David Meeler

Beginning with Warren and Brandeis, I canvass the development and success of privacy in various legal issues. Warren and Brandeis focused on privacy as protection against unwanted publication of personal information. Prosser cataloged four case types including intrusion into one's seclusion, publication of embarrassing private facts, appropriating one's name or likeness, and publicity placing one in a 'false light.' In the American constitution, privacy emerges from the 4th amendment, and protects against unwarranted searches and seizures of personal property, papers or effects. Constitutional privacy developed as protection for certain rights to engage in sex and marriage, rights controlling many aspects of procreation, and the right to make some kinds of decisions that are centrally important to the individual. ;Chapters two and three explore six paradigm philosophical approaches to privacy: three from a thin legal interpretation and three from a thicker moral interpretation. Privacy has been identified with mere control over information or has been derided completely as a pseudo-right easily reduced to less controversial rights like property. Feinberg and Henkin eliminate constitutional privacy because it concerns autonomy and not privacy. Thomson eliminates privacy altogether because it is a pseudo-right overlapped by and confused with basic rights. Parent focuses on privacy only as protection for personal information. Broader conceptions consider privacy fundamental to human moral and psychological development, defending privacy as a way to protect autonomy from state control. Schoeman claims that privacy is preserved when information is not consolidated. Nagel safeguards public discourse from contamination by personal material, and DeCew identifies privacy as a cluster concept covering information, bodily access, and personal expression. ;In chapter four I defend a thin conception of privacy and consider the feminist critique of the public/private distinction, which centers on privacy as a shield for practices that devalue, degrade or abuse women. This critique sees privacy in terms of autonomy establishing a private inner sanctum ruled by the head of the household. A liberal understanding of privacy undermines the feminist critique by limiting privacy against the power of the state, where privacy cannot be used to shield actions that, like abuse, violate criminal statutes

I will argue for a straightforward claim: privacy is best understood as protecting information about us from being known by others. To those unfamiliar with recent scholarship regarding privacy, this claim may seem self-evident, too trivial to deserve defense. At the same time, scholars of privacy may find the claim too narrow or outdated to enjoy sustained defense. This situation makes the view an interesting one, I think. My goal is to develop a conception of privacy that is concise enough to be legally functional and robust enough to be morally valuable. Beginning with richer moral conceptions ofprivacy, I will pursue a type ofreductioniststrategy by defending infonnational privacy as the only meaningful core of privacy interests. My reductionism is not necessarily conceptual. While I think a conceptual reduction might also be defended, my reduction can be seen, primarily, as practical. My reasons for focusing on information are straightforward:(conceptually) I suggest that any private matter must be related to the information aspect, and (practically) that protecting information privacy is sufficient for protecting the other aspects identified in the richer moral tradition; however, protecting only the other regularly acknowledged aspects (either access or expressive privacy) fails to protect information privacy. This analysis of privacy centered on information should be clean enough for legal application while addressing the deepest worries that motivate morally thick analyses. We define the parameters ofself-expression and legitimate government access most effectively by carefullydefining the parameters for protecting information about our lives