After reviewing some contexts in which privacy predominates as an issue, I shall show that there are two very different kinds of privacy, serving diametrically opposed functions vis-à-vis social control over the individual. I shall discus the difference between these sorts of privacy and point out the significance of, and basis for, seeing one form of privacy as protecting people from the overreaching control of others.

ON NOT DEFINING PRIVACY

Often it is suggested that the best way to begin a discussion of a volatile and controversial concept like privacy is with a definition. However, given the socially hyperactive role that privacy plays in contemporary controversies regarding the evolving contours of personhood, there may be some benefit in not striving for verbal precision in defining privacy before this evolution is further played out. At this stage, we can better understand privacy by characterizing the contexts in which it arises or is invoked as a concern. The particular contexts considered here, beginning with the legal context, were chosen because they are germane to the issues that arise in this book and not because they are representative of all privacy contexts or controversies, let alone comprehensive. We shall see from the discussion that nearly everything about privacy, from its scope to its value, is controversial.

THE LEGAL CONTEXT: A SKETCH

Privacy has been described in a U.S. Supreme Court decision as a right more fundamental than any of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. However, privacy attracted scant explicit legal attention until 1890, when Warren and Brandeis advocated explicit legal recognition of a right to privacy.