In Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy (1995), I argued that privacy is not only of value to the individual but also to society in general and I suggested three bases for the social importance of privacy: its common value, its public value, and its collective value. My thinking about privacy as a social value was informed both by the philosophical and legal writing at the time, and also by the legislative politics and processes in the United States that sought to protect a ‘right to privacy’. I concluded that the individualistic conception of privacy, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, did not provide a fruitful basis for the formulation of policy to protect privacy. I argued that if privacy is also regarded as being of social importance, different policy discourse and interest alignments are likely to follow.

As society moved into the 20th century, thinking about the importance of privacy was largely shaped by Warren and Brandeis’ 1890 Harvard Law Review article defining privacy as the ‘right to be let alone’. Alan Westin in his seminal book Privacy and Freedom adopted this individual rights view of privacy, defining it as the right ‘of the individual to control information about himself’ (1967). This focus on the individual right and the emphasis on individual control dominated much of liberal, legal, and philosophical thinking about privacy during the late 1960s and through the 1980s – a time when information and communication technologies transformed the ways that businesses, governments, and individuals collected, retained, analysed, and transferred information about individuals.

Starting in the 1970s, a group of philosophical thinkers also began to consider a broader social value of privacy. In a compendium of essays (Pennock and Chapman 1971), Carl Friedrich and Arnold Simmel both acknowledged that privacy has some broader social importance. Friedrich wrote that he was ‘not concerned… with the private aspect of this privacy, individualistic and libertarian, but with the political interest that may be involved’ (115). Simmel argued that privacy is ‘part and parcel of the system of values that regulates action in society’ (71). In a series of articles in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1975, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Thomas Scanlon, and James Rachels each considered how to broaden the interest in privacy beyond traditional liberal thinking in order to expand and revitalize its importance.