ABSTRACT
Privacy has been discussed from a variety of unphilosophical standpoints, as in the writings of Justices Warren and Brandeis and Dean Prosser. It was a central issue in Vance Packard's nightmarish account of encroaching electronic omnipresence. Most of the work on privacy, like so many of the commentaries on Griswold v. Connecticut, suffers, as Hyman Gross has pointed out, from the lack of any understanding of the essential characteristics of privacy. In an effort to dispel the “pernicious ambiguities” that infect the concept of privacy, Gross suggests that “privacy is the condition of human life in which acquaintance with a person or with affairs of his life which is personal to him is limited.” Some phenomenological and metaphysical issues must be resolved in order to determine the essentials of privacy. The author fails to understand the complacency of both the general public and the professional psychologists toward the encounter-group movement with its indiscriminate disclosures.
