PRIVACY: SOME INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
Philip Doty

While we all commonly invoke the concept of privacy in ordinary conversations, precisely what we mean by the concept is not clear. And that situation is echoed in much of the literature about privacy - there are literally hundreds of "definitions" of privacy, some mutually supporting and some conflicting.

Among the many elements that privacy includes are (Doty, forthcoming):

• Protection of information related to individual attributes such as age, name, educational history, and taste in food, entertainment, clothing, and the like
  
  
• Protection of information about commercial transactions effected by telephone and computer; such information is sometimes identified as transaction-generated information (TGI)
  
  
• Protection of information related to social (especially intimate) relationships, e.g., marital and parental status, group membership, and identities of correspondents
  
  
• Protection of physical isolation, e.g., limitation of physical intrusion and searches by government and commercial actors
  
  
• Prohibition of access to the physical self; this prohibition especially includes protection from unwanted touching or observation and forced giving of samples of blood, DNA, and tissue
  
  
• Protection of information related to physical location and activity
  
  
• Prohibition of access to one's attention
  
  
• Freedom to act, e.g., to be politically and socially active and to act erotically and make reproductive decisions largely free from social and governmental scrutiny

Clearly, while these categories are not mutually exclusive, privacy as a concept bears a very heavy burden. Our confusion about what we and others mean by "privacy," thus, appears almost inevitable.

One point worth remembering is that privacy does not concern simply individuals or individuals' interests. There are two important reasons for this assertion:

• We form and perform our identities in the context of social relations (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Goffman, 1959). Privacy is one of the means that we use to define and characterize these relationships, especially our intimate relationships.
  
  
• Often, privacy interests are shared, e.g., the identity of one's correspondents, social contacts, and fellow group members.

Unfortunately, too much of the literature and our common understanding of privacy emphasize personal, i.e., individual, concerns, ignoring the important social elements of privacy.

Among the classical citations we see in the literature of privacy is to the 1890 Harvard Law Review paper by Warren & Brandeis (1985). This paper took Judge Cooley's 1888 assertion that privacy is the "right to be let alone" and brought privacy to the kind of political attention it had not previously enjoyed. There are two elements of this paper that merit particular mention here. First, as the list of eight elements of privacy outlined above should help clarify, simply calling privacy "the right to be let alone" obscures many important characteristics of the actual practices of privacy. Second, Warren and Brandeis assume a hard and fast distinction between the public and private. This easy distinction that also animates our ordinary conceptions of privacy can and should be interrogated (Habermas, 1991; Fraser, 1992), and gendered perspectives on privacy especially do so (Allen, 1988; Boling, 1996; Frazer & Lacey, 1993).

There are an increasing number of important collections of papers that go beyond the easy "I'm right, you're wrong" dichotomies into which privacy discussions too often fall. Excellent sources include Agre & Rotenberg (1997), Bennett & Grant (1996), and many of the papers in Kling (1994). There are a number of organizations that also engage privacy and its interaction with digital technologies from a variety of perspectives. These include the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Cato Institute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Online Privacy Alliance (OPA).

Despite our field's sometimes naïve assumptions, there are defensible positions that posit that we have too much privacy. No matter what one's opinions about privacy, it is important to know this part of the privacy literature. Useful and well-written pieces include Etzioni (1999), Posch (1993), and Singleton (1998).

Among the many themes developed in privacy recently, particularly important ones include:

• Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs; see, e.g., Burkert, 1997)
  
  
• Privacy as property (e.g., Branscomb, 1994; Laudon, 1996)
  
  
• The interaction among various and often conflicting privacy regimes in a global context
  
  
• What combination of self-regulation and governmental oversight is appropriate for addressing the protection of privacy in commercial transactions

As with copyright and other important information policy issues, it is clear that LIS has significant contributions to make to the national and international conversation about privacy, especially in the digital environment.

Sources

Agre, Philip E., & Rotenberg, Marc. (Eds.). (1997). Technology and privacy: The new landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Allen, Anita L. (1988). Uneasy access: Privacy for women in a free society. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.

American Civil Liberties Union. (2000). http://www.aclu.org

Bennett, Colin, & Grant, Rebecca. (Eds.). (1996). Visions of privacy: Policy choices for the digital age. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Berger, Peter L., & Luckmann, Thomas. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.

Boling, Patricia. (1996). Privacy and the politics of intimate life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Branscomb, Anne Wells. (1994). Who owns information? From privacy to public access. New York: BasicBooks.

Burkert, Herbert. (1997). Privacy-enhancing technologies: Typology, critique, vision. In Philip E. Agre & Marc Rotenberg (Eds.), Technology and privacy: The new landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cato Institute. (2000). http://www.cato.org

Doty, Philip. (Forthcoming, 2001). Digital privacy: Towards a new politics and discursive practice. In Martha E. Williams (Ed.), Annual review of information science and technology, Vol. 35. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. (2000). http://www.eff.org

Etzioni, Amitai. (1999). The limits of privacy. New York: Basic Books.

Fraser, Nancy. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In Craig Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109-142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Frazer, Elizabeth, & Lacey, Nicola. (1993). The politics of community: A feminist critique of the liberal-communitarian debate. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Goffman, Erving. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kling, Rob. (1996). Computerization and controversy: Value conflicts and social choices. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Laudon, Kenneth C. (1996). Markets and privacy. Communications of the ACM, 39(9), 92-104.

Online Privacy Alliance. (2000). http://www.privacyalliance.org/

Posch, Robert J. (1993). Don't Take Lou Harris too seriously. Direct Marketing, 56(8), 44-48.

Singleton, Solveig. (1998). Privacy as censorship: A skeptical view of proposals to regulate privacy in the private sector. Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 295. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-295es.html

Warren, Samuel D., & Brandeis, Louis D. (1985). The right to privacy. In Deborah G. Johnson & John W. Snapper (Eds.), Ethical issues in the use of computers (pp. 173-182). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. (Originally published in 1890)