Defining Privacy

Privacy is a difficult notion to define in part because rituals of association and disassociation are cultural and species-relative. For example, opening a door without knocking might be considered a serious privacy violation in one culture and yet permitted in another. Definitions of privacy can be couched in descriptive or normative terms—we can view privacy as a condition or as a moral claim on others to refrain from certain activities. Furthermore, some view privacy as a derivative notion that rests upon more basic rights such as liberty or property. As highlighted below, there is little agreement on how to define privacy. But like other contested concepts—for example, liberty or justice—this conceptual difficulty does not undermine its importance. If only Plato were correct and we could gaze upon the forms and determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for each of these concepts. But we can’t, and neither intuitions nor natural language analysis offer much help. Not doing violence to the language and cohering with our intuitions may be good features of an account of privacy. Nevertheless, these features, individually or jointly, do not suffice to provide adequate grounds for a definition—the language and the intuitions may be hopelessly muddled. Moreover, as indicated by the analysis of examples offered throughout this article, there are central cases of privacy and peripheral ones. Aristotle discussed this idea of central and peripheral cases in talking about “friendship”: “. . . so they are not able to do justice to all the phenomena of friendship; since one definition will not suit all, they think there are no other friendships; but the others are friendships. . . .” The same may be said of privacy. Some of the core features of the central cases of privacy may not be present in the outlying cases. One of the ways a conception is illuminated is to trace the similarities and differences between these examples. Evaluation is a further tool that aids in arriving at a defensible conception of privacy. A perfectly coherent definition of privacy that accords faultlessly with some group’s intuitions may be totally useless. In the most general terms, we are asking “what this or that way of classifying privacy is good for.” At the most abstract level the evaluation may be moral—we ask “does this way of carving up the world promote, hinder, or leave unaffected, human well-being or flourishing?” John Finnis echoes this sentiment,