ABSTRACT
In Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy (1995), I argued that privacy is not only of value to the individual but also to society in general and I suggested three bases for the social importance of privacy: its common value, its public value, and its collective value. My thinking about privacy as a social value was informed both by the philosophical and legal writing at the time, and also by the legislative politics and processes in the United States that sought to protect a ‘right to privacy’. I concluded that the individualistic conception of privacy, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, did not provide a fruitful basis for the formulation of policy to protect privacy. I argued that if privacy is also regarded as being of social importance, different policy discourse and interest alignments are likely to follow.
