ABSTRACT
Work within the emerging field of surveillance studies calls into question the implicit linkages between surveillance, visual observation, and centralization that the conventional metaphors for privacy invasion have tended to reinforce. Since the US legal system purports to recognize an interest in spatial privacy, it is useful to begin there. Doctrinally, whether surveillance invades a legally recognized interest in spatial privacy depends in the first instance on background rules of property ownership. The information privacy law project has tended to ratify this omission, precisely because its primary interest has been information rather than the bodies and spaces to which it pertains. Many information privacy theorists criticize spatial metaphors in privacy discourse, arguing that they muddy rigorous analysis of privacy issues in the information age. Conceptualizing the privacy interest as having an independently significant spatial dimension explains aspects of surveillance that neither visibility nor informational transparency can explain.
