The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America

The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. Jeffrey Rosen. New York: Random House, 2000. 288 pp. $24.95 hbk. What exactly is the injury suffered when private information is disclosed? The answer varies with the information revealed. Revelation of personal information may be embarrassing. It may harm reputation. One may have something to hide. But even if the information revealed seems mundane, one may still feel discomfort. Why do some find it unsettling to learn that countless video cameras watch them as they go about their routines on the streets of New York City? Why is delight sometimes tempered by discomfort when an online bookstore makes recommendations based on our previous purchases and browsing? In The Unwanted Gaze, Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor and journalist, takes a panoramic view of privacy, drawing upon legal scholarship, psychology, sociology, and literature to articulate the harms of being watched and tracked. Scholars of media ethics and law will find this a valuable contribution on an issue in the spotlight. Rosen carefully and succinctly reviews cases and arguments about privacy, and traces what he characterizes as the erosion of privacy in America, in several contexts: at home, at work, in court, in cyberspace. Rosen proposes legal solutions for some of the problems he discusses. However, Rosen's contribution is not so much in prescribing legal solutions as in pinning down the values of privacy and the injury suffered by its violation. Based on his analysis, Rosen argues forcefully that the "architecture" of new media should be constructed so that one can control what one discloses, and when one discloses it. Three related and powerful insights animate Rosen's analysis. First, Rosen argues, revelations of decontextualized information-a legal record, a credit history, or a paparazzo's photograph of a celebrity, for example-raise the danger that one may be misjudged on a bit of information wrenched from context, that "part of our identity will be confused with the whole of our identity." Second, Rosen emphasizes the tendency for prurient informationgossip about a sexual liaison, for exampleto drown out other types of information when one forms impressions, so that one's character may be reduced, in the minds of the audience, to one's most embarrassing moment. Third, Rosen asserts, the erosion of privacy threatens "backstage areas"venues at work or at home, in the online or offline worlds, where one can express oneself candidly and informally, and collect oneself before putting on one's "public face." The privacy of the backstage areas is essential, Rosen argues, for public success, even if the "backstage" is unmonitored e-mail in which one occasionally vents about one's boss. In his chapter "Privacy at Home," Rosen illustrates the erosion of privacy by discussing the disclosure of Sen. Bob Packwood's diaries. When Packwood was accused of sexual harassment of a former aide, he said that he had written in his diary about interactions with her. The Senate Ethics Committee subpoenaed the diaries, which were made part of the public record. A district court ruled that no privacy rights were violated. The Washington Post then published excerpts from the diaries. Given this and other precedents, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr faced no legal obstacles when he subpoenaed drafts of Monica Lewinsky's correspondence, including even unsent drafts of love letters to President Clinton. Those letters were subsequently released in Starr's report to Congress, and made available in the media. As evidence that privacy protections have been seriously diminished in recent years, Rosen contrasts these recent cases with earlier cases that were more protective of privacy, some from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In "Privacy at Work," Rosen argues that monitoring of employees, and the accompanying threat of legal and career consequences, deprives employees of real and virtual "backstage areas. …