, at 6 (contending that privacy has an “inherently positive value”).
339. Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia,
and Individual Freedom 69-70 (1993).
340. Benn, supra note 108, at 26.
341. Inness, supra note 3, at 95.
342. See, e.g., Westin, supra note 4, at 39 (“[P]rivacy is neither a self-sufficient state nor an end
in itself, even for the hermit and the recluse. It is basically an instrument for achieving individual goals
of self-realization.”); Gavison, supra note 1, at 442 (arguing that “we cannot avoid a functional
analysis” of the value of privacy).
343. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in 14 The Middle Works of John Dewey 155
(Jo Ann Boydston ed., 1988).
344. Id.
1146 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
autonomy, creativity, imagination, counter-culture, freedom of thought,
and reputation.
However, no one of these ends is furthered by all practices of privacy.
The problem with discussing the value of privacy in the abstract is that privacy
is a dimension of a wide variety of practices each having a different
value—and what privacy is differs in different contexts. My approach toward
conceptualizing privacy does not focus on the value of privacy generally.
Rather, we must focus specifically on the value of privacy within
particular practices.
C. Practical Applications
Why should scholars and judges adopt my approach to conceptualizing
privacy? To deal with the myriad of problems involving privacy, scholars
and judges will have to adopt multiple conceptions of privacy, or else
the old conceptions will lead them astray in finding solutions. The Court’s
1928 decision in Olmstead v. United States345
epitomizes the need for
flexibility in conceptualizing privacy. The Court held that the wiretapping
of a person’s home telephone (done outside a person’s house) did not run
afoul of the Fourth Amendment because it did not involve a trespass inside
a person’s home.346
Justice Louis Brandeis vigorously dissented, chastising
the Court for failing to adapt the Constitution to new problems: “[I]n the
application of a Constitution, our contemplation cannot be only of what has
been, but of what may be.”347
The Olmstead Court had clung to the
outmoded view that the privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment was
merely freedom from physical incursions. As a result, for nearly forty
years, the Fourth Amendment failed to apply to wiretapping, one of the
most significant threats to privacy in the twentieth century.348
Finally, in
1967, the Court swept away this view in Katz v. United States,349
holding
that the Fourth Amendment did apply to wiretapping. These events
underscore the wisdom of Brandeis’s observations in Olmstead—the landscape
of privacy is constantly changing, for it is shaped by the rapid pace
of technological invention, and therefore, the law must maintain great
flexibility in conceptualizing privacy problems.
This flexibility is impeded by the use of an overarching conception of
privacy. Trying to solve all privacy problems with a uniform and
345. 277 U.S. 438 (1928).
346. Id. at 465.
347. Id. at 474 (Brandeis, J., dissenting) (internal quotations omitted).
348. For an account of some of the most notorious abuses of wiretapping by law enforcement
officials, see Whitfield Diffie & Susan Landau, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of
Wiretapping and Encryption 109-223 (1998). One of the most famous instances of the abuse of
wiretapping was the FBI’s extensive wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr. See David J. Garrow,
The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1980).
349. 389 U.S. 347 (1967) (overruling Olmstead).
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1147
overarching conception of privacy is akin to using a hammer not only to
insert a nail into the wall but also to drill a hole. Much of the law of information
privacy was shaped to deal with particular privacy problems in
mind. The law has often failed to adapt to deal with the variety of privacy
problems we are encountering today. Instead, the law has attempted to adhere
to overarching conceptions of privacy that do not work for all privacy
problems. Not all privacy problems are the same, and different conceptions
of privacy work best in different contexts. Instead of trying to fit new problems
into old conceptions, we should seek to understand the special circumstances
of a particular problem. What practices are being disrupted? In
what ways does the disruption resemble or differ from other forms of disruption?
How does this disruption affect society and social structure?
These are some of the questions that should be asked when grappling with
privacy problems. In the remainder of this section, I will discuss several
examples that illustrate these points.
The case of McNamara v. Freedom Newspapers, Inc.350
demonstrates
the deficiencies of failing to recognize the distinctiveness of particular
privacy invasions. In McNamara, a newspaper published a photo of a high
school soccer player’s genitalia that he inadvertently exposed while
running on the soccer field. The student sued under the tort of public
disclosure of private facts, in which one is liable for widely publicizing “a
matter concerning the private life of another” that “would be highly
offensive to a reasonable person” and “is not of legitimate concern to the
public.”351
The student contended that the newspaper “violated the bounds
of public decency” and “could have used one of its other numerous
photographs in its article.”352
The court held that the student’s case should
be dismissed because “[t]he picture accurately depicted a public event and
was published as part of a newspaper article describing the game. At the
time the photograph was taken, [the student] was voluntarily participating
in a spectator sport at a public place.”353
Although not explicitly stated, the court appeared to be
conceptualizing privacy as a form of secrecy, which is violated by the
disclosure of concealed facts. Since the photograph was taken outside and
in public, the student could not claim that an image of his exposed genitals
was a private matter. Courts routinely employ this reasoning in cases
involving the tort of public disclosure of private facts.354
Appearing in
public, according to one court, “necessarily involves doffing the cloak of
350. 802 S.W.2d 901 (Tex. Ct. App. 1991).
351. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652D (1981).
352. McNamara, 802 S.W.2d at 904-05.
353. Id. at 905.
354. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652D cmt. B (1977) (“There is no liability [for
public disclosure of private facts] when the defendant merely gives further publicity to information
about the plaintiff that is already public.”).
1148 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
privacy which the law protects.”355
For example, in Penwell v. Taft
Broadcasting Co., the court dismissed a public disclosure action for the
filming and broadcast of the wrongful arrest of a married couple because
the arrest was filmed in a place “left open to the public eye.”356
The McNamara court, however, applied an inappropriate conception
of privacy in deciding the case. The injury was not one caused by the
disclosure of concealed information, but one of what I will call “exposure.”
Exposure differs from disclosure in that with exposure, no secrets or
concealed information are revealed. Exposure involves the exposing of
certain physical or emotional attributes which, based upon social practices,
are often kept out of view of others. For example, it is common knowledge
that people urinate and defecate. Revealing the fact that a person urinates
or defecates is not what privacy is about in this context, for it is no secret
that people eliminate waste. Further, absent any unusual physical features,
the nude body does not reveal secrets or facts about a person. Nevertheless,
people currently take great strides to cloak their nude bodies and to urinate
and defecate away from other people. As discussed earlier, these practices
developed over a long span of history, but are today deeply entrenched in
most societies.357
A candid photograph of a person in the nude or engaged
in elimination of waste engenders deep embarrassment and distress for
most people. If no secrets are being disclosed, why are people so upset
about this form of exposure?
The answer, I believe, is that social practices have developed to
conceal aspects of life that we find animal-like or disgusting as well as
activities in which we feel particularly vulnerable and weak. We scrub,
dress, and groom ourselves in order to present ourselves to the public in a
dignified manner. We seek to cover up smells, discharge, and excretion
because we are socialized into viewing them with disgust. We cloak the
nude body in public based on norms of decorum. These social practices,
which relegate these aspects of life to the private sphere, are deeply
connected to human dignity.358
Dignity is, in part, the ability to transcend
355. Cefalu v. Globe Newspaper Co., 391 N.E.2d 935, 939 (Mass. App. 1979).
356. Penwell v. Taft Broad. Co., 469 N.E.2d 1025, 1028 (Ohio App. 1984).
357. See supra Part II.A.
358. This conception of privacy would more appropriately account for the recent controversy over
the autopsy photographs of Dale Earnhardt, a famous race car driver who died while racing in 2001.
Over thirty photographs were taken of Earnhardt’s cadaver. Earnhardt’s wife sought to keep the
autopsy photographs of Earnhardt from the public. Under Florida’s public records law, autopsy
photographs are public documents, and the owner of a website that specialized in posting gruesome
autopsy photographs (along with a number of newspapers and media entities) were interested in
obtaining the photographs. In response, the Florida legislature passed a law restricting the disclosure of
autopsy photographs unless the party seeking disclosure obtained a court order by showing good cause
for disclosure. A Florida court upheld the law, stating that the “publication of a person’s autopsy
photographs constitutes a unique, serious, and extraordinarily intrusive invasion of the personal privacy
of that person’s surviving family members.” Earnhardt v. Volusia County Office of the Med. Exam’r,
No. 2001-30373-CICI, slip op. at 7 (7th Cir. July 9, 2001). The court further stated that “[t]here is a
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1149
one’s animal nature, to be civilized, to feel worthy of respect. Indeed, one
form of torture is to dehumanize and degrade people by making them dirty,
stripping them, forcing them to eliminate waste in public, and so on.359
When social practices relating to dignity are disrupted, the result can be a
severe and sometimes debilitating humiliation and loss of self-esteem.360
Therefore, the fact that the student’s genitalia was exposed to the public
may have eliminated its secrecy, but the injury was not one of lost secrecy.
The fact that the exposure occurred in a public place should have been
treated as relatively unimportant.
Another example demonstrates how the approach of conceptualizing
privacy articulated in this Article will shift the focus of the courts to more
pertinent and appropriate considerations. In Nader v. General Motors
Corp.,361
Ralph Nader, a prominent public figure and outspoken critic for
consumer safety, criticized the safety of General Motors’ automobiles for
many years. General Motors interviewed Nader’s friends and acquaintances
to learn the private details of his life, made threatening and harassing
phone calls, wiretapped his telephone and eavesdropped into his conversations,
hired prostitutes to entrap him into an illicit relationship, and kept
him under pervasive surveillance while outside in public places.362
The court proceeded to analyze one-by-one each of the particular acts
of General Motors. The court held that interviewing Nader’s friends was
not an invasion of privacy: “Information about the plaintiff which was
already known to others could hardly be regarded as private to the
plaintiff.”363
The harassing phone calls and the prostitutes did not involve
“intrusion for the purpose of gathering information of a private and
confidential nature.”364
The wiretapping, however, was a well-established
tortious intrusion.365
On the question of the pervasive surveillance, the
court held that although observation “in a public place does not amount to
an invasion of . . . privacy,” in certain instances, “surveillance may be so
‘overzealous’ as to render it actionable.”366
As the court illustrated: “A
person does not automatically make public everything he does merely by
being in a public place, and the mere fact that Nader was in a bank did not
give anyone the right to try to discover the amount of money he was
substantial injury to families when strangers are permitted carte blanche to go through their loved ones’
autopsy photographs. In a decent society that should be recognized per se.” Id. at 9.
359. These techniques were among those employed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
360. See, e.g., William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust 147 (1997) (“Clearly defecation
is degrading and contaminating. It is hedged in with rules about appropriateness as to place. And to
violate those rules is a cause for disgrace and shame.”).
361. 255 N.E.2d 765 (N.Y. 1970).
362. See id. at 767.
363. Id. at 770.
364. Id.
365. Id.
366. Id. at 771.
1150 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
withdrawing.”367
Thus, the court held that this issue depended “on the
nature of the proof.”368
Based on its example, however, surveillance in public
would constitute an invasion of privacy only if it revealed certain facts
or information commonly deemed “private” such as financial information.
In a well-reasoned concurring opinion, Judge Brietel contended that
although the common-law privacy torts are “subdivided . . . into separate
classifications,” these classifications are neither “frozen or exhausted.”369
According to Brietel, “it is premature to hold that the attempted entrapment
of plaintiff in a public place by seemingly promiscuous ladies is no
invasion of any of the categories of the right to privacy.”370
Further, Brietel
reasoned, “while allegations treated singly may not constitute a cause of
action, they may do so in combination, or serve to enhance other violations
of the right to privacy.”371
As Brietel’s concurrence correctly noted, the majority lost sight of the
forest for the trees. The purpose of General Motors’ plan was to employ its
considerable power in a campaign to disrupt Nader’s personal affairs. The
court should have focused on the way in which the company’s actions
aimed to disrupt Nader’s life, and the paramount social importance of
avoiding such exercises of power designed to deter, harass, and discredit
individuals, especially ones who are attempting to raise important social
and political issues. General Motors focused its assault on personal aspects
of Nader’s life: his friends, his sexual behavior, his conversations, and his
daily activities. These are aspects of life we commonly consider to be private,
and with regard to Nader, these aspects of his life were irrelevant to
the consumer advocacy issues he was raising against General Motors. The
disruption involved in this case was not a loss of secrecy, as nothing in this
case indicates that any of Nader’s secrets were uncovered or disclosed.
Much of the information gleaned by General Motors was not intimate.
There was no evidence that General Motors discovered any embarrassing
facts or that Nader’s reputation was harmed. Nor was there a loss of control
over information. Rather, the facts of this case suggest a different type of
disruption, one that should be conceptualized from the bottom up by focusing
on the situation at hand. General Motors’ campaign of harassment, surveillance,
and investigation created a form of systemic oppressiveness, an
exercise of power that is profoundly suffocating and threatening to a person’s
private life. This type of power has a significant potential to render
people vulnerable and helpless, as if they are hunted prey or prisoners under
constant guard.
367. Id.
368. Id.
369. Id. at 772 (Brietel, J., concurring).
370. Id. at 771.
371. Id.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1151
Instead of dissecting the situation and placing each invasion into preexisting
categories of privacy, the court should have assessed the whole situation.
By slicing off parts of the case and compartmentalizing them into
categories, the court impeded a jury’s ability to consider the full situation.
Certain disruptions, such as the one in Nader, are created cumulatively by
the aggregation of isolated acts which together can be oppressive. In short,
rather than look for isolated privacy harms based on existing categories, the
court should have focused on social practices and their disruption. This
focus would have enabled the court to better assess the nature and effects
of the power that General Motors exercised. Indeed, one of the most important
reasons for protecting privacy is to prevent stifling exercises of power
employed to destroy or injure individuals.
A third application of the pragmatic approach to conceptualizing privacy
demonstrates the profound problems with clinging to a particular conception
of privacy that is not well-suited for grappling with the privacy
problems of the Information Age. In a series of decisions, the Court, viewing
privacy as secrecy, held that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for
information known by or exposed to third parties. In United States v.
Miller,372
the Court concluded that a person does not have a reasonable expectation
of privacy in her financial records kept by her bank.373
Analogizing
to a series of cases in which a person’s friend betrays their secret or a
person divulges information to a police informant or undercover officer,374
the Court concluded that “the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the
obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to
Government authorities.”375
Similarly, in Smith v. Maryland,376
the Court
held that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in pen registers (a
listing of the phone numbers a person dials) because they were turned over
to third persons (phone companies).377
Since people “know that they must
convey numerical information to the phone company” and that the phone
company can and does record this information, people cannot “harbor any
general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret.”378
The Court’s jurisprudence in these cases conceptualizes privacy as a
form of total secrecy; however, this conception is ill-suited for the
372. 425 U.S. 435 (1976).
373. Id. at 444.
374. See, e.g., United States v. White, 401 U.S. 745 (1971) (finding that the Fourth Amendment
does not protect information conveyed to government informant who wears a radio transmitter); Hoffa
v. United States, 385 U.S. 293 (1966) (finding that the Fourth Amendment does not protect “misplaced
confidence” when speaking to an undercover informant); On Lee v. United States, 343 U.S. 747 (1952)
(finding that the Fourth Amendment does not apply when a person misplaces her trust by talking to a
bugged government informant).
375. Miller, 425 U.S. at 443.
376. 442 U.S. 735 (1979).
377. See id. at 745-46.
378. Id. at 743.
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circumstances involved in these cases. The people we call, the papers we
discard, and our financial records are commonly understood as private matters
even though third-parties may have access to (or even possess) that
information. We expect privacy because we do not expect unauthorized
persons to delve through this information. Indeed, we often share information
in various relationships, some of which the law strongly protects, such
as those between attorney and client and between patient and physician.379
Life in the modern Information Age often involves exchanging information
with third parties, such as phone companies, Internet service providers,
cable companies, merchants, and so on. Thus, clinging to the notion of privacy
as total secrecy would mean the practical extinction of privacy in today’s
world. In contrast to the notion of privacy as secrecy, privacy can be
understood as an expectation in a certain degree of accessibility of infor-
mation.380
This is not the only way to conceptualize privacy, but it is more
appropriate as an account of modern practices, where cumulatively, we
disclose a tremendous amount of data in various settings and transactions.
Finally, the importance of applying my approach toward conceptualizing
privacy is illustrated by the current difficulties of courts in grappling
with privacy problems created by the collection and use of personal information
in today’s Information Age. I do not believe that these problems
can be conceptualized under the same paradigms as other privacy prob-
lems.381
By conceptualizing using the metaphors and understandings of
privacy created to solve other privacy problems, judges and legal scholars
have not yet been able to adequately grapple with the privacy problems
created by the collection and use of personal information. For example, in
U.S. West, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission,382
a telecommunications
carrier challenged on First Amendment grounds the privacy
regulations of the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”), which
restricted the use and disclosure of customers’ personal information unless
the customers gave their consent. The court, which determined that the
regulations involved a restriction on commercial speech, analyzed the
regulations under the Central Hudson intermediate scrutiny test.383
In concluding
that the regulations failed the Central Hudson test, the court reasoned
that the FCC’s asserted state interest in protecting consumer privacy
was not “substantial.”384
Noting that privacy was a very broad concept, the
379. See, e.g., Jaffee v. Redmond, 518 U.S. 1 (1996) (psychotherapist-patient privilege); Upjohn
Co. v. United States, 449 U.S. 383 (1981) (attorney-client privilege); Hammonds v. Aetna Cas. & Sur.
Co., 243 F. Supp. 793 (D. Ohio 1965) (finding third parties liable for inducing breach of patientphysician
confidentiality).
380. See Daniel J. Solove, Access and Aggregation: Privacy, Public Records, and the
Constitution, 86 Minn. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2002).
381. Solove, supra note 83, at 1398.
382. 182 F.3d 1224 (10th Cir. 1999).
383. Id. at 1233.
384. Id. at 1234-35.
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1153
court held that the FCC did not “specify the particular notion of privacy
and the interest served.”385
The court, however, harbored its own implicit
conception of what would constitute a privacy invasion:
[T]he government must show that the dissemination of the
information desired to be kept private would inflict specific and
significant harm on individuals, such as undue embarrassment or
ridicule, intimidation or harassment, or misappropriation of
sensitive personal information for the purposes of assuming
another’s identity.386
The court further stated that a “general level of discomfort from knowing
that people can readily access information about us does not necessarily
rise to the level of a substantial state interest under Central Hudson for it is
not based on an identified harm.”387
The U.S. West court was too fixated on a conception of privacy that
viewed its invasion as a discrete harm, akin to a tort harm, where the individual
is left with specific injuries that can be readily translated into damages
(for example, a ruined reputation, a broken leg, psychological trauma,
and so on). This, however, is a constrained way to view the disruption created
by the aggregation and uncontrolled uses of personal information by
private sector bureaucracies. This disruption of the way that power is allocated
between individuals and large corporations goes to the structure of
our society as a whole. This problem differs from the disclosure of a secret,
the exposure of a nude body, or the pervasive surveillance of an individual.
It is a problem that goes to the heart of what type of society we are constructing
as we move headfast into the Information Age.
I have discussed the privacy problem created by the collection and use
of personal information by private sector companies at length elsewhere.388
Although many disruptions of privacy practices involve the disclosure of
secrets, much of the information collected about individuals in databases
consists of day-to-day, often nonsecret information such as name, address,
phone number, race, gender, birth date, and so on. Trying to fit the problem
into the conception of privacy as secrecy will not illuminate the problem
very well; in fact, important aspects of the problem will be ignored or marginalized.
The conception of privacy as intimacy fails to capture the
problem in this context because for the most part, databases do not invade
or disrupt our intimate lives. Our names, addresses, types of cars we own,
and so on are not intimate facts about our existence, certainly not equivalent
to our deeply held secrets or carefully guarded diary entries. In
385. Id. at 1235.
386. Id.
387. Id.
388. See Solove, supra note 83.
1154 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90:1087
cyberspace, most of our relationships are more like business transactions
than intimate interpersonal relationships.
The conception of privacy as control over information only partially
captures the problem. The problem is also engendered by the process by
which the information is collected, processed, and used—a process which
itself is out of control. In other words, what makes this problem significant
is the fact that this information is aggregated, that it can be used to make
important decisions about people’s lives, that it is often subjected to a bureaucratic
process lacking much discipline and control, and that the individual
has scant knowledge of how the information is processed and used.
Therefore, existing conceptions of privacy have not adequately accounted
for this problem. The problem can be better understood and dealt with by
conceptualizing privacy from the bottom up, beginning with the problem
itself rather than trying to fit the problem into a general category.
Conclusion
Thus far, attempts to locate a common denominator for conceptualizing
privacy have been unsatisfying. Conceptions that attempt to locate the
core or essence of privacy wind up being too broad or too narrow. I am not
arguing that we must always avoid referring to privacy in the abstract;
sometimes it is easiest and most efficient to do so. Rather, such abstract
reference to privacy often fails to be useful when we need to conceptualize
privacy to solve legal and policy problems. Therefore, it may be worthwhile
to begin conceptualizing privacy in a different way.
A bottom-up contextualized approach toward conceptualizing privacy
will prove quite fruitful in today’s world of rapidly changing technology.
Of course, in advocating a contextual analysis of privacy, the issue remains:
At what level of generality should the contexts be defined? This is
a difficult question, and I doubt there is a uniform level of generality that is
preferable. This Article does not recommend that contexts be defined so
narrowly as to pertain to only a few circumstances. It is often useful to define
contexts of some breadth, so long as the generalization is not overly
reductive or distorting. All generalization is an imperfection. Focusing on
particular contexts and practices is a way of carving up experience into
digestible parts. The human mind simply cannot examine experience in its
chaotic totality: it must bite off pieces to analyze.
The way we conceptualize privacy in each context profoundly influences
how we shape legal solutions to particular problems. We can evaluate
the results of our conceptions by looking to how well they work in
solving the problems. Although I critique attempts to locate an overarching
conception of privacy, I am certainly not arguing against endeavors to conceptualize
privacy. Conceptualizing privacy in particular contexts is an
essential step in grappling with legal and policy problems. Thus, the issue
2002] CONCEPTUALIZING PRIVACY 1155
of how we conceptualize privacy is of paramount importance for the
Information Age, for we are beset with a number of complex privacy problems,
causing great disruption to numerous important practices of high social
value. With the method of philosophical inquiry I am recommending,
we can better understand, and thus more effectively grapple with, these
emerging problems.
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