Criminal Law: Offence against the person - Invasion of privacy

The right to privacy is an element of various legal traditions to restrain governmental and private actions that threaten the privacy of individuals. Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy.

In the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 12, the United Nations states:

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.

History.

The concept of a human "right to privacy" begins when the Latin word "ius" expanded from meaning "what is fair" to include "a right - an entitlement a person possesses to control or claim something," by the Decretum Gratiani in Bologna, Italy in the 12th Century. 

In the United States, an article in the December 15, 1890 issue of the Harvard Law Review, written by attorney Samuel D. Warren and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, entitled "The Right to Privacy", is often cited as the first explicit finding of a U.S. right to privacy. Warren and Brandeis wrote that privacy is the "right to be let alone", and focused on protecting individuals. This approach was a response to recent technological developments of the time, such as photography and sensationalist journalism, also known as "yellow journalism".

Privacy rights are inherently intertwined with information technology. In his widely cited dissenting opinion in Olmstead v United States (1928), Brandeis relied on thoughts he developed in his 1890 article The Right to Privacy.  In that dissent, he urged that personal privacy matters were more relevant to constitutional law, going so far as to say that "the government was identified as a potential privacy invader." He writes, "Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet." At that time, telephones were often community assets, with shared party lines and potentially eavesdropping switchboard operators. By the time of Katz, in 1967, telephones had become personal devices with lines not shared across homes and switching was electro-mechanical. In the 1970s, new computing and recording technologies raised more concerns about privacy, resulting in the Fair Information Practice Principles.

In recent years there have been few attempts to clearly and precisely define the "right to privacy".