What Is Privacy?

Many experts have written about the difficulties of defining privacy. As legal theorist Robert Post once said, “ Privacy is a value so complex, so entangled in competing and contradictory dimensions, so engorged with various and distinct meanings, that I sometimes despair whether it can be usefully 2addressed at all.” ¹ Daniel Solove, an internationally known expert in privacy law, has pointed out that privacy has been interpreted to mean many things, ranging from freedom of thought to solitude in one’ s home to protection from unlawful searches and seizures. He concludes that privacy is a “ concept in disarray” and that “ nobody can articulate what it means.” ² Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and Computer Science at New York University, sums it up nicely when she writes that, in considering the vast landscape of the theoretical work on privacy, “ One point on which there seems to be near-unanimous agreement is that privacy is a messy and complex subject.” ³