Posted by Orin Kerr:
A Taxonomy of Privacy:
My friend and colleague [1]Daniel Solove has a new and interesting
paper currently available in draft form, [2]A Taxonomy of Privacy,
forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. The paper
examines and classifies the different types of legal claims that are
placed under the umbrella term of "privacy," focusing on the specific
harms involved in each type of claim. As one who has often found the
word "privacy" to shed more heat than light in legal debates, I found
the paper pretty interesting. From the introduction:
Often, privacy problems are merely stated in knee-jerk form:
"That violates my privacy!" When we contemplate an invasion of
privacy � such as having our personal information gathered by
companies in databases � we instinctively recoil. Many discussions
of privacy appeal to people�s fears and anxieties. What
commentators often fail to do, however, is to translate our
instincts into a reasoned articulable account of why such a privacy
problem is harmful. When people claim that privacy should be
protected, it is unclear precisely what they mean. This poses a
difficulty when making policy or resolving a case because lawmakers
and judges have a hard time articulating the privacy harm. . . .
In this article, I provide a framework for how the legal system
can come to a better understanding of privacy. I aim to develop a
taxonomy that focuses more specifically on the different kinds of
activities that impinge upon privacy. I endeavor to shift focus
away from the vague term �privacy� and more toward the specific
activities that are posing privacy problems. Although various
attempts at explicating the meaning of �privacy� have been made,
few have attempted to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive
and concrete manner.
References
1. http://www.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/
2. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=667622
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