Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.
The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of appropriate use and protection of information. Privacy may also take the form of bodily integrity.
Throughout history, there have been various conceptions of privacy. Most cultures acknowledge the right of individuals to keep aspects of their personal lives out of the public domain. The right to be free from unauthorized invasions of privacy by governments, corporations, or individuals is enshrined in the privacy laws of many countries and, in some instances, their constitutions.
With the rise of technology, the debate regarding privacy has expanded from a bodily sense to include a digital sense. In most countries, the right to digital privacy is considered an extension of the original right to privacy, and many countries have passed acts that further protect digital privacy from public and private entities.
There are multiple techniques to invade privacy, which may be employed by corporations or governments for profit or political reasons. Conversely, in order to protect privacy, people may employ encryption or anonymity measures.
Etymology
The word privacy is derived from the Latin word and concept of 'History
Philosophical views on privacy
The concept of privacy has been explored and discussed by numerous philosophers throughout history.Privacy has historical roots in ancient Greek philosophical discussions. The most well-known of these was Aristotle's distinction between two spheres of life: the public sphere of the polis, associated with political life, and the private sphere of the oikos, associated with domestic life. Privacy is valued along with other basic necessities of life in the Jewish deutero-canonical Book of Sirach.
Islam's holy text, the Qur'an, states the following regarding privacy: 'Do not spy on one another' ; 'Do not enter any houses except your own homes unless you are sure of their occupants' consent'.
English philosopher John Locke's writings on natural rights and the social contract laid the groundwork for modern conceptions of individual rights, including the right to privacy. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke argued that a man is entitled to his own self through one's natural rights of life, liberty, and property. He believed that the government was responsible for protecting these rights so individuals were guaranteed private spaces to practice personal activities.
In the political sphere, philosophers hold differing views on the right of private judgment. German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel makes the distinction between moralität, which refers to an individual's private judgment, and sittlichkeit, pertaining to one's rights and obligations as defined by an existing corporate order. On the contrary, Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, interpreted law as an invasion of privacy. His theory of utilitarianism argued that legal actions should be judged by the extent of their contribution to human wellbeing, or necessary utility.
Hegel's notions were modified by prominent 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill's essay On Liberty argued for the importance of protecting individual liberty against the tyranny of the majority and the interference of the state. His views emphasized the right of privacy as essential for personal development and self-expression.
Discussions surrounding surveillance coincided with philosophical ideas on privacy. Jeremy Bentham developed the phenomenon known as the Panoptic effect through his 1791 architectural design of a prison called Panopticon. The phenomenon explored the possibility of surveillance as a general awareness of being watched that could never be proven at any particular moment. French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded that the possibility of surveillance in the instance of the Panopticon meant a prisoner had no choice but to conform to the prison's rules.
More recently, the unequal effects of weak privacy protections have been debated. In Privacy at the Margins, law professor Scott Skinner-Thompson argues that marginalized and vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected both because they are more likely to be required to share personal information and because they experience more severe harm when their privacy is breached.
Technology
As technology has advanced, the way in which privacy is protected and violated has changed with it. In the case of some technologies, such as the printing press or the Internet, the increased ability to share information can lead to new ways in which privacy can be breached. It is generally agreed that the first publication advocating privacy in the United States was the 1890 article by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy", and that it was written mainly in response to the increase in newspapers and photographs made possible by printing technologies.In 1948, 1984, written by George Orwell, was published. A classic dystopian novel, 1984 describes the life of Winston Smith in 1984, located in Oceania, a totalitarian state. The all-controlling Party, the party in power led by Big Brother, is able to control power through mass surveillance and limited freedom of speech and thought. George Orwell provides commentary on the negative effects of totalitarianism, particularly on privacy and censorship. Parallels have been drawn between 1984 and modern censorship and privacy, a notable example being that large social media companies, rather than the government, are able to monitor a user's data and decide what is allowed to be said online through their censorship policies, ultimately for monetary purposes.
In the 1960s, people began to consider how changes in technology were bringing changes in the concept of privacy. Vance Packard's The Naked Society was a popular book on privacy from that era and led US discourse on privacy at that time. In addition, Alan Westin's Privacy and Freedom shifted the debate regarding privacy from a physical sense, how the government controls a person's body and other activities such as wiretapping and photography. As important records became digitized, Westin argued that personal data was becoming too accessible and that a person should have complete jurisdiction over their data, laying the foundation for the modern discussion of privacy.
New technologies can also create new ways to gather private information. In 2001, the legal case Kyllo v. United States determined that the use of thermal imaging devices that can reveal previously unknown information without a warrant constitutes a violation of privacy. In 2019, after developing a corporate rivalry in competing voice-recognition software, Apple and Amazon required employees to listen to [|intimate] moments and faithfully transcribe the contents.
Police and government
Police and citizens often conflict on what degree the police can intrude a citizen's digital privacy. For instance, in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Jones, in the case of Antoine Jones who was arrested of drug possession using a GPS tracker on his car that was placed without a warrant, that warrantless tracking infringes the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court also justified that there is some "reasonable expectation of privacy" in transportation since the reasonable expectation of privacy had already been established under Griswold v. Connecticut. The Supreme Court also further clarified that the Fourth Amendment did not only pertain to physical instances of intrusion but also digital instances, and thus United States v. Jones became a landmark case.In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Riley v. California, where David Leon Riley was arrested after he was pulled over for driving on expired license tags when the police searched his phone and discovered that he was tied to a shooting, that searching a citizen's phone without a warrant was an unreasonable search, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court concluded that the cell phones contained personal information different from trivial items, and went beyond to state that information stored on the cloud was not necessarily a form of evidence. Riley v. California evidently became a landmark case, protecting the digital protection of citizen's privacy when confronted with the police.
A recent notable occurrence of the conflict between law enforcement and a citizen in terms of digital privacy has been in the 2018 case, Carpenter v. United States. In this case, the FBI used cell phone records without a warrant to arrest Timothy Ivory Carpenter on multiple charges, and the Supreme Court ruled that the warrantless search of cell phone records violated the Fourth Amendment, citing that the Fourth Amendment protects "reasonable expectations of privacy" and that information sent to third parties still falls under data that can be included under "reasonable expectations of privacy".
Beyond law enforcement, many interactions between the government and citizens have been revealed either lawfully or unlawfully, specifically through whistleblowers. One notable example is Edward Snowden, who released multiple operations related to the mass surveillance operations of the National Security Agency, where it was discovered that the NSA continues to breach the security of millions of people, mainly through mass surveillance programs whether it was collecting great amounts of data through third party private companies, hacking into other embassies or frameworks of international countries, and various breaches of data, which prompted a culture shock and stirred international debate related to digital privacy.