Law Commons^™

Plotting Privacy As Intimacy, Heidi Reamer Anderson

Heidi R Anderson

In Plotting Privacy as Intimacy, I use a two-dimensional Venn diagram to plot and evaluate a subset of privacy law decisions. In each plotted case, the general question was whether a person’s action should be afforded legal protection as private. How the court answered that question can be explained by examining whether the specific facts of the case fall within or outside two circles of intimacy. One circle represents the intimacy of the space in which the action occurs. This spatial intimacy is based primarily on the proximity of the identified space to a secluded area of the home. Within …

The Mythical Right To Obscurity, Heidi R. Anderson

Heidi R Anderson

In several states, citizens who videotaped police misconduct and distributed the videos via the Internet recently were arrested for violating state wiretapping statutes. These arrests highlight a clash between two key interests—the public’s desire to hold the officers accountable via exposure and the officers’ desire to keep the information private. The arrests also raise an oft-debated privacy law question: When should something done or said in public nevertheless be legally protected as private?

For decades, the answer has been: “There can be no privacy in that which is already public.” However, given recent technological developments (e.g., cell phone cameras and …