Privacy law is the area of law concerned with the protection and preservation of the privacy rights of individuals. Increasingly, governments and other public as well as private organizations collect vast amounts of personal information about individuals for a variety of purposes. The law of privacy regulates the type of information which may be collected and how this information may be used and stored.
The scope of applicability of privacy laws is called expectation of privacy.
Contents
[show]United States
Main article: Privacy laws of the United States
The idea of a right to privacy was first addressed within a legal context in the United States. Louis Brandeis (later a Supreme Court justice) and another young lawyer, Samuel D. Warren, published an article called 'The Right to Privacy' in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 arguing that the constitution and the common law allowed for the deduction of a general "right to privacy".[4] Their project was never entirely successful, and the renowned tort expert Dean Prosser argued that "privacy" was composed of four separate torts, the only unifying element of which was a (vague) "right to be left alone."[5] These elements were- appropriating the plaintiff's identity for the defendant's benefit
- placing the plaintiff in a false light in the public eye
- publicly disclosing private facts about the plaintiff
- unreasonably intruding upon the seclusion or solitude of the plaintiff