ABSTRACT
There has, of course, been very much written on privacy within the past century, but there has been little in the legal or governmental sphere which has taken a sociological (by which I mean a 'detached' and 'analytical') approach to the nature of information.3 Sociologists have certainly looked to
notions of privacy: an early example is Harrington Moore, who took a social evolutionary approach and suggested that few of the cultural subjects of his study evidenced a complete lack of conception of private, but emphasised that ultimately, 'Privacy cannot be the dominant value in any society. Man has to live in society, and social concerns have to take precedence' (Moore, 1984, p. 274).
