ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that privacy in public, which has been explicitly excluded or merely neglected by many of the most highly-regarded and often-cited philosophical and legal works on privacy, is a genuine privacy interest that is worthy of study as well as protection. A variety of factors have shaped normative theories of privacy, making them more responsive to some types of problems and constraints and less responsive to others. Examining these theories with a view to understanding why specifically they either neglect or dismiss the normative force of privacy in public, three factors emerge, which have labeled, respectively, conceptual, normative, and empirical. To many, the idea that privacy may be violated in public has an oddly paradoxical ring. One likely source of this response is the way the terms "public" and "private" have been used in political and legal theory.
