A New Conception of Human Rights

Abstract

The demand that individual privacy be respected is becoming more common and more insistent in our age. This probably reflects a rapidly increasing need for privacy arising from converging ecological, cultural, technical and social changes. The population explosion together with modern urbanization have made it much more difficult for the individual to get away, physically and psychologically, from the crowd of strangers around him. The growing allegiance to political individualism and moral autonomy have caused the individual to resent and resist legal regulation and social interference more intensely. At a time when bugging and other techniques of surveillance have been perfected to an alarming degree, the development of computers enables us to store and retrieve vastly increased amounts of information about any specified individual in even very large populations. Finally, as organizations have grown larger in size and more bureaucratic in structure, their tendency to invade the life of the individual has grown apace.