why is privacy important to us?

1. protect people interests in competitive situation

2. it would be embarrassing for other people to know some private behaviors

3. consequences to individuals of facts about them becoming public knowledge

4. some irrelevant information can be unfairly taken into account when investigating an individual for a valid reason (credit, job, insurance)

5. we have a “sense of privacy” that is not restricted to embarrassment or fear of disadvantages

   this is the most important reason why we value privacy

what is this sense of privacy

privacy is necessary to maintain a variety of social relationships with other people

• there are different pattern of behavior that define different relationships between people
  • our conception of the relationship with other people is inseparable from the idea of how it is appropriate to behave with and around them, and what information about us is appropriate for them to have
  • in this sense, privacy is an aspect of liberty

counterargument to Thomson

Thomson:

• the right of privacy is a cluster of rights that intersects with the cluster of rights which the right over the person consists of and also with the cluster of rights which owning property consists of
• right to our body as analogous to property rights, privacy lies in the intersection of both

there are matters of privacy, not simply analogous to property rights

• example of physical intimacy
  • having certain parts of our body looked at (right to our body) is tied to certain specific types of personal relationships
  • dissociating the body from ideas of physical intimacy and the relationships it defines separates this right from the matters that make privacy important
• if the right to privacy has a different point that these other rights then it cannot lie only in the intersection
• regard the right of privacy as a distinctive sort of right in virtue of the special kind of interest it protects