The Seven Veils of Privacy

P rivacy is very important. Whatever it is. The debate on privacy is notable for the lack of agreement — what is it for, is it a good or a bad thing, a right or a preference? As philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson put it, “Perhaps the most striking thing about the right to privacy is that nobody seems to have any clear idea of what it is.”1 In a classic legal paper, William Prosser dismissed it as a set of interests “which are tied together by the common name, but otherwise have almost nothing in common except that each represents an interference with the right of the plaintiff ... ‘to be let alone’.”2 One of the most distinguished current commentators, Daniel Solove, pronounced that it was “a concept in disarray.”3 Does this matter to anyone but a philosopher, a lawyer, or a nut who doesn’t want his or her data to help humanity? It does: privacy has a role to play in our psychological well-being and the health of our democracies. Being undefined doesn’t stop it playing that role, but the lack of definition opens up space for critics and skeptics with different priorities. Jeff Jarvis writes that instead of coherence he sees “a confused web of worries, changing norms, varying cultural mores, complicated relationships, conflicting motives, vague feelings of danger with sporadic specific evidence of harm, and unclear laws and regulations made all the more complex by context.”4 In short, he’s saying it’s a mélange that shouldn’t stand in the way of social progress, and that we should ignore inchoate privacy concerns and reap the benefits of sharing data with nary a backward glance. Maybe he has a point.