Privacy in Modern Industrial Society

Abstract

The idea of privacy is a vague one and difficult to get into a right perspective. Numerous meanings crowd in on the mind that tries to analyse privacy: the privacy of private property; privacy as a proprietary interest in name and image; privacy as the keeping of one’s affairs to oneself; the privacy of the internal affairs of a voluntary association or of a business corporation; privacy as the physical absence of others who are unqualified by kinship, affection, or other attributes to be present; respect for privacy as respect for the desire of another person not to disclose or to have disclosed information about what he is doing or has done; the privacy of sexual and familial affairs; the desire for privacy as a desire not to be observed by another person or persons; the privacy of the private citizen in contrast with the public official; and these are only a few. But not only are there many usages of the concept of privacy; there are also the numerous related and contrasting terms: freedom, autonomy, publicity, secrecy, confidentiality, intimacy, and so forth. In the ensuing paragraphs, I will attempt to state a little more clearly what I mean by ‘privacy’ and to place it in relationship to other concepts.

Reprinted with permission from a symposium on Privacy which appeared in Law and Contemporary Problems, 31, Spring 1966, pp. 281–306, published by the Duke University School of Law, Durham, North Carolina. ©1966 Duke University.