Privacy, Democracy and Freedom of Expression

1982

Bedause of judicial indifference and legislative inaction, the Conilict"between the right of privacy and'the freedom of the press is no closei to a resolution than it was a century ago. William Prossee's reduction of the common law of privacy into four separate torts has not solved'the problem. The doncept of "newsworthiness" has not been helpful either because the judiciary has neither advanced nor adopted a unifiedAtheory of the news. -Effortd to link privacy-'to community mores have been misdirected, stressing the community's:right to shield itself from indecency instead of the individual's autonoiny and dignity, arid failing to discriminate between variOus types of privacy. Privacy should be treafed as a value worthy of its own status, as a matter of human dignity and a requisite for a democratic society. Since prior restraint would be too destr.uctive'to freedom of the press, the goal of,privacy law must be to prevent its further ahuse. A four-part test can be used to balance.the plaintiff's and defendant's responsibilities in a privacy action. The plaintiff must show that the disclosed facts are truly private and that their publication was sufficiently embarrassing to result in a loss of dighity; the defendant must explain why clisclosure was "in the public interest" 'and thus privileged and why it was necessary to reveal the plaintiff's identity. (JL) wea,

Contemporary Political Theory 5.2. (2006) 142-162

This article argues that people have legitimate interests in privacy that deserve legal protection on democratic principles. It describes the right to privacy as a bundle of rights of personal choice, association and expression and shows that, so described, people have legitimate political interests in privacy. These interests reflect the ways that privacy rights can supplement the protection for people’s freedom and equality provided by rights of political choice, association and expression, and can help to make sure that these are, genuinely, democratic. Feminists have often been ambivalent about legal protection for privacy, because privacy rights have, so often, protected the coercion and exploitation of women, and made it difficult to politicise personal forms of injustice. However, attention to the differences between democratic and undemocratic forms of politics can enable us to meet these concerns, and to distinguish a democratic justification of privacy rights from the alternatives

"Media and Communication", 2020

While communication and media studies tend to define privacy with reference to data security, current processes of datafication and commodification substantially transform ways of how people act in increasingly dense communicative networks. This begs for advancing research on the flow of individual and organizational information considering its relational, con-textual and, in consequence, political dimensions. Privacy, understood as the control over the flow of individual or group information in relation to communicative actions of others, frames the articles assembled in this thematic issue. These contributions focus on theoretical challenges of contemporary communication and media privacy research as well as on structural privacy conditions and people's mundane communicative practices underlining inherent political aspect. They highlight how particular acts of doing privacy are grounded in citizen agency realized in datafied environments. Overall, this collection of articles unfolds the concept of 'Politics of Privacy' in diverse ways, contributing to an emerging body of communication and media research.

2010

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

The meaning of privacy has been frequently disputed in the philosophical and legal literature since Warren and Brandeis first argued for it as a distinct and important personal and social value. Nevertheless, while the meaning of privacy is held to be vague, there is general agreement that Warren and Brandeis were correct in their assessment of its value. Theorists of democracy, on the other hand, have been ambivalent towards the realm of the private. This paper interrogates the intersection between privacy and democracy, questioning the place of privacy as a distinctly democratic value. Introduction My concern in this paper is with the place a right to privacy has in a normative account of democracy. 1 One difficulty with my topic is that both privacy and democracy are highly contested ideas and so I am liable to become entangled in too many matters of definition. I am going to attempt to evade this problem by offering an account of privacy that addresses, I think, the essential worry that advocates of privacy express and one that is not overly controversial. This will not be a full definition of privacy but a partial one suited to my purposes here. With this account in hand I will then show how three alternative views of democracy place different values on privacy. I will end by arguing that only what I call full deliberative democracy requires a right to privacy as a central part of its democratic vision and, consequently, offers a democratic argument for the right to privacy. Although many countries, states, and international organisations have or advocate for a right to privacy, the idea that privacy is valuable is by no means universally accepted. Some have argued that privacy is a dated notion incompatible with modern technology, while others have argued for its limited value. I think it is important at the beginning to distinguish between what privacy amounts to and what its value is. What we value about privacy will change according to how we understand it. However, there is no easy way to say what privacy means, as is evident in the extensive philosophical and legal literature on just this topic, beginning in 1890 with Warren and Brandeis's law journal article called the " Right to Privacy ". There they argued that the right to privacy was a right to be " let alone " (Warren and Brandeis 1890, 205) and free from the invasion of the " sacred precincts of private and domestic life " (Warren and Brandeis 1890, 196). This definition of privacy has some obvious flaws. It is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for privacy. It confuses solitude with privacy and, as Judith Thomson notes, I can fail to let you alone by dropping a brick on your head, but in doing so I have not violated your privacy (Thomson 1975, 295). Nevertheless, it does capture one aspect of what privacy means by pointing to the idea of limited or restricted access as an important part of its definition. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will focus on a second feature of privacy that has less to do with encroachment into personal domains and more to do with restrictions on what other people and institutions know about a person. On this account, one is in a state of privacy with respect to a piece of information to the extent that others are not in a cognitive relationship with it. In other words, the fewer people who know some fact about me, the more private that information is. If no-one else knows it, then it is absolutely private.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Nobody likes to be talked about but everybody likes to talk. Trying to stop the dissemination of private information is, however, an impingement on free expression and the freedom to observe.

Fair and Free: Labour, Liberty and Human Rights, 2017

Protecting freedom of expression and privacy rights would make our democracy stronger and our people safer. And our domestic approach should be the template for an international policy which supports free speech and human rights worldwide.