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Right to privacy

The right to privacy is a purported human right and an element of various legal traditions which may restrain both government and private party action.

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United Nations

A right to privacy is explicitly stated under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.[1] http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

United States

The U.S. Supreme Court has found that the Constitution implicitly grants a right to privacy against governmental intrusion. This right to privacy has been the justification for decisions involving a wide range of civil liberties cases, including Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which invalidated a successful 1922 Oregon initiative requiring compulsory public education, Griswold v. Connecticut, where a right to privacy was first established explicitly, Roe v. Wade, which struck down a Texas abortion law and thus restricted state powers to enforce laws against abortion, and Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down a Texas Censored page and thus eliminated state powers to enforce laws against Censored page.

An article in the December 15, 1890 issue of the Harvard Law Review, written by Supreme Court Justices Warren and Brandeis and entitled "The Right To Privacy", is often cited as the first implicit declaration of a U.S. right to privacy [2] http://lawrence.edu/fac/boardmaw/Privacy_brand_warr2.html . This right is frequently debated. Strict constructivists argue that no such right exists (or at least that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to protect such a right), while some civil libertarians argue that the right invalidates many types of currently allowed civil surveillance (wiretaps, public cameras, etc.).

Most states of the United States also grant a right to privacy and recognize four torts based on that right:

  1. Intrusion upon seclusion or solitude, or into private affairs;
  2. Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts;
  3. Publicity which places a person in a false light in the public eye; and
  4. Appropriation of name or likeness.

Journalism

It is often claimed, particularly by those in the eye of the media, that their right to privacy is violated when information about their private lives is reported in the press. The point of view of the press, however, is that the general public have a right to know personal information about those with celebrity status. This distinction is encoded in most legal traditions.