ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates the meaning and value of the broad, contested notion of privacy. It presents an overview of competing conceptions of privacy and of privacy’s spatial, informational and decisional dimensions. It is argued that privacy is instrumentally valuable as a prerequisite for the liberal ideal of autonomy, which enables individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good life. Autonomy is understood to embrace both freedom from intervention by the state and others and freedom to develop and pursue one’s own life plan for self-fulfilment. A gradual, relational and evolving understanding of autonomy is advanced, to overcome the criticism that children cannot exercise autonomy because they lack the capacity to do so. This chapter also explains the significance of children’s capacity for two competing theories of rights: the interest theory and the will or choice theory. It articulates how a theory of children’s decisional privacy draws on the interest theory to bestow rights on children irrespective of their capacity to exercise those rights.
