by Ruth Gavison

Ruth Gavison (born March 28, 1945, Jerusalem) is an Israeli Law professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is also a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Israel Democracy Institute. Her areas of research include Ethnic Conflict, the Protection of Minorities, Human Rights, Political Theory, Judiciary Law, Religion and Politics, and Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. (contradiction already)

Gavison was nominated for a position on Israel’s Supreme Court in 2005 but failed to secure a majority for the appointment. Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann reportedly asserted in 2007 that existing Supreme Court justices opposed her nomination because of their disagreement with her views.

What the paper is about

There popular demands for increased protection of privacy and an intensified interest in its relation to other values such as liberty, autonomy and mental health.

There has been a variety of legal responses through the Supreme Court and Congress yet many scholars have argued that privacy rhetoric is misleading and have advocated for some form of reductionism.

Yet she and most people consider privacy to be something distinct and coherent. Continued…

by Richard A. Poser

The Concept of privacy elusive and ill defined.

The article attempts an economic analysis of the dissemination and withholding of information in the personal rather than the business context.

The two main points are that personal privacy seems to be valued more highly than organizational privacy and that judges in tort cases have been sensitive to the economics of privacy.

(Tort law is the name given to a body of law that addresses, and provides remedies for, civil wrongs not arising out of contractual obligations)

Some people posses information they will incur costs to conceal and others are willing to incur costs to discover it. Continued…

Alan Westin’s Privacy and Freedom is a staple in the privacy literature. Written in the 1970s, he was concerned with shifting the privacy debates away from ‘raising privacy awareness’ to ‘a sensitive discussion of what can be done to protect privacy in an age when so many forces of science, technology, environment, and society press against it from all sides’ (Westin 1970: 3). For our purposes, I explicate Westin’s understand of privacy’s functions and surveillance in society, and pose some critiques/questions that arose when I read the text.

In my previous post, I noted that privacy is a particularly large, well/over-used concept that many people talk about, with Colin subsequently asking “large in definition? context? the term’s connotations, or denotations?” In terms of Westin, I would respond that he proposes a broad definition that is meant to be context sensitive (and thus both contextually specific for certain geo-social spaces, but broad in potential understandings of how privacy should be balanced), and meant to be reasonably explicit in what is addressed. Privacy is an individual claim that is voluntarily exercised and meant to limit the exposure of personal information to the public, provide a space for intimacy, anonymity, and reserve, and is always conditioned to social forces. The term is used to establish a space where particular surveillance practices can be understood in light of personal/private needs that must be met for individuals to lead healthy lives. Continued…