Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to Anita L. Allen, it may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, Allen argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover's kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate privacy protections for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. This unique book draws attention to privacies of seclusion, concealment, confidentiality and data-protection undervalued by their intended beneficiaries and targets--and outlines the best reasons for imposing them. Allen looks at laws designed to keep website operators from collecting personal information, laws that force strippers to wear thongs, and the myriad employee and professional confidentiality rules--including insider trading laws--that require strict silence about matters whose disclosure could earn us small fortunes. She shows that such laws recognize the extraordinary importance of dignity, trust and reputation, helping to preserve social, economic and political options throughout a lifetime.

Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to Anita L. Allen, it may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, Allen argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover's kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate privacy protections for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. This unique book draws attention to privacies of seclusion, concealment, confidentiality and data-protection undervalued by their intended beneficiaries and targets--and outlines the best reasons for imposing them. Allen looks at laws designed to keep website operators from collecting personal information, laws that force strippers to wear thongs, and the myriad employee and professional confidentiality rules--including insider trading laws--that require strict silence about matters whose disclosure could earn us small fortunes. She shows that such laws recognize the extraordinary importance of dignity, trust and reputation, helping to preserve social, economic and political options throughout a lifetime.

You can hardly pass through customs at an airport today without having your picture taken and your fingertips scanned, that information then stored in an archive you’ll never see. Nor can you use your home’s smart technology without wondering what, exactly, that technology might do with all you’ve shared with it: shopping habits, security decisions, media choices. Every day, Americans surrender their private information to entities that claim to have their best interests in mind, in exchange for a promise of safety or convenience. This trade-off has long been taken for granted, but the extent of its nefariousness has recently become much clearer. As Lawrence Cappello’s None of Your Damn Business reveals, the problem is not so much that data will be used in ways we don’t want, but rather how willing we have been to have our information used, abused, and sold right back to us. In this startling book, Cappello shows that this state of affairs was not the inevitable by-product of technological progress. He targets key moments from the past 130 years of US history when privacy was central to battles over journalistic freedom, national security, surveillance, big data, and reproductive rights. As he makes dismayingly clear, Americans have had numerous opportunities to protect the public good while simultaneously safeguarding our information, and we’ve squandered them every time. The wide range of the debates and incidents presented here shows that, despite America’s endless rhetoric of individual freedom, we actually have some of the weakest privacy protections in the developed world. None of Your Damn Business is a rich and provocative survey of an alarming topic that grows only more relevant with each fresh outrage of trust betrayed.

Internationally renowned communitarian leader Amitai Etzioni presents a controversial challenge to the fundamental American belief in personal privacy at all costs

Online surveillance of our behavior by private companies is on the increase, particularly through the Internet of Things and the increasing use of algorithmic decision-making. This troubling trend undermines privacy and increasingly threatens our ability to control how information about us is shared and used. Written by a computer scientist and a legal scholar, The Privacy Fix proposes a set of evidence-based, practical solutions that will help solve this problem. Requiring no technical or legal expertise, the book explains complicated concepts in clear, straightforward language. Bridging the gap between computer scientists, economists, lawyers, and public policy makers, this book provides theoretically and practically sound public policy guidance about how to preserve privacy in the onslaught of surveillance. It emphasizes the need to make tradeoffs among the complex concerns that arise, and it outlines a practical norm-creation process to do so.

Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.

We live more and more of our lives online; we rely on the internet as we work, correspond with friends and loved ones, and go through a multitude of mundane activities like paying bills, streaming videos, reading the news, and listening to music. Without thinking twice, we operate with the understanding that the data that traces these activities will not be abused now or in the future. There is an abstract idea of privacy that we invoke, and, concrete rules about our privacy that we can point to if we are pressed. Nonetheless, too often we are uneasily reminded that our privacy is not invulnerable-the data tracks we leave through our health information, the internet and social media, financial and credit information, personal relationships, and public lives make us continuously prey to identity theft, hacking, and even government surveillance. A great deal is at stake for individuals, groups, and societies if privacy is misunderstood, misdirected, or misused. Popular understanding of privacy doesn't match the heat the concept generates. With a host of cultural differences as to how privacy is understood globally and in different religions, and with ceaseless technological advancements, it is an increasingly complex topic. In this clear and accessible book, Leslie and John G. Francis guide us to an understanding of what privacy can mean and why it is so important. Drawing upon their extensive joint expertise in law, philosophy, political science, regulatory policy, and bioethics, they parse the consequences of the forfeiture, however great or small, of one's privacy.