Protecting Privacy in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public

Abstract

While philosophical theories have long acknowledged the relationship between privacy and information about persons, and have argued for limits on allowable practices of information gathering, analyzing, and sharing as a means of protecting privacy, their efforts have primarily applied to intimate and sensitive information. A variety of factors have shaped normative theories of privacy, making them more responsive to some types of problems and constraints and less responsive to others. Examining these theories with a view to understanding why specifically they either neglect or dismiss the normative force of privacy in public, three factors emerge, which the author have labeled, respectively, conceptual, normative, and empirical. Reasons for protecting privacy in public are quite similar to reasons for protecting privacy of the more traditional kind because values placed in jeopardy from invasions of the intimate realm are also jeopardized by various forms of public surveillance practiced today.

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