The Right to Privacy

The 1890 Harvard Law Review article "The Right to Privacy" by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis is probably one of the most influential articles ever written on the topic of the protection of privacy. In this article, Warren and Brandeis argued that common law contained the foundation for effectively protecting privacy and that it was possible to modify and extend common law to make this happen.

From reading "The Right to Privacy," it certainly looks like Warren and Brandeis started thinking about the need to protect privacy because technological innovations were making it easier and easier to violate privacy. We have this same problem today. Cell phone carriers have databases of every call that we make as well as where we are when we make these calls, and e-commerce web sites track every click that you make and every page that you view.

Back in the 1880s, however, the problem was apparently a bit different. The example that Warren and Brandeis use again and again is that of the loss of privacy that the new technologies for photography allow. After all, if anyone can take a photograph without you knowing it, the possibilities for abuse of the technology are limited only by the imagination of the people who have cameras.

From the early twenty-first century, it almost seems hard to believe that cameras could cause so much concern. I wonder if people 100 years from now will have the same reaction to the privacy concerns that we have today. People seem to have adjusted to the widespread use of cameras fairly well, and they seem to have done this by accepting that the violation of privacy that they allow is an acceptable cost of using the technology. It may seem hard to believe now, but we might adjust to today's information technology by accepting that the violations of privacy that they allow. I wouldn't be surprised if that's how things turn out in the future.