The Book attempts to analyse and amalgamate longstanding debates regarding the contours of the right to privacy, and argues that the notion of privacy is not limited to a specific definition or right. Solove proposes a flexible framework of privacy, one that acknowledges its intersections  with various sectors and issues. The book is foundational for policy makers, judges and individuals to understand the modern concept of privacy.

Solove and Schwartz have presented a vastly comprehensive yet accessible overview of information privacy. It provides an in-depth introduction to the development and genesis of information, and covers information or mental privacy from the point of view of law enforcement, media, national security, health, data security, education, employment and international law including data flows, as well as the specific frameworks in different countries.

Warren and Brandeis’ seminal work pointed out the increasingly invasive and deeply penetrative nature of developing media and technology, and posited privacy rights (rooted in the common law right to liberty) as a legal remedy to such intrusions. A large part of the U.S. as well as international privacy jurisprudence is inspired by this work.

Cavoukian’s pioneering work in this article envisages a framework through which privacy is embedded in our technologies and information systems by default. The framework encompasses 7 principles that guide design, organization, planning and implementation of projects that have implications for data protection and privacy, and has thus become the standard of best practice for understanding and respecting user privacy at a commercial and practical level. These principles are recognized in the EU GDPR and were also the basis for the 9 privacy principles put forth in the Justice Srikrishna Committee Report.

This article discusses how informational privacy is yet to attain the status of a strongly protected and cherished right. The author argues that as rational project pursuers, who operate and flourish in a world of material objects it is our ability control patterns of association and disassociation with our fellows that afford each of us the room to become distinct individuals. Privacy, whether physical or informational, is valuable for beings. Therefore, establishing the truth of this claim is the primary focus of this article. This article providing reasons, evidence, and support for this claim and takes us into the historical and cultural dimensions of privacy.

“Public privacy” sounds like an oxymoron, but this article asserts a tort theory to enforce just such a right under limited circumstances. Traditionally, courts have refused to recognize a right to privacy in a public place. The author argues that this lack of protection needs to be revisited in a world where good taste and decency have vanished from journalism/entertainment and video cameras and other electronic privacy-invading devices have proliferated. Analyzing the three foundations of privacy — secrecy, solitude, and anonymity — the author explains how and why they need, and are worthy of, legal protection even in some public contexts.

This article discusses the case of Time Inc v. Hill where, the Supreme Court of the United States had held that held that constitutional protections for speech and press preclude recovery under the right of privacy statute for “false reports of matters of public interest,” in the absence of proof that the report was published “with knowledge of its falsity or in reckless disregard of the truth.” Thus, by this decision, the Supreme Court made it evident that the primary consideration was promotion of free speech as recognized by the First amendment and that the right to privacy is subordinate to that.

This report seeks to develop an understanding on the means to protect the right to privacy by analysing the laws in various jurisdictions, including the statutory expressions of the tort of invasion of privacy in the United States, some of the provinces of Canada and the Privacy Bill considered by the Irish Parliament. The aim is to  determine what is considered ‘private’ for the purpose of determining liability for a breach of privacy.

The article addresses the origins of the right to privacy – the reason why men feel that the invasion of that right injure them in their very humanity. It also addresses the change in the conception of the right to privacy due to the increased technological surveillance and electronic eavesdropping.

This article discusses the issues relating to privacy in great detail, including the definition of privacy, grounds for interference and the need to balance conflicting interests. The article provides some factors based on which balancing of conflicting interests can occur: (i) Ad hoc or definitional balancing; (ii) formulation of rules; (iii) protection of vulnerable groups such as children and families; and (iv) consideration of information already in the public domain.

The author argues that privacy is a concept in disarray and nobody can articulate what it means. Privacy is far too vague a concept to guide adjudication and lawmaking, as abstract incantations of the importance of privacy do not fare well when pitted against more concretely-stated countervailing interests. This article develops a taxonomy to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive and concrete manner. It endeavors to guide the law toward a more coherent understanding of privacy and to serve as a framework for the future development of the field of privacy law.

In this article the author examines the nothing to hide argument. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing and Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

In this article, the author develops a new approach for conceptualizing privacy. He begins by examining the existing discourse about conceptualizing privacy, exploring the conceptions of a wide array of jurists, legal scholars, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. Solove contends that the theories are too narrow or too broad. With a few exceptions, the discourse seeks to conceptualize privacy by isolating one or more common essential or core characteristics of privacy. Solove contends that privacy is better understood as drawing from a common pool of similar characteristics. Rather than search for an overarching concept, and advances a pragmatic approach to conceptualizing privacy.

This article addresses the case of Time, Inc. v. Hill and the disorderly nature of the recognition of the right to privacy in the United States.

The article compares the protection of privacy rights by the European Court of Human Rights and domestic courts in France and England, and considers whether a more harmonised methodology may be emerging. It further Examines their approaches to balancing the right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 Art.8 with the right to freedom of expression under Art.10 and reflects on the English adoption of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test.

The regulation of broadcasting in the United Kingdom has been reformed and the precise responsibilities of the Office of Communications (Ofcom) were being finalised at the same time as this Report was being prepared. This report provides 34 recommendations for the allocation of responsibilities to the Ofcom which allow it to regulate the laws pertaining to freedom of expression and privacy. This report addresses the issues of defining the right to privacy, the exceptions to the right to privacy and the method of balancing conflicting rights. It also addresses the role of the media and the government in protecting the right to privacy.

The present report analyses the implications of States’ surveillance of communications for the exercise of the human rights to privacy and to freedom of opinion and expression. While considering the impact of significant technological advances in communications, the report underlines the urgent need to further study new modalities of surveillance and to revise national laws regulating these practices in line with human rights standards.

Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic – conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of the protection of privacy, cannot be right. This article explores these conflicts, trying to show that European privacy norms are founded on European ideas of personal honor. Continental privacy, like continental sexual harassment law, prison law, and many other bodies of law, aims to protect the personal honor of ordinary Europeans. American law takes a very different approach, protecting primarily a liberty interest. These are not differences that we can understand unless we abandon the approach taken by most privacy advocates, since they have little to do with the supposedly universal intuitive needs of personhood. Instead, they are differences that reflect the contrasting political and social ideals of American and continental law. Indeed, we should broadly reject intuitionism in our legal scholarship, focusing instead on social and political ideals.

This article addresses the various philosophical theories behind the reason why people feed the need to protect their privacy. It connects the desire of people to control the information about themselves to their ability to maintain different social relationships.

This is the seminal article pertaining to the right to privacy. It laid down the basis for the recognition of the right to privacy in the United States.

This article discusses recent US case law and legal opinions relating to defamation and privacy law in the United States. It specifically deals with each of the defences to defamation and the standard of actual malice that is required. The article also deals with the internet related developments and the need to accordingly revise privacy law.

This article deals with the philosophical aspect of what exactly constitutes the right to privacy. In this respect, it analyses the right to privacy as the ‘right to be left alone’. The author then discusses certain cases to understand how the right to be left alone can be better protected.

In this article, the author focuses on the interplay between privacy and systems of surveillance and argues that the freedom of surveillance is foundational to the practice of informed citizenship. Privacy is therefore a structural feature of a liberal democratic system- the perception of privacy as anti-innovation is non-sequitur.

This is a report on a survey conducted by the author. It analyses several District Court cases in the United States and draws the link between confidentiality of journalists’ sources and the right to privacy. The article also discusses cases related to privacy and defamation.

This article will demonstrate that courts are guided by certain well-accepted and clearly identifiable social policies in resolving conflicts over media portrayals. It will further demonstrate that coherent legal principles can be derived from those policies, and that these principles, although infrequently articulated by the courts, account for the prevailing pattern of court decisions. The article proposes that the terms “privacy” and “publicity” should be abandoned in the analysis of media portrayal cases, and replaced with an explicit recognition of the principles that courts actually use.

This Article is the text of the John A. Sibley Lecture delivered on March 2, 1978, at the University of Georgia School of Law, and is part of a collaborative project with George J. Stigler on the law and economics of privacy. The present Article attempts an economic analysis of the dissemination and withholding of information primarily in personal rather than business contexts. It is thus concerned with such matters as prying, eavesdropping, “self-advertising,” and gossip. The line between personal and commercial is not always clear or useful, and I shall not maintain it unwaveringly; the emphasis, however, is on the personal. The first part of the Article develops the economic analysis. I remark in passing the irony that personal privacy seems to be valued more highly than organizational privacy, judging by current public policy trends, although a reverse ordering would be more consistent with the economics of the problem. The second part of the Article examines the principles of tort law that protect a “right of privacy” in both commercial and personal contexts (the former is discussed only briefly, however) and concludes that the judges in tort cases have been sensitive to the economics of privacy.

In this Article Professor Post argues that the common law tort of invasion of privacy safeguards social norms, which he calls "rules of civility," that in significant measure constitute both individual and community identity. The tort is predicated upon the assumption that personality, as well as human dignity, are injured by the violation of these norms. Civility rules also create a "ritual idiom" that allows individuals to recognize and differentiate between respect and intimacy; fluency in this idiom enables individuals to become autonomous persons. In protecting civility rules, however, the law must transform social norms into workable legal doctrine, and it must determine the nature of the community whose norms it will preserve. Civility rules that control the dissemination of information conflict with the prerequisites of the 'public," which is a social formation created when persons, otherwise unrelated, are united by access to common social stimuli. Within the "public," communication is driven by a logic of accountability that is largely indifferent to norms of civility. The values of privacy, and the identity of persons and communities predicated upon those values, are thus endangered by the vast contemporary expansion of the public created by the mass media.

This article discusses the cases of Wainwright v Home Office1 and Campbell v MGN Ltd. and then goes on to trace the right to privacy as a human right under English law. Specifically, the author has discussed jurisprudence under the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. The author concludes that even though jurisprudence on privacy is essentially fact-centric, certain trends have begun to arise, such as the recognition of the right to publicity under the ambit of privacy.

The European Union’s Court of Human Rights is leading the way in recognizing the continuing duty of democratic societies to protect the sphere of privacy that not only leaves its citizens secure in their person and property, but also cultivates family dignity, privacy and opportunities for self-determination. On June 24, 2004, in Case of Von Hannover v. Germany, the European Court of Human Rights radically altered the rules governing the unauthorized publication of exposes that offer intimate details of celebrities’ private lives.

This case, which involved a woman of enormous courage and celebrity, is less momentous for its visibility than for its considerable value to democracy. While most celebrities remain relatively secluded, convinced they lack power against the media, Princess Caroline of Monaco has been resolute in her quest for justice. 2 After fighting in the German courts for nearly ten years, Caroline Von Hannover took the case for protection of her privacy to the European Court of Human Rights. 3 Invariably, others will benefit from her perseverance in ways that she could not as she waded through the appellate process. 4 In Von Hannover, the European Court of Human Rights offers an exceptionally clear statement of judicial recognition of the relationship between privacy and personal development. Considering this decision emanated from one of the world’s most respected courts, the international community will reap enormous benefits.

A path-breaking analysis of the concept of privacy as a question of access to the individual and to information about him. An account of the reasons why privacy is valuable, and why it has the coherence that justified maintaining it as both a theoretical concept and an ideal. Finally, the paper looks into the move from identifying the grounds of the value of privacy to the different question of whether and to what extent privacy should be protected by laws. While privacy is a useful concept in social and moral thought, it may well be the case that it is relatively rare that it should be protected by the law in cases where its violation does not also involve infringement or violation of other important interests or values.

In English law, there are calls by a section of the public that Parliament should enact privacy law, to offer protection for the right to privacy which is guaranteed under the Human Rights Act 1998. However, the current tort system provides various ways of protecting privacy. The article demonstrates how various means can be used to protect such rights. The author argues that ‘the let us study as we go’ approach adopted by the court will be more appropriate, rather than legislation by parliament.

This comment focuses on the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all economic, social and cultural rights.

This article captures the historical development of the right to privacy in the United States. In this regard, it discusses all the relevant case law of the Supreme Court of United States and traces the extent of recognition of the right to privacy.