Right of privacy

Perhaps the most widely quoted definition of privacy is from the classic 1890 law review article by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, titled “The Right of Privacy” 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890): More recently, the U.S. Department of Commerce wrote:
 * Privacy is the right to be let alone.
 * There is no single privacy law in the United States, rather, U.S. privacy law is a patchwork of constitutional, statutory, regulatory, and common law protections. While the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment restricts the ability of government to collect information from places in which an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, there is no constitutional right to be free from analogous intrusions by private parties. Tort law limits intrusive collection of private information, penalizes unwarranted disclosure of erroneous information about individuals. A number of statutes, at both the federal and state level, protect individuals from governmental misuse of personal information, while other statutes adopt ‘fair information principles’ for private sector record keepers in specific industries.
 * In 1974, Congress established the Privacy Protection Study Commission to undertake a broad study of whether privacy rights were being adequately protected in the emerging information society. In its final report, issued in 1977, the Commission concluded that federal privacy laws should advance three concurrent policy goals &mdash;
 * To minimize intrusiveness by creating a proper balance between what an individual is expected to divulge to a record-keeping organization and what he or she seeks in return;
 * To maximize fairness by opening up record-keeping operations in ways that will minimize the extent to which recorded information about an individual is itself a source of unfairness in any decision about him or her; and
 * To create legitimate, enforceable expectations of confidentiality by creating and defining obligations with respect to the uses and disclosures that will be made of recorded information about an individual.

Today. . . there have been further advances in telecommunications and information technology. Given the proliferation of computerized data collection and the prospect of converging technologies &mdash; computers, telephones, and mass media &mdash; it is time to reconsider what privacy means in developing electronic communities.