6.7 PRIVACY IN THE WORKPLACE
Privacy is a surprisingly obscure and disputed value in contemporary society. With the tremendous increase in computer technology, calls for greater protection of privacy have increased in recent decades. Yet there the widespread disagreement concerning the nature, extent, and value of privacy. Few western countries, for example, ac knowledge a legal right to privacy as recognized within the United States. Even within the United State, there is significant disagreement about privacy. The U.S. Constitution, for example, makes no mention of right to privacy and major Supreme Court decisions that have relied on a fundamental right to privacy, "Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade, remain highly contentious and controversial.
Two general understanding of privacy can be found in legal and philosophical literature on this topic: (1) privacy as a right to be "let alone" within a personal zone of solitude and (2) privacy as the right to control information about oneself. Each interpretation is problematic, but each has important implications for business.
The right to be "let alone" with some personal "zone of privacy" has had the longest history within the U.S. legal system. This understanding of privacy is traced to and 1890 Harvard Low Reviewarticle by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandies. Warren and Brandeis argued that increasing population and technological advance (e.g., photojournalism) were increasing the threat to "be let alone" Seventy-five years later in Griswold v. Connecticutthe U.S. Supreme Court relied on a similar understanding in recognizing a Constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy.This case invalidated a Connecticut low that prohibited the use, sale, and prescription of contraception.
Critics have claimed that this understanding of privacy seems to involve something closer to a general right to liberty and, as a result, is too broad. Surely no one living in a social setting can expect to be let alone in any full sense.In a fundamentally social and cooperative activity like work, privacy in this meaning certainly would make little sense.But a closer look at the major legal cases Shows that courts have not claimed that individuals should not be let alone to make just any decision. Rather, courts have concluded that only certain very personal decisions, involving family, reproduction, sexuality, home life, and decisions regarding life-sustaining medical treatment are rightfully private. A reasonable interpretation of these judicial decisions suggests that certain decisions are so fundamental to establishing our own identity as an individual, that they ought to be protected as rightfully private.
Concerns that privacy as the right to be let alone is too broad have led some to conclude that a better understanding of privacy focuses on privacy as involving the control of personal information. From this perspective, the clearest case of an invasion of privacy occurs when others come to know personal information about us as when a stranger reads your e-mail or eavesdrops on a personal conversation But, again,this might be too broad an understanding if we are to claim a right of privacy.Surely there are many occasions when others, particularly within an employment context, can legitimately know even personal information about us.
Philosopher George Brenkert has argued that the informational sense of privacy involves a relationship between two parties,A and B, and personal information X about A. Privacy is violated only when B comes to know X and