A Taxonomy of Privacy:

My friend and colleague Daniel Solove has a new and interesting paper currently available in draft form, A Taxonomy of Privacy, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. The paper examines and classifies the different types of legal claims that are placed under the umbrella term of “privacy,” focusing on the specific harms involved in each type of claim. As one who has often found the word “privacy” to shed more heat than light in legal debates, I found the paper pretty interesting. From the introduction:

  Often, privacy problems are merely stated in knee-jerk form: “That violates my privacy!” When we contemplate an invasion of privacy – such as having our personal information gathered by companies in databases – we instinctively recoil. Many discussions of privacy appeal to people’s fears and anxieties. What commentators often fail to do, however, is to translate our instincts into a reasoned articulable account of why such a privacy problem is harmful. When people claim that privacy should be protected, it is unclear precisely what they mean. This poses a difficulty when making policy or resolving a case because lawmakers and judges have a hard time articulating the privacy harm. . . .
  In this article, I provide a framework for how the legal system can come to a better understanding of privacy. I aim to develop a taxonomy that focuses more specifically on the different kinds of activities that impinge upon privacy. I endeavor to shift focus away from the vague term “privacy” and more toward the specific activities that are posing privacy problems. Although various attempts at explicating the meaning of “privacy” have been made, few have attempted to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive and concrete manner.