Privacy: Its Constitution and Vicissitudes

The idea of is a vague one and difficult to get into a right perspective. Numerous meanings crowd in on the mind that tries to analyze privacy: the of private property; as a proprietary interest in name and image; as the keeping of one's affairs to one's self; the of the internal affairs of a voluntary association or of a business corporation; as the physical absence of others who are unqualified by kinship, affection, or other attributes to be present; respect for as respect for the desire of another person not to disclose or to have disclosed information about what he is doing or has done; the of sexual and familial affairs; the desire for as a desire not to be observed by another person or persons; the of the private citizen in contrast with the public official; and these are only a few. But not only are there many usages of the concept of privacy; there are also the numerous related and contrasting terms: freedom, autonomy, publicity, secrecy, confidentiality, intimacy, and so forth. In the ensuing paragraphs, I will attempt to state a little more clearly what I mean by privacy and to place it in relationship to other concepts. Privacy is a zero-relationship between two persons or two groups or between a group and a person. It is a zero-relationship in the sense that it is constituted by the absence of interaction or communication or perception within contexts in which such interaction, communication, or perception is practicable-i.e., within a common ecological situation, such as that arising from spatial contiguity or membership in a single embracing collectivity such as a family, a working group, and ultimately a whole society. Privacy may be the of a single individual, it may be the of two individuals, or it may be the of three or numerous individuals. But it is always the of those persons, single or plural, vis-a-vis other persons. In any society, most of the population is private in a certain sense vis-a-vis most of the rest of the population. Mutual ignorance obtains; interaction is impossible because no structural or spatial context of interaction exists. But this separateness is not in our sense. The phenomenon of exists only in contexts in which interaction, communication, or perception is physically practicable and within the range of what can be expected of human beings. The situation must, therefore, be one in which the abrogation of by intrusion from the outside or by renunciation from the inside is practically possible.