ABSTRACT
We have seen that the value of privacy is both personal and political, a reflection of the importance of personal, as well as collective responsibility, choice and conviction. In so doing, we have shown that privacy can usefully be disaggregated into its component parts, as Judith Thomson claimed in her famous essay on the right to privacy.1 However, we have described those parts in terms of claims to solitude and seclusion, anonymity and confidentiality, intimacy and family formation, rather than in terms of property ownership and property-like rights over the person-which Thomson favours. We have also seen that our assumptions about the nature and importance of equality profoundly affect the ways we conceptualise people’s claims to privacy, and the importance that we attach to those claims. So, on the face of it, privacy seems as closely bound up with our claims to equality and political participation as with property ownership and the rights we have over our body. It is time, then, to look more closely at Thomson’s views, and to see what practical, analytical and normative conclusions we can draw from them.
